When Sparks Fly

A passionate, feel-good small-town romance about old friends whose sudden attraction challenges what they thought they wanted out of life.

Over four books, romance author Jo McNally has treated readers to tender contemporary love stories set in the small fictional town of Rendezvous Falls in Upstate New York. Challenges of real life--and subsequent consequences--always play a part in her multi-generational stories set in locales such as the local vineyard (Slow Dancing at Sunrise), a B&B (Stealing Kisses in the Snow), the flower shop (Love Blooms) and via an apartment rental (Barefoot on a Starlit Night).

 

In the fifth book, When Sparks Fly, McNally focuses on Zoe Hartford, a 40-year-old, self-employed, ‘fix-it’ appliance and auto repairwoman whose confidence is down since a traumatic divorce. The hard-working single mother is determined to restore stability and normalcy to the life of her rebellious, 13-year-old daughter, Hazel. When Zoe starts to have romantic feelings for Mike--a lawyer, now a widower who’s been one of Zoe’s best friends since high school--complications ensue. Will their dear and cherished friendship be put at risk by sparking up a romance after all these years? And might the couple’s relationship drive a wedge in the mother-daughter bond?

 

The joys and tribulations of small-town life--and other love stories therein--offer a colorful backdrop to this passionate, down-to-earth romance where members of a meddling match-making book club offer wit and levity. A subplot involving Zoe’s house and place of business nicely binds up several plot threads. Readers who enjoy stories about the toil of true love will feel right at home in the comforts of this continuing series.

 

When Sparks Fly (A Rendezvous Falls Novel: Book Five) by Jo McNally 

HQN Books – Original Edition, $9.99 Mass Market Paperback, 416 pages, 9781335916389

Publication Date: August 9, 2022

To order this book on INDIEBOUND link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (August 12, 2022), link HERE

Cleaning Nabokov's House

What does the cover of this book say to you?  It's part of what intrigued me and led me to it...

Love and longing (and fondly remembering) a missing, deceased father is what anchors Barbara Barrett back to the world and her life when this divorced mother of two is deemed by a court as "psychologically unstable" to care for her children. In Cleaning Nabokov's House, Leslie Daniels has written a uniquely original debut novel that transcends grief and breathes levity (and often, unbelievable) satirical absurdity into a story that might have, in less clever creative hands, flat-lined into melodrama.

When the book opens, the reader joins Barbara's story after the court order has been handed down, and she is scrambling to pick up the pieces of her shattered life and figure out a way to get her children back. Barbara, originally a Manhattanite, feels like an outcast since moving to her ex's (and now also her children's) hometown of Onkwedo, New York (a fictionalized version of Oneida). She feels stuck in a rut. Her lackluster job at a small dairy, writing response letters to disgruntled ice cream consumers and the like, isn't much help either. But her luck suddenly changes when she moves into a house once inhabited by the great Vladimir Nabokov, the author of the seductive classic, Lolita. Tucked behind a false wall in the house, she discovers a manuscript she believes is an unpublished masterpiece written by Nabokov himself about Babe Ruth...of all people.  Could having the novel authenticated and getting it published serve as a winning lottery ticket to fulfill Barbara's quest? It is this discovery, along with a cast of equally quirky and absorbing characters, that ultimately empowers Barbara to reinvent her life in often laugh-out-loud ways that she, and the reader, could never have imagined.

Cleaning Nabokov's House by Leslie Daniels
Touchstone, Hardcover, 978-1439195024 , 336 pp
Publication Date: March 1, 2011
To purchase this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE