Home Sweet Home by Bella Riley (Emerald Lake #1)
Contemporary Romance
October 1, 2011
Paperback
Forever

Reviewed by May

With a senator for a father (who recently passed away) and a mother who raised her in the small town of Emerald Lake while running a yarn store, Andi Powell took more after her father and has spent the last decade out in the world working hard and chasing her big city dreams. She wasn’t ever great at knitting, and she didn’t want to be trapped in the small town like the women of her family. She had bigger plans.

     There hadn’t been any formal training, just years of sitting at her mother’s and grandmother’s knees, of being like any normal girl and wanting to do what they did.
     Until that day she’d realized she wasn’t like them, that she didn’t fit in, that she wasn’t girlie enough or good enough with her hands. She was good with numbers and arguing. She wasn’t soft and small and rounded. She was tall and lean and dark like her father.

Now back in Emerald Lake to try and put together a deal to build some condos for her employer and long time client, Andi has to deal with the town mayor – her first love Nate.

He’d been her first lover at seventeen, the night she’d outdebated him over “doing the right thing,” tackled him in the backseat of his beat-up old car, and made him take her virginity.

Nate opposes the deal to build, and with every scene he’s  busy taking low blows and trying to attack her through statements with double meaning all about how she abandoned him in his time of need ten years ago. After several scenes where it seemed Andi coldheartedly dumped him, the truth is revealed. He had given her an ultimatum: quit school or lose me.

     “Hell, Andi, you say you want to get it all out once and for all, but you’re not actually going to admit culpability for a damn thing, are you?”
      She wasn’t eighteen anymore. She was going to stand up for herself this time. “Give me one reason to accept the blame and I’ll take it.”
     “I was losing it, Andi. My dad had just shot himself in the head. I was still grieving over my mom. I didn’t know how the hell I was going to be able to take care of Madison, or if they were even going to let me keep her. You should have known all those things. You should have known I didn’t mean it when I told you to go. You should have known I was scared. You should have known I needed you. But you didn’t.”

Up until now I’d liked Andi. Strong, independent, and a woman who’d worked hard to get where she is. She also is loyal to her mother and grandmother, pitching right in to help at the yarn store when needed. These are all traits I can respect and I loved her response to Nate’s rant. She reminds him that they were both just eighteen and that she had her own dreams and plans that didn’t revolve around him.  She did run right home as soon as he called about his dad, she just didn’t plan to give up everything to stay in the small town. This I respect! At that young age she wasn’t dropping everything to play house with her boyfriend.

     “Did you really think I was going to drop all of my dreams, that I was going to give up my entire life before it even began?”
     Nate looked flat-out disgusted with her. “No, Andi. You’re right. None of it is your fault. It’s mine. You were never going to sink so low as to actually end up with the trailer trash you said you loved, were you? Not when you had such big plans to go take care of. Not when you had so many big dreams to go achieve.”

You know what disgusted me? Nate. He’s a grown ass man, the leader of this town, and yet he is clearly stuck at eighteen. Not taking any blame, believing that it wasn’t ok for Andi to choose college education over staying home and changing his sister’s diapers. He is manipulative, controlling, and I found absolutely nothing good to say for him aside from the fact that he loves his sister and seems to take good care of her.

Soon after their blow up, he decides that he’ll do anything to get her back, he’s quickly envisioning making her his bride and how much he loves her. He just needs to get her to stay! In fact, he goes so far (it’s real big of him) to admit some fault:

While neither one of them was blameless, no one was more to blame than the other, either.

In the end, Nate knew one thing for sure: Both he and Andi had paid the price for their anger, for their pride in not wanting to admit fault, and for their stubborn desire to be the one to hear “I’m sorry” first.

Oh please! At no point was Andi thinking that Nate owed her anything, he seems to be the only one in this relationship who feels he is owed something. And yes, at this point there is smoke coming out of my ears. Then full on flames come when he goes to comfort her after a very emotional day of celebrating the memory of her father (who died a year ago) the senator in town. In a moment of emotional weakness, she takes all the blame. That it’s all her fault and clearly Nate is blameless. As you can guess, Nate is now a happier guy.

My enjoyment of this book degrades from this point as Andi realizes that her big dreams weren’t hers, the real her wants to be in this small town, and she will compromise and change everything about herself to be with Nate. I felt like she must have sipped on some small town kool-aid at a town meeting. I found myself encouraging her to run far away.

Nate does not have to change, he’s perfect! The town’s golden boy, he gets to be mayor, everyone loves him, and he raises his sister. It is never even considered that he will change anything – in fact at one point Andi recognizes that to be with him all the change will need to be on her end. Yes, to make this work Andi needs to pack up her life and move back to town, change careers, and get ready to raise Nate’s kids. (yes, they had unprotected sex…)

I do like small town romance when the story isn’t about making big city life out to be awful, or people who want to leave and pursue dreams wicked. When the focus is on the beautiful little town and it’s people, the positive reasons you’d want to stay and never look back – that is what I much prefer. In this book I’m not ok with the clearly imbalanced relationship, the way that the heroine was made to be wrong in every way. Her dreams, her going to college and making what I felt was the right choice in not ditching everything – those were all shown to be “wrong”. “Right” is being at home in the tiny town and standing by your man.

Despite my feelings about the story, the writing in this book was well done enough that I’d try the author again. While the message and characters were a fail in my book, I can’t do that here today. If you want the small town “girl realizes her big city life is wrong and she should knit and make babies for her perfect man while knitting is used as metaphor for life and grandma tells tales of her first love” book, I imagine you’d enjoy this one quite a bit.

Grade: C-

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