Review – All About Charming Alice by J. Arene Culiner #fiction #smalltown #romance
Synopsis
Trust in love and solutions will appear.
Alice Treemont has no intention of falling in love. Living in Blake’s Folly, a semi-ghost town, she cooks vegetarian meals, rescues unwanted dogs, and protects the most unloved creatures on earth: snakes. What man would share those interests?
Jace Constant is in Nevada, doing research for his new book, but he won’t be staying. He’s disgusted by desert dust on his fine Italian shoes and dog hair on his cashmere sweaters. As for snakes, he doesn’t just despise them: they terrify him.
So why does the air sizzle each time Alice and Jace meet? A romance would entail far too many compromises.
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Review
Take a trip back to Blake’s Folly. In this book, we focus on Alice and Jace. The story is told from both POVs, and it is interesting how their brains operate. Alice doesn’t want him in her life, but he is smitten with her and wants to have more of a relationship. I think Alice wants that too, but is just afraid to say so. It doesn’t help that the town is very small, with around 53 citizens, so any gossip spreads like wildfire.
I really enjoyed watching their relationship blossom and become something more. The book is filled with a variety of scenes that elicit different emotions. And it doesn’t hurt that there are MANY dogs involved. Alice is something of a dog whisperer and takes them in until she can find them a home. That is how she met Jace, through a dog he found on the road that he named Killer. The dog is anything but a killer. But that helps cement their relationship over time.
While this is the second in the series, it can be read as a standalone novel. The first book has a little background information, but not so much that you are missing anything by reading the books out of order.
I can’t wait to read the third book, and we give this one 4 paws up.
About the Author
Writer, photographer, social critical artist, and impenitent teller of tall tales, J. Arlene Culiner was born in New York and raised in Toronto. She has crossed much of Europe on foot, has lived in a mud house on the Great Hungarian Plain, a Bavarian castle, a Turkish cave dwelling, a haunted house on the English moors, and on a Dutch canal. She now resides in a 400-year-old former inn in a French village of no interest where, much to local dismay, she protects spiders, snakes, and all weeds. She particularly enjoys incorporating into mysteries, non-fiction, and romances, her experiences in out-of-the-way communities and her conversations with very odd characters.
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