Jill Shalvis is one of my go-to “feel good” authors, so when I needed a lift I picked up The Lemon Sisters, and, man, it did not disappoint. This book was cathartic. It made me laugh and it made me cry, and it helped me let loose some of my own bottled-up feelings. I left this book feeling recharged and satisfied, which was exactly what I needed.

The third book in the Wildstone series can be easily as a standalone, and as much as it’s a romance, it’s also the story of two sisters reconnecting. All of the main characters in this book have to re-evaluate their situations and make an emotional journey, and I found the fact that they all did the work to get where they needed to be while also supporting each other to be incredibly satisfying.

The Lemon sisters, Brooke and Mindy, aren’t exactly estranged, but they aren’t close either. Mindy married her high school sweetheart, had three children, and began to take over the family business. Brooke fled their small town of Wildstome, California, looking for adventure photographing the world. When the novel opens, Mindy is at her breaking point, and she unexpectedly shows up to Brooke’s LA condo with her three kids (Millie, Mason and Maddox) in tow and with the suspicion that her husband, Linc, might be having an affair. Mindy, who always strives for perfection, is seriously burned out.

Despite having spent little time together in recent years, Brooke offers to take the kids back to Wildstone and stay with them so that Mindy can have a break. The truth is, Brooke is ready to face her past, and that means Mindy’s neighbor and Brooke’s ex-fiance, Garrett.

The Brooke/Garrett romance is a pretty straightforward second chance love story. Brooke and Garrett were friends with benefits, sleeping together when Brooke rolled back through town. When she got pregnant, they got engaged because, to Brooke, it felt like the right thing to do. While working as a producer for a travel TV series, Brooke was in a serious helicopter accident that caused a miscarriage and left her unable to carry a pregnancy to term. Since the pregnancy was unplanned, Brooke felt some level of irrational guilt, like she somehow caused the accident to happen by being uncertain of whether she wanted a baby at all. She was also left with PTSD from the crash itself, and rather than deal with all of these things, and they are a lot of things, she left Garrett and Wildstone and stayed away.

Garrett never got over Brooke, and since he was delighted to be engaged and expecting, he never really understood how complex the miscarriage felt for her. When she returns to Wildstone with Plot Moppets in tow, Brooke feels like she owes Garrett some kind of explanation for why she fled, but she’s still too conflicted by her feelings for him and her trauma to articulate it.

Instead we get a lot of Brooke and Garrett dancing around their still-smoldering attraction for each other. We also get some adorable moments where Garrett helps out with the kids:

Five minutes later, they were in the kitchen working breakfast when Garrett reappeared. He eyed Maddox, face-down on the floor crying. “Problem?” he asked over the din.

“Whyever would you think that?” Brooke asked.

This got the slightest of lip twitches.

Mason and Millie just kept eating their granola with chopped up bananas. After she got to the store later and bought fresh stuff, she’d be able to get more than two colors in their bowl.

Garrett glanced at the still face down-on-the-floor Maddox. “What’s wrong with this one?”

“He’s upset that his sweatpants match his sweatshirt, even though he dressed himself.”

Garrett nodded like this made perfect sense. He crouched low, balanced on the balls of his feet, and murmured something softly for Maddox’s ear only, rubbing the toddler’s back with an easy, warm affection.

After a minute, Maddox got to his feet and hitched up his sweatpants, like, Okay, I’m good.

Garrett held out his closed fist, and to Brooke’s surprise, Maddox bumped his baby fist into it.

While all of that is going on, we also see Mindy and Linc’s relationship. Linc took over his father’s medical practice when he died, and hasn’t been home very much. Mindy feels like her entire identity has been reduced to wife-and-mother, and questions if her husband is still attracted to her. Her life is a constant juggle of carpools and play dates and laundry, with some poop thrown in for good measure.

I liked how the book pointed out that parenthood is hard, and that it’s okay to take the time to lay in your sister’s bed drinking wine for a week. It’s okay to say, “I need a break and a chance to breathe.”

Just like Garrett and Brooke, Linc and Mindy need to communicate as well, but on a different level. Mindy feels overwhelmed and ignored. Linc has been sailing through their relationship assuming that everything is okay because it’s not actively on fire, and missing the fact that his wife is handling more than her fair share.

And finally we have Brooke and Mindy. There’s less to work through between the sisters besides distance, but this felt like the most meaningful and heartfelt part of the book. The writing balances “driving each other crazy” with “unconditional love” in a way that resonated for me when I think of my own relationship with my sister. There’s a scene in this book between Mindy and Brooke that felt so poignant and felt so real to me. As a big sister, part of me never wants my little sister to go through any kind of pain, let alone without my support.

Mindy’s heart tightened. “What? Tell me. Please tell me.”

“I didn’t just miscarry after the helicopter crash. During the surgery, things…happened.”

“I know, Bee. You lost your spleen, some of your lower intestines, got an infection and almost died.” Her eyes filled again. “We were all devastated for you. I wanted to crawl into your hospital bed and take care of you. I’m your big sister–I’m supposed to nurture you so hard that you get annoyed.”

“Mission accomplished.”

They both gave a watery laugh, but Brooke’s faded. “I…can’t get pregnant anymore.”

Mindy stared at her, heart pounding at the reality of what her sister had gone through, alone. “What?”

“Please don’t make me repeat it. Bust most of all, please don’t cry anymore, you’re already dehydrated. You break out when you’re dehydrated. I don’t want that on my head.”

Mindy swallowed heard, not willing to let Brooke tease this away.

There are a lot of relationships being juggled in The Lemon Sisters but all of them are given the time and attention they need so it didn’t feel like any plotline was left dangling. The repair of those relationships also demanded that the characters really talk to each other which I appreciated.

The Lemon Sisters has a lot of Big Feels in it and for me it was cathartic and uplifting book I needed.