Review of Love Blooms on Main Street by Olivia Miles

Brief Summary: 

Ivy Birch like any woman fantasizes that one day, her prince charming will show up at her store with a bouquet of flowers. For Olivia if it turns out to be Brett Hastings, the guy she kissed at her best friends wedding then its a win all around.  However, doesn't realize that this could happen sooner than she thinks because Mr. Hasting is now back in town. Will Ivy be able to hide her feelings for Brett, or will she be left heart broken.

Brett Hasting is only in Briar Creek for a short time. He hopes to spend a couple quiet months with his family and his job in the small hospital and then get back to a big city where he belongs.  However, things don’t go as planned when he is assigned to run the hospital fundraiser at work and work with the hometown sweetheart, Ivy Birch who he kissed back at his friends wedding. Will Brett be able to keep things professional or will he end up distracted again and potentially fall in love and possible cause someone else pain?

My review:

I received this book from Netgalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest and unbiased review. This is the 4^th book in the series by Olivia Miles but the first that I have read of hers. I think Olivia does a good job of creating well developed main characters. I enjoyed learning about both Ivy and Brett’s past history and what made them be who they were in the present day as I felt it really added to the storyline.

In, addition to creating well developed characters Olivia also created a great background scenery. The scenery was so well described that you felt like you lived in the quaint little town of Briar Creek with the characters. In addition, Olivia did a great job of matching the scenes to where you were in the book. They never felt out of place.

Lastly, I liked that she also did a great job of narrowing in on two fairly serious items. The first item being, Ivy having diabetes and second, how Brett dealt with the lost of a patient. It was interesting to see her incorporate these two serious issues into a story and in the end have a lesson for readers to learn from what the characters went through.  

If there was anything that I thought could be improved in the story would be that I felt that the author concentrated too much on their separate stories, then the romance. As a reader you want to see the romance from start to finish grow. I felt that the characters grew through out the book, however, the romance was more shown towards the end of the book.

All in all this was a great book and I recommend reading it if you like romance and drama. In addition, I really think that Olivia and her crew did a great job on the book cover.

Review of Curious Minds

Brief Book Summary: 

Riley Moon, a recent graduate of Harvard Business and Law School lands her first real full-time job working at Blane-Grunewald bank as a junior analyst. However, instead of doing the dream job that she was hired to do, she is stuck babysitting an arrogant, rich and handsome millionaire, Emerson Knight. Will she be able to survive this first assignment or will she be forced into finding a new career path?

Emerson Knight, recently gained ownership of his families fortune when his father passes away. However, shortly after reviewing the family companies finances he finds that there are missing funds. After paying a visit to the bank in charge of the funds he finds the one person who his family trusted is now missing and with the missing funds. In hopes to finding this Grunewold and to uncover the whole truth of what happened, Emerson sets out on an adventure with Ms. Moon but quickly finds out that there is more danger and lies into the ordeal than he originally thought. Will he be able to find his money and still make it home alive? Can he keep his relationship with Riley strictly professional?

My Review:

I received this book from netgalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. Having read the Stephanie Plum series from Janet Evanovich, I was very intrigued to read this new series of Janet’s because how different it sounded then the Plum Series.  

Janet did a great job of creating well developed characters as well. In addition to well developed characters, Janet also did a good job of setting the scene through out the book. Each scene was well crafted and written out. As a reader you felt that you were on their journey with them. She also did a great job of inserting humor in at the right times in the book. So at times you were on the edge of your seat waiting to see what was going to happen to laughing out loud.

The reason I would give this book a four out of five stars is that after a couple of chapters you could kind of predict how the book was going to end based off the material that was written. However, Janet did a great job of keeping your attention through out the book with all the twists and turns that the predicatability of the ending of the book did not bother me.  I am interested to see what the next book in the series will be like and to see how she decides to develop Emerson and Riley’s story.