RITA Reader Challenge Review

Trust My Heart by Carol J. Post

This RITA® Reader Challenge 2017 review was written by LauraL. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Romance with Spiritual or Religious Elements category.

The summary:

Grant McAllister arrives in Murphy, North Carolina, with one aim: to sell his inherited property and leave as quickly as possible. The big-city lawyer has no interest in his late, estranged grandparents or the dilapidated mansion he just acquired. After his high-profile divorce, he should be avoiding perky reporters, too. But Jami Carlisle is honest, funny, and undeniably appealing.

After breaking up with her safe-but-smothering boyfriend, Jami is determined to ace her first big assignment. A story about the McAllister estate is too intriguing to ignore—much like its handsome, commitment-phobic heir. Thanks to her digging, the pieces of Grant’s fraught family history are gradually fitting into place, but also upending all his old beliefs.

The two draw closer as they share their dreams, until misread signals and misunderstandings begin to test their trust. But in the unspoiled beauty of the Smoky Mountains, there’s healing and forgiveness to be found. And for Grant, this unplanned detour may be just what’s needed to finally guide him home…

Here is LauraL's review:

You could read the book description above and skip reading Trust My Heart as it summarizes the story much better than I ever could. Yes, it is a pretty typical small town story and you know how it is going to end. But you would miss the author’s storytelling skills and her way of keeping you in a bit of suspense until the end of the story. There were many times while reading this book I thought our hero and heroine simply would not find their happily ever after. I reviewed Ms. Post’s Mistletoe Justice last year and felt the same, except that story really was a suspense story with bad guys and bad things happening all around.

In this case, it is emotional baggage and the past haunting Jami and Grant. Both of them had events happen in their early years which color their actions as adults. Jami’s father walked away and her mother had recently passed away. Jami moved forward with great faith and persistence to graduate from college and come home to a reporting job at the weekly newspaper. Grant never knew the grandparents who named him their heir and his family circumstances sent him in the direction of overachieving in business and to become an excellent cook and musician. His law career brought him a high society wife and then a very public divorce which left him bitter and drifting.

At the beginning of the story, Jami had just split with her long term boyfriend who was planning their wedding for later in the year. Jami celebrates her freedom by adopting two dachshunds from the shelter and throwing herself into her new job. Grant plans on dealing with his ennui on a cross country trip after he sells the big old Southern mansion his grandmother bequeathed to him.

We pretty much have an opposites attract story here as Grant scorns small-town life and the church while Jami embraces her hometown and her faith. Of course, as happens in small town novels, as a few weeks go by, Grant sees the value of life in Murphy. He also notes the peace Jami’s goodness and faith bring to her life. Grant starts to slow down a bit. But it isn’t one sided: Grant also encourages Jami to become a bit more focused on her goal of writing a novel. There are a number of misunderstandings along the way, prompted both internally and externally, and Jami and Grant’s trust is tested several times.

The secondary characters played a big part in the story, both in getting Jami and Grant together and in causing the conflicts. Bernie, Jami’s outrageous middle-aged co-worker, makes sure the newspaper editor assigns Grant’s family story to Jami. She appears to be doing a bit of matchmaking as well. Jami’s best friends, Holly and Sam, are painted in broad strokes as a girly-girl and tomboy. I suspect their stories will be told at some time. There is also a smattering of townspeople including Walt the feed store owner, Beulah the town gossip, Grant’s mother, Jami’s father, and the members of the MountainView Church.

I enjoy the simple faith that is part of several series, like Emily March’s Eternity Springs novels and Marilyn Pappano’s Tallgrass novels, but I am not a regular reader of inspirational novels. In this case, Jami’s faith and goodness were believable, comfortable, and a bit inspiring. She’d been through her own corner of Hades and was better for it. Jami cheerfully plowed forward and she found it in her heart to simply forgive and forget. Well, most of the time as she is not perfect. When Grant finally had his big moment of forgiveness and faith we could get to the happy ending.

One of my favorite parts of the narrative was how the author built up the romance beginning with Jami and Grant noticing each other and then missing each other when apart. Jami feels tingles she had once believed were made up feelings from romance novels. Grant and Jami share a couple of hot kisses and that is as passionate as it gets in these pages.

If she ever wondered whether a simple kiss could make her pulse race, her knees weak and her head spin, she would never wonder again.

The only downside to all this goodness is that Jami and her faithful gal pals play a bit of a prank on a pair of older citizens of Murphy. Then, Jami and Grant are brought together at the end with a bit of a ruse. Perhaps the citizens of Murphy aren’t as good and Christian as they could be. This lowered my satisfaction with the story and my grade. As my Gramma used to say, “It’s the Golden Rule, treat others as you would like them to treat you.”

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Trust My Heart by Carol Post

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  1. kitkat9000 says:

    Nice review, though considerably different from the other. With an averaged C grade this serves as yet another fail of the RITA nominating procedure.

    Still won’t read it.

  2. DonnaMarie says:

    @kitkat, I don’t see this as a fail. I think most of what I read falls into the C+ B- territory. It doesn’t make them bad books. LauraL liked this more than I did. Going by the Goodreads reviews I saw after I wrote mine, many people thought even more highly of it. A review is a subjective thing. You might read any one of these and think the reviewer was talking out their ass. Let’s just appreciate the opportunity that Sarah and​ the other bitches give us once a year to share a review with our peers.

  3. Plum says:

    Scanning this, my brain interpolated “emu” for “ennui” and I got very interested for two seconds, hoping I was about to read a small town marshmallow about two lost souls finding each other at the moment when both had supposed all chance for love was past and running an emu/dachshund reserve (like some kind of demented “Little Men”?), before it all collapsed. Well, there goes my night.

  4. kitkat9000 says:

    @DonnaMarie: please allow me to refine my earlier statement… I won’t read this because it’s religious and I am most definitely not.

    As to the failing part, of all the nominated/finalist books reviewed here, and yes,I’m very much indebted to Smart Bitches for this forum, far too many of them are rated C or lower. And the (seeming) majority of people posting their opinions having also read these books agreed with the reviewer. For a sample of books that are supposed to represent the “best” in romance, *I* feel these grades are too low. Of course, as always, ymmv.

  5. LauraL says:

    @kitkat9000 – I agree, an awful lot of C or lower grades this year. While I enjoyed both books I read and reviewed, I would not have considered them among the best romances published last year. There were a lot of highly regarded novels missing from the sign up sheet this Spring but perhaps their authors chose not to enter the writing contest.

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