RomBkLove

I read a fair number of small town series (Ruthie Knox’s Camelot, Shannon Stacey’s Kowalski’s and Jill Shalvis’ Happy Harbor series) I tend to avoid books set in farming communities. I spent five years living in the prairies of Alberta and I have learned as much as I needed to about the toils and travails of farming communities.
Chance of Rain reunites former high school sweethearts, Natalie and Sawyer. Natalie looks after her Gram’s diner and Sawyer left behind his father’s farm for a career in the Navy. Natalie had a long-time crush on Sawyer that briefly blossomed into going steady during the last few weeks of Sawyer’s senior year. Their relationship came to abrupt end when Sawyer broke up with her and left Dearling to become a Navy SEAL. Twelve years later, Sawyer is finally back in town but only temporarily, so he can fix-up and liquidate the farm he grew up in.
The romance in this book really didn’t work for me. Both Natalie and Sawyer keep are still deeply attracted to each other but push each other away and need other people and tropical storm to push them back toward each other. I didn’t really connect with their passivity and I felt while many complicated emotional issues complicating their relationship were raised there was little resolution or direct dialogue by the characters about their issues.
While the romance didn’t connect with me the story of Sawyer’s homecoming did. While Sawyer is actively struggling with the idea of whether he can commit to Natalie and make a go of it in Dearling, the bigger story seemed to me was whether Sawyer would wake up to realize that his hometown hadn’t rejected him, but instead was waiting for him to come back and he needed to stop trying to prove himself worthy of being loved by the town, and simply accept their love.
I will probably check out other books by Amber Lin as I am despite myself curious about the other residents of Dearling, such a Natalie’s outrageous busy body best friend Lucy and Sawyer’s banker-turned-farmhand Ian.
Publication date Nov 4, 2013
Digital ARC provided for free by publisher via NetGalley