What a time I had with this one!

Lainey lives in a small lake-side town in Wisconsin. She suffers from chronic migraines and being part of the gig economy in a small town doesn’t exactly give her great medical cover. She works as a handyman, ride share driver, carpenter and, on the side for herself, an artist, living a hand-to-mouth existence. Her small town is known for the work of a famous architect and Lainey lives in the last house he designed before he died. It actually belongs to her gran who she lived with from the age of 7 until her gran moved into assisted living.

Enter Elliot: huge fan of the famous architect and recent benefactor of his uncle’s will. He’s inherited the lakeside resort next to Lainey’s house, the land that Lainey’s house sits on, and, he assumes, the house itself. To Lainey’s shock, her grandmother doesn’t actually own the house but because Lainey has lived there since she was seven, due to the law of adverse possession, she has squatters’ rights to the house, if not the land that it sits on.

Enter a marriage of convenience. Elliot proposes that Lainey marry him for his excellent healthcare coverage: her expensive migraine meds would be covered and they’ll rent out the house at an exorbitant rate and share the profits. With the profits that Elliot plans to make from the resort and the house rental, he’ll get a mortgage and make Lainey an offer on the house at the end of the summer. Lainey will then get to travel to France as she has always wanted to do, but never had the opportunity.

And so they marry.

I laughed, I smiled, I cried, I did it all while reading this one. My heart felt light, though, as tension built towards the bleak moment, I had to take little sanity breaks to calm myself down.

The emotional growth that Lainey goes through is significant. By turns plucky, creative and charismatic, she’s also deeply lost and scared to trust, with both of her parents being duds in the dependability department. Can she trust Elliot? Does she dare trust Elliot? Internally, Lainey has some work to do in terms of being brave enough to allow herself to lean on other people. She has staunchly viewed herself as independent since her mother flitted off. She’s close with her gran, but she doesn’t even allow herself to lean on her gran really. It’s not just Elliot that she needs to learn to trust, it’s her best friend too.

Elliot has his own trust issues to work through too. Can he trust this charismatic woman who is (by necessity) always looking for the angle or the grift?

This is no quaint, typical small town, either. Everyone knows each other, sure, and there are feuds, but it’s gritty and more realistic too. There’s also a clear ‘us vs them’ in terms of tourists vs locals. It’s frank about the financial reality of surviving in a town that relies on tourists who are only there a couple months of the year.

There is, of course, a best friend. Lainey’s best friend Bree has her own stuff going on. She’s funny and smart and pregnant but there’s something wrong and she’s not talking about it. I’m used to the best friend in a book mostly having their life figured out but not so in this case. I enjoyed Bree’s story.

This is a closed door romance with heaps of sexual tension. The writing around intimate moments is so lush and vivid and visceral, that my head would probably implode if I were to read about the actual sex happening. The story itself is so deeply romantic, such as when Lainey thinks of Elliot:

Elliot knew how to listen. His eyes fixed on her as she spoke, absorbing each sentence with intense brows as if he were carving her words onto the marble tablet of his mind.

To me, paying attention in that way is real romance.

Here is another great moment that’ll give you a good idea of the kind of humour present. Elliot and Lainey are at a restaurant talking marriage logistics:

She was scooching herself in when Elliot attempted to give the back of her chair a gentlemanly push, nearly tipping her into the grill.

His face blanched, “Sorry, I thought I should -”
“I didn’t realise you were going to-”

What was happening? This was reeking of first date awkwardness. She wasn’t prepared to feign interest in his intramural kickball league for the next forty-odd minutes. They were getting married, but they weren’t dating. That last part was an essential part of the deal.
“Should we get right to business?” she asked. There. That should clarify what this was in the event that anyone was confused. “I had my lawyer look at the prenup, and we’re all good there.”

She, in fact, did not have her lawyer look at the prenup. She was currently dodging Mark’s calls since he had billed her seven hundred dollars for the whole adverse possession debacle and had, through an intermediary, refused to accept payments through Klarna.

He had, however, accepted the birdhouse she constructed for him, just not as payment.

She’d had Bree print out the prenup for her at work, where Ansel, the front desk manager, gave it a quick once over because he and his wife had divorced and remarried and recently gotten divorced again, and, as far as Lainey was concerned, it didn’t get much more expert than that.’

I realize that the excerpt above might present Lainey as someone who takes advantage of people and doesn’t pay her way. She had no choice but to go to a lawyer for help as there was an eviction notice on the door. She couldn’t afford to rent somewhere else, so Bree had arranged the meeting with the lawyer as a favour to Lainey as Bree’s family are big clients of the lawyer in question. The bill was therefore a surprise to Lainey.

I also felt a lot of empathy for Lainey because she is broke. Not ‘low on funds’, not ‘pay cheque to pay cheque,’ broke, but as in, there is no pay cheque. She suffers from a poorly managed (because she’s broke) migraine condition which makes regular work difficult, if not impossible. She works whatever odd jobs she can when her body allows her to and then uses that money to buy her medicine which she rations. It’s not that Lainey doesn’t want to pay. She just doesn’t have the money.

Was there anything I didn’t like? Only the vague sense that sometimes the book couldn’t hold my attention – usually when my mind was wildly cycling through things to do and worry about. While reading, I got a bit stressed out thinking of the impending bleak moment and needed to hold it off for a while. Sometimes books are so all-consuming that they can drown out my laundry list of things to worry over, but this one couldn’t always do that.

I’m such a fan of the writing that I’m going to be digging into the author’s back catalogue because I am hungry for more. If you’re looking for romance and big feelings and bigger growth, then I think you’ll enjoy this one.