Monte Price's Reviews > Late Bloomer

I've come close to purchasing this book so many times so when it was available at the library I figured it would be smarter to read and then purchase, and I'm glad that I did because I didn't love this book.

I'm no expert book formater, but the font size and line spacing seem to be doing a lot to make this book look longer because the actual content doesn't really deliver what you think it would for a book that is 375 pages. This book also never makes a solid case as to why this particular story set in mostly one location needed to be told from both Opal and Pepper's perspective. As a dual POV truther it feels wild to come on the internet to complain about a romance being told from two perspectives, well... here we are friends. I get that it's Opal who wins the lottery, but honestly most the heft of the story could be coming from Pepper's perspective and it might have made for a stronger narrative if we were only in her head and seeing her life getting turned even more upside down than it was before Opal arrived and complicated matters even further. Opal was just too cookie cutter quirky romance heroine that didn't offer much of anything outside single siblings that future books could follow, which honestly isn't enough of a reason to get as much airtime as she gets in the book.

I devoured almost the first two hundred pages in a single sitting. Partly because I was intrigued, partly because I was at a fast food restaurant waiting for the next bus, but partly because the first two hundred pages read like what could have been a hundred pages. We get to meet Opal and Pepper, learn that Opal has won the lottery and immediately puts her winnings to use to purchase land that Pepper is currently living on (and maybe the person who sold her the land didn't have the rights to do so?) and set up a scheme wherein feeling bad about this situation strike up a roommate agreement and future plan that Pepper might be able to purchase the farm back at some undisclosed future date. With half the book spent setting up the basic premise the latter half becomes this plot to enter a floral arrangement contest to maybe get the down payment on purchasing the farm back.

Only sorta. Pepper is hesitant to enter the contest for at least another twenty or so percent and so it's a lot of spinning wheels and time spent exploring the chemistry of our two leads now that they have this friends with benefits arrangement going.

Only this is a sorta too... While yes we get to see them hooking up and the complications that arise from that it's also not a lot of seeing the chemistry? They're forced together and there's definitely some cute banter, but nothing that had me rooting for them ending the book cohabitating. A lot of romance that I've read recently seems to want to jump to that point in a relationship; people living together in a sort of pseudomarried bliss without any of the time people might spend actually dating or being a couple. It's just speed run for the sake of a plot and this book felt like it was trying to navigate the obstacle course in record time to the detriment of both Pepper and Opal who never really got to be more than the shadow of potential characters.

The third act conflict was also pure foolishness in my opinion, and probably the reason that I can't give this three stars. It's not the worst thing that I've ever read, but it just didn't ring true. It lacked a believably, both narratively and from just a common sense perspective. This is far better than the last book I picked up by Eddings, so at least on that front I'm not upset that I decided to give this a go. I'll probably pick up more books from them in the future, but this was definitely a swing and a miss.