A Rainbow Above Us

April 22, 2019
Sala (Dark Water Rising) falters with the lackluster eighth small-town contemporary in the Blessings, Georgia series, in which an old family feud at last gets resolved. Skilled contractor Bowie James returns to Blessings to rebuild the house where he grew up, which has been damaged by a hurricane. His relatives, who still live in the house, have taken in Rowan Harper, who lost her home and father in the storm. While Bowie copes with the Boone family’s persecution of him, he and Rowan flirt and then swiftly fall into a low-key romance in which she makes him coffee, he buys her clothing, and they picnic together near the site of Rowan’s destroyed home. Meanwhile, as the Boones’ past sins relating to Bowie and his mother are revealed, their tribulations repeatedly draw focus from Bowie and Rowan, whose characters are considerably more shallow. This is mostly a saga of fallout from family skeletons revealed, and romance readers might want to give it a miss. Agent: Meredith Bernstein, Meredith Bernstein Literary.

May 15, 2019
A construction company owner returns home and finds love with a hurricane refugee. The Boone and James families of Blessings, Georgia, have been feuding for generations. As a teenager, Bowie James and his mother were forced to flee town, and he vowed never to return. Years later, a hurricane destroys his grandmother's home, and his family begs him to help rebuild. Bowie is surprised to find Rowan Harper, a young woman who lost her father in the storm, living with his aunt and grandmother in an emergency shelter. Refusing to leave any of "his girls" behind, he takes all three to live in his mobile home while his crew restores the destroyed house. When Bowie's return unveils years of shameful Boone family secrets, he prepares himself for their inevitable retaliation, which starts with physical assault and escalates to gunplay. Sala (Forever My Hero, 2019, etc.) gives extensive narrative time to everyone in the Boone family, including the angry patriarch, the duped wives, the incompetent middle-aged sons, and the confused teenage grandson. This is notable only because Rowan, Bowie's love interest and the heroine of the book, is a complete cipher. Rowan graduated from high school, but there is no hint of her life in the intervening seven years. She lived on a farm with her controlling father and didn't go to school, have a job, or dream of her future. Every morning Bowie heads into Blessings, and readers follow his day and the machinations of the Boone family, but there is nothing of Rowan. Rarely are modern romance heroines so passively underdeveloped; Rowan does little more than prepare dinner and wait for Bowie to return home and make her a character again. Overwrought small-town drama relegates the romance to an unsatisfying subplot.

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May 15, 2019
In Sala's latest Blessings, Georgia, tale, following Forever My Hero (2019), Bowie James returns to town to help his grandmother and Aunt Ella repair their house after Hurricane Fanny. Now grown and successful, he is able to fight back when members of the Boone family, who forced him and his mother to leave, attack once again, ultimately driving family secrets into the light. Rowan Harper lost her dad and her home in the storm, and has been staying with the James ladies?leading Bowie to help all three women?and finding unexpected love and peace. Sala effectively shows the lasting effects of hurricanes and violence in the midst of a flirty romance.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)