Review - - The Winter Wedding Plan & One Week to the Wedding

The Winter Wedding Plan   
By Olivia Miles
Publisher: Grand Central / Forever
Release Date: September 26, 2017
Reviewed by Janga 

  

In The Winter Wedding Plan, Olivia Miles takes her readers back to Misty Point, Rhode Island, for the story of Charlotte Daniels, the younger sister of the heroine of One Week to the Wedding. Although Charlotte returned to Misty Point to get her life together and to heal the breach with her family, things are not going well. Kate’s former fiancé, the father of Audrey, Charlotte’s seven-month-old daughter, has refused any contact with the infant and except for a one-time check for $10,000, pays no child support. Charlotte, determined to prove to her family that she is not a hopeless screw-up, has allowed them to think that he is supporting his child.

Charlotte is struggling to care for her daughter and to use her job in Kate’s fledgling event-planning business to earn her sister’s respect. But sleep-deprivation and financial woes severe enough to have her facing eviction from her tiny apartment make her doubt her ability to meet Audrey’s needs and her limited responsibility at Kate’s business makes achieving her secondary goal unlikely. She hopes moving to her parents’ home will relieve some of the financial pressure, but when her parents announce that they are moving out-of-state to care for an aging parent and her back-up plan of sharing her cousin Bree’s house falls through, Charlotte is staring homelessness in the face. This is her situation when Kate asks her to meet with a new client to plan a Christmas party.

Gregory Frost, heir presumptive to the Frost Greeting Card Company, needs more than a party planner; he needs a fake fiancée. He recently split with his fiancée over a difference of opinion about having children, and his mother has decided that an engagement announcement at the company’s annual Christmas party to be held at their Misty Point home is just what is needed to win the account of a huge department store committed to a family-friendly image. If Greg doesn’t cooperate, his mother is threatening to give the company that is Greg’s legacy to his cousin. Greg decides the pretty party planner can plan the Frost Christmas event and serve as his temporary fiancée.

At first, Charlotte is insulted by Greg’s proposal and rejects it roundly, but his account offers her a desperately needed bonus and a way to prove to Kate what she can do. When the eviction she has feared becomes reality and Greg offers her a place to stay while she plans the Frost party, she can’t say no. But she is not prepared for all the deception that will involve or for the stress of keeping the truth from Kate. Greg is not prepared for Audrey or for all the complications his mother’s early arrival will bring. Deceptions abound in this novel, but the greatest deception may be the one Charlotte and Greg are playing with their hearts.

I became an Olivia Miles reader with her Briar Creek books, a series I enjoyed so much that I recently marked it, with its bookend Christmas books, for a December reread. I had high hopes for the Misty Point series. I knew I liked Miles’s voice, and I am a fan of the hybrid form of women’s fiction that romance authors tend to produce when they turn to that genre. But so far, I have been disappointed.

I liked Kate in the first book, and I rooted for her and Alec to resolve their differences. However, I am not a fan of love triangles involving siblings, regardless of the twist an author gives the triangle. That is a personal response, and I know many readers seek out these books. But for me, Charlotte started with one strike against her. She does earn sympathy points for her remorse and for her difficulties as a single mother, but these are undercut by the fact that she seems so immature. If I had not known that she was twenty-eight, I would have guessed she was at least seven years younger. I also had little sympathy for her choice to keep the truth of her situation from her family. By the end of this story, she has matured, but I would like to have seen more of the process. I found Greg rather more likable, but he somehow lacked the full dimensionality I expect in primary characters. I did love Audrey; she had all the adorability and fractiousness of seven-month-olds I have known.

The greatest flaw in this book was the Bree factor. At intervals, the story switches to this character, and these sections consist mostly of her thoughts. Since I found her to be a whiny woman seriously lacking in discernment, I hated these sections. I have little patience in life or in fiction for women who confuse their image of a man with who he really is, regardless of the evidence. This character’s only redeeming quality was that she genuinely seemed to care about Charlotte and Audrey. I longed for a version of the book pruned of the Bree distractions.

In summary, The Winter Wedding Plan is not a bad book. I might have liked it more had I expected less. It also hit a few of my hot-button issues with force. Other readers will react differently. Misty Point is an appealing setting. Readers who liked Kate and Alec in the first book will enjoy seeing more of them. And the sisters are fully reconciled. There is also the holiday factor. The novel opens with Thanksgiving dinner and ends at a Christmas party with lots of holiday festivities in between. Although labeled women’s fiction, the romance is central enough to satisfy most romance readers. If you like holiday books high on the sweetness scale, this may be just your cup of wassail (without the hard cider).

Kate’s friend and town baker Colleen is delightful, and there is a suggestion that she has met her hero after years of unrequited love—and the new man is auburn-haired. I like the sound of that. I look forward to her story, which means I’m still in if Miles writes more books in this series—just not for Bree’s book.

One Week to the Wedding

By Olivia Miles

Publisher: Forever

Release Date: June 13, 2017
Reviewed by Janga

 

Kate Daniels is playing dual roles in her best friend’s wedding. She is the wedding planner and the maid of honor. The pressure is heightened by a boss who is looking for Kate to make a mistake so that she can fire her. But Kate’s greatest difficulty comes with her memories. Every fitting, every visit to the caterer, and every petal on the selected flowers awaken memories of Kate’s own wedding that never was, the one that was canceled when her fiancé, Jake Lambert, betrayed her. The betrayal was particularly devastating since the other woman was Kate’s younger sister, Charlotte. Kate has sworn off dating, and Alec Montgomery, however attractive he may be, is far too much like her ex to make her reconsider. Or is he?

Charlotte Daniels has made half a dozen phone calls to her sister. Kate might never forgive her, but Charlotte is determined that Kate will learn the truth of what happened with Jake Lambert, a truth that includes the existence of Charlotte’s infant daughter. Just as soon as she gets her life together, Charlotte plans to return to her hometown and reconcile with her family, but with money getting scarcer and life as a single mother getting more difficult, she may not have the luxury of delaying her return.

Alec Montgomery is ostensibly in town for a week for his brother’s wedding in which he is to serve as best man. No one knows that Alec has two purposes for taking a rare week away from his high-pressure Boston job, and neither of them is to celebrate the wedding. He is there to meet with a prospective client who can help save the Montgomery family business and to convince his younger brother William that he made a mistake when he left the family firm to marry and start a new life—and a new business—in his bride’s hometown. Alec never expected to end up envying his brother or to find himself thinking much too often about the wedding planner.

It is one week to the wedding of Elizabeth Jones and William Montgomery, and things are humming in Misty Point as the day draws near. Can Kate see that her best friend has the perfect wedding? Will the best man show up? Will an unexpected wedding guest prove too much for Kate?

One Week to the Wedding introduces a new series from Olivia Miles. Set in the resort town of Misty Point, Rhode Island, the series is billed as women’s fiction rather than romance and advertised as perfect for fans of Robyn Carr, Kristan Higgins, and Susan Mallery, three authors whose women’s fiction titles have proved as popular as their contemporary romance novels. I enjoyed Olivia Miles’s Briar Creek books, but I found her first women’s fiction book less than fully satisfying.

I am not a fan of love triangles, and I find those involving siblings particularly annoying. A few authors have been able to overcome this prejudice and make me fall in love with their books. (I’m looking at you, Terri Osburn!) But those authors are exceptions. Even though the Daniels sisters and Jerky Jake are not a true triangle, I could not get past the betrayal. Charlotte evoked little sympathy. Regardless of her explanation, she came across as a spoiled brat who was forced into growing up when she had to deal with the consequences of her choices. Jake, of course, is slime, but his lack of character doesn’t excuse Charlotte’s behavior. I liked Kate, but I did wonder about her judgment. She was in a two-year relationship with Jake and only retrospectively wonders if all was not as wonderful as she thought.

Alec was a more sympathetic character. He carried some heavy baggage, and his reluctance to accept William’s breaking away was understandable. However, his transformation seemed incredibly swift to me, as did his and Kate’s tumbling into love. It all occurs within a week! William was my favorite character, and I regretted that his and Elizabeth’s story was not part of the series.

To be fair, I think some of the book’s problems can be attributed to the needs of setting up the series in the first book. In addition to Kate and Alec’s love story and Charlotte and Kate’s relationship arc, Kate’s cousin Bree and friend Colleen, potential heroines for future books, are introduced along with hints about what is going on—or not going on—with their love lives. That is a lot to pack into one book, especially in one that covers only a single week.

Miles is a good writer, and Misty Point is an appealing setting. Readers who are free of my bias against triangles may find the sisters’ relationship less troubling than I did. The Winter Wedding Plan, a September 27 release, continues the sisters’ story with the focus on Charlotte, and it may temper my response to these characters. Although I am not convinced that One Week to the Wedding merits favorable comparison to Carr, Higgins, and Mallery, I am sufficiently engaged to continue with the series and hope for books I love as much as I did Miles’s Mistletoe on Main Street and Hope Springs on Main Street, my favorites in her Briar Creek series.

Review - - Christmas Comes to Main Street

Christmas Comes to Main Street

By Olivia Miles

Publisher: Forever

Release Date: September 27, 2016

 

 

Kara Hastings has risked her inheritance from her father to open Sugar & Spice, her own cookies-only bakery, but she is overwhelmed with all the work involved. The Christmas season makes her product in greater demand, particularly her special gingerbread houses. This is great for the bakery’s bottom line but not so good in other ways for the exhausted, sleep-deprived owner. The pressure to make a success of her business is intensified both by the emotional connection to her father and by the doubts of her mother and others who think the bakery is just the latest of Kara’s fleeting interests. Kara feels that she has a lot to prove, and her focus on Sugar & Spice doesn’t leave her much time for a personal life. Her happily married and about-to-be-married friends and her younger, newly engaged sister make Kara long to find “the one,” but Briar Creek doesn’t offer much opportunity to meet the man of her dreams. And then Nate Griffin shows up.

Nate, a workaholic management consultant, is paying a duty visit to his aunt. He has a deep affection for his quirky, bossy aunt, but he is not enthusiastic about spending time in Briar Creek. Not only does it seem slow after his busy city life, but the town’s immersion in Christmas and all its trappings stirs painful memories of his childhood Christmases made bleak by poverty. Nate’s plan is to ease his guilt by spending time with his aunt who adores him and then to return to Boston ASAP. Despite his reservations, Nate is caught up in his aunt’s frenzy to decorate her bed and breakfast so spectacularly that she will win the town’s annual contest for the best decorated Christmas house. Her matchmaking plan proves even more difficult to elude.

Nate and Kara have a disastrous first meeting when he inadvertently destroys a cookie order intended for the B & B, an encounter that leaves Kara angry and tearful. However, neither she nor Nate can stop thinking of the other. Even as attraction sparks between the two, Nate resists because he has jumped to the conclusion that Kara is a wealthy heiress for whom the bakery is a whim. Kara is offended by Nate’s attempts to give her business advice, and she knows his time in Briar Creek is short. But these are merely bumps on the road to a holiday embellished HEA.

Olivia Miles comes full circle in this fifth book in her Briar Creek series, adding a second Christmas romance to the series that began with Mistletoe on Main Street. Fans of the series will remember Kara who played a prominent secondary part in Love Blooms on Main Street (Book 4). I found her to be a much more sympathetic character in her own book, less whiny and more vulnerable. Nate is a younger, hot version of Scrooge. Seeing him fall for Kara and for holiday-drenched Briar Creek should have great appeal for readers looking for a sweet Christmas romance.

This book stands out among the 2016 Christmas romances I have read because the holiday is more than backdrop. From the food-coat-toy drive and the decorating contest, which is a major plot element, to Kara’s gingerbread houses and Nate’s need to learn to keep Christmas in his heart, this novel is saturated with the traditions and sentiment of Christmas. If you have enjoyed Miles’s other Briar Creek books, you should definitely read this one. I also recommend it to those who love a heartwarming Christmas romance. Christmas Comes to Main Street has Hallmark Holiday Movie written on it from the cover to the conclusion.

~Janga

Review - - Love Blooms on Main Street

Love Blooms on Main Street

By Olivia Miles

Publisher: Forever

Release Date: July 26, 2016

 

Ivy Birch has been hoping to hear from Brett Hastings for seven months, ever since they shared a kiss that fired Ivy’s dreams at the wedding of her best friend, Grace Madison, and Brett’s cousin Luke Hastings (main characters in Mistletoe on Main Street). Ivy has nourished a crush on Brett since they were in middle school, and she finds the grown-up Dr. Brett Hastings just as appealing. The memory of that kiss is enough to make it difficult to concentrate on her work as Briar Creek’s favorite florist, a job she loves. But when months pass without even a phone call or a text from Brett, Ivy begins to suspect that the distracting doctor is another in a long line of jerks. That impression is confirmed by an unexpected encounter at the local hospital.

Brett could not wait to leave Briar Creek, Vermont. A full scholarship to Yale gave him his first opportunity. A free ride to medical school at Johns Hopkins followed, and ranking first in his class helped him secure a demanding post as an ER physician in a Baltimore hospital. Now he is back in Briar Creek, filling in for a doctor on maternity leave after his boss in Baltimore suggests the young doctor needs a change from the high-pressure, big-city ER scene. Brett is determined that his stay in Briar Creek will be strictly temporary. However attractive he finds Ivy, he knows that he, with his fear of commitment and plans to leave his home town as soon as possible, is not the man sweet Ivy with her roots deep in Briar Creek needs in her life.

 The chemistry between Brett and Ivy proves stronger than his intention to stay away from her for her own good. For a time, the two seem headed for the HEA of Ivy’s dreams. But Ivy’s fear that Brett will follow her overprotective brother’s example in dealing with her diabetes and Brett’s fear that the cost of opening his heart will prove too high may be insurmountable obstacles. Can Ivy and Brett overcome their baggage from the past to claim a shared future?

Love Blooms on Main Street is the fourth book in Miles’s Briar Creek series. Readers familiar with the earlier books, particularly Hope Springs on Main Street (the story of Jane Madison and Henry Birch, Ivy’s brother), will recognize the plucky Ivy. She is a sympathetic heroine, and her struggle to overcome her childhood as the daughter of an alcoholic and the complications of life as a diabetic to have a “normal” life give her substance and interest.  I found Brett less sympathetic. Despite his abandonment issues and his guilt over leaving his mother when she was ill, he came across as too self-absorbed for my taste. I also felt the ending was rushed and less than fully convincing.

Part of the charm of small-town romance is the cast of secondary characters with hints of their stories, but I found all the space devoted to Kara’s career conflicts irrelevant and distracting despite the thematic connection of secrets kept and the need to set up a future book. I really enjoyed the first three Briar Creek books, and I had high hopes for this one. Unfortunately, I ended up viewing LBOMS as the weak link in an otherwise excellent series. If you are a fan of the series, you may want to read this one for the sake of continuity. It is not a bad book, just less engaging than the other books. If you are new to Olivia Miles, I recommend you begin with Mistletoe on Main Street, the first book in the series, to see this author at her best.

  

 ~Janga

Review - - Hope Springs on Main Street

Hope Springs on Main Street

By Olivia Miles

Publisher: Forever

Release Date: October 27, 2015

 

Conscious that she is the target of town gossip and that her cheating ex-husband is having no problem moving on with his mistress, Jane Madison is trying to cope with life as a divorced woman and mother of one. She knows the gossip and the poor-Jane looks are only going to get worse when Briar Creek learns that her ex is soon to marry his pregnant mistress. This is not how she saw her life when she gave up her best chance to conquer a larger world as a dancer and married her high school sweetheart instead. Added to her hurt and disillusionment is her worry about tightening finances because the dance studio where she teaches is cutting classes, some of them the classes Jane teaches. But Jane is determined not to burden her mother and sisters with her problems, especially since the family is focused on her sister’s upcoming wedding.

Henry Birch is not happy to be in Briar Creek. The town holds too many memories that haunt him, memories of his alcoholic mother and her neglect and of being an object of the town’s gossip and pity. Only his love and concern for his sister Ivy have brought him back after a six-year absence. He feels guilty that he did not return to help Ivy when their mother died, and he is determined to be there for her to help clear out their childhood home and put it up for sale. He also wants to make sure Ivy, who has Type I diabetes, is taking care of herself. His plans are to take care of business and leave Briar Creek as soon as possible.

Henry is not surprised to learn that Jane and Adam are divorced. Adam may have been his best friend, and Adam’s parents may have given Henry the only experience he has ever known of being part of a real family, but even so, Henry knew before Jane married him that Adam was a player. Jane unknowingly claimed Henry’s heart when they were in high school, and he has never forgotten her. Sure, the fact that she is his best friend’s ex creates some awkwardness, but all the connections that made Henry and Jane friends who “got” each other are still there with the potential for fireworks added. Henry even falls for the charms of Jane’s young daughter. But Jane’s roots in Briar Creek are deep, and she deserves a man without Henry’s baggage and his history of failed relationships. But sometimes a man finds that he has to go home again and hope that the woman who is more than he deserves can forgive him for leaving.  

Hope Springs on Main Street is the third book in Miles’s Briar Creek series, after Mistletoe on Main Street and A Match Made on Main Street. It is a slightly different take on the friends-to-lovers trope. Henry and Jane have a history, but they also have six years of silence and Henry’s loyalty to Adam—or perhaps more accurately, Adam’s family—to complicate matters. They are both good people, but they are far from perfect. Some readers may find Henry’s fear and self-doubt irritating, but I thought the characteristics were exactly those one would expect to see in the adult child of an alcoholic. I found Jane’s refusal to share her problems with the family that loves her more difficult to understand. But I cared about both these characters and wanted to see them reach an HEA.

As much as I liked the romance, I also appreciated that all the other relationships are also dynamic. Henry’s relationship with Ivy may be the most interesting, but Jane’s relationships with her daughter and with her sisters also change and grow. I found Henry’s developing relationship with young Sophia charming. Although I went in search of the first two books in the series as soon as I read this one, I had not read either before reading Hope Springs on Main Street and had no problem reading this book as a standalone. I am hooked on the series now, however, and am hoping for Ivy’s story soon. I had heard good things about Olivia Miles’s books, and I’m delighted that all the yea-sayers were right. I am adding another small-town series to my must-read list, and I definitely recommend that all of you who are fans of small-town romance or of romance with lots of sexual tension but closed bedroom doors give this one a try.

 ~Janga