The best thing about it was the increasing complications of all the blended families - I think every child has a step-sibling in each direction by the end - which adds a lot of difficulty to any pair of lovers getting together, without requiring them to be deeply stupid. Okay, maybe that's why it's a real novel¹: believable conflict, based on moral duties, which spring from choices freely made before a substantial change in character. The worse part of the novel is the financial fantasy of running lovely little shops and doing really sensitive old-house renovations for profit. Desirable, of course, and the heroine gets seriously dirty doing it, but I think it's shown less realistically hard than the parenting problems. Therefore it's a summer novel.
¹I don't think there's a clear line in writing quality; I'm sure that some genre writing is more complex and subtle than some 'respectable' writing. I am finding the latter hard to specify, though, since I don't keep those books - or even finish them - and seem to have successfully denied them memory-space.
ISBN: 0-7434-6354-4
So wrote clew in
Fiction (21st c.).
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