This was a light, somewhat sweet contemporary romance that hinted at potential depth but never quite got there.

Ekaterina “Kit” Averin is a lab tech at a university, overworked and overqualified for her job. Before the book began, she and her two close friends, Greer and Zoe, played the lottery on a semi-drunken whim and won the jackpot. Greer and Zoe collected the winnings but Kit begged them to keep her windfall a secret, so her life could continue as normal.

Ben, a recruiter for a powerful and very well-funded private research lab, is back in his hometown to care for his father. His company, Beaumont, wants to hire Kit away from the university, and Ben agrees to present her with a very attractive proposal while he’s in town – and he does a crappy job of it. He stands to get out of his non-compete clause with Beaumont if he can recruit Kit for the company, which would enable him to start his own company with a co-worker, so initially his focus is on what he can gain personally from convincing Kit to leave her home.

I really liked the set up for this series, which is part of the reason I picked it up. A trio of friends win the lottery? That’s cool! On the surface, that sounds like a great thing,  but it comes with a trough-load of complications. A lottery win like that would easily knock a person off balance and force them to acknowledge what they want to do now that the major stress of financial solvency has been taken off their shoulders.

But in this case, that major element is dropped and doesn’t resurface until about 60% in. That didn’t seem realistic to me. Even if Kit had kept her involvement in the coverage of the jackpot to a minimum, she hangs out with the other two women frequently. No one mentions it to them or talks to them about it, nor do they struggle with it at all. I expected that part to be a more prominent influence on Kit and on her friends, especially since Greer and Zoe collected their winnings publicly so members of their community would logically know about it, but really, it was a minor complication, so minor it was barely mentioned.

Kit is an interesting heroine, both in her own intellect and talents in science, while Ben struggles with more internal conflict. Kit has a painful family history and is focused on building a life for herself. Ben is “just visiting” while he takes care of his father and part of his development as a character is to come to terms with his local reputation (he got into a lot of trouble as a kid). The same connections to the community that Kit savors are the ones Ben doesn’t want to deal with because of his own painful history, but even then, that tension only shows up when Ben talks about it.

There was a lot of potential here, especially in the exploration of identifying what you want for your life vs. what you think you want, and that you can and should have the power to choose what kind of life you want for yourself. There is also some interesting potential symbolism in the house that Kit purchases, which needs a lot of work. Ben’s father owns a salvage yard that specializes in antique fixtures, and Ben helps run the yard while his dad recuperates. I expected more development within the idea of renovating and upgrading the past and appreciating it for its history and its potential, a parallel to Ben’s adjustment to returning home as an adult for an extended visit and facing his past. That didn’t happen, either.

I never felt fully engaged with those potential layers, which would have made Ben and Kit more interesting and their journey more meaningful. I felt, and I think this is partly due to the narration choices, like I was told nearly everything, and very little was shown in ways that were emotionally resonant or organic to their story. The story is told in alternating first person, present tense POV, and while normally that doesn’t bother me, in this case, I found the switching back and forth and the tense choice distracting. It also added to the “I am being told a lot of things” feeling, which held me at a distance from the emotional connection I sought. Further, while I loved Kit’s voice, and her narration, Ben’s was more flat, distant, and uninteresting.

I really liked Ben’s father, and I liked Greer and Zoe, as well as the other characters who become part of the world of the narrative. There were so many original choices that could have been outstanding conflicts to explore, and they weren’t given enough space or depth to become meaningful. When they did appear,  those conflicts didn’t really influence the characters beyond a few adjacent pages. This could have been a emotionally engaging and interesting romance, but it remained mostly superficial.