Book Review: Love in Bloom by Lucy Eden

Genres: Romance, Contemporary Romance, Fiction, Forced Proximity, Small Town Romance, Adult, Found Family
Pages: 368
Format: Physical Book
Rating:

Initial Thoughts

As I was perusing the small-town romance section at Barnes and Noble this little beauty caught my eye. I was supposed to be on a book buying ban, but I couldn’t resist picking this one up. Written by a BIPOC author with a black woman and brown man on the cover, and a plot about a farm, I had to have it. And not to mention, the copy I got was signed!

The Plot (Spoiler-Free!)

Emma lives a fast-paced life in Atlanta, Georgia with the perfect boyfriend, perfect job, and perfect social life. She’s used to a luxurious lifestyle, with high paying clients, until she loses it all and inherits a farm four hours away. With nothing to lose, Emma abandons her city life and decides to take up a rural farm life. The farm she inherited also came with a very attractive, witty, farm manager named Dan. Dan has no faith Emma can handle farm life, but Emma is determined to prove him wrong. During this process, Emma is discovering that maybe small-town life isn’t so bad, nor is the guarded farm manager. But Emma soon discovers that this small-town is keeping secrets, and she doesn’t know if she can keep them too.

What I Liked

I liked the plot of the story in general. It is definitely something different from what I’ve read before – especially when the true plot is revealed. I’m really starting to like these small-town romance books and they’re making me want to pick up my life and move to a farm! I think that’s a testament to the writing and how well-done the storytelling and scene setting was done. There’s also a sense of community in small-town books that this one also had. It’s like how everyone knows everyone and they all care about each other and work together as a community for the greater good of the town.

As an MMC, Dan is a pretty good one. He cooks, makes great tea, takes care of others — just an all-around good guy. He’s also very witty and reads Emma down for filth when needed. He also picks up Emma a lot and throws her over his shoulder and we love that. There were some spicy moments which I did like, but then I also felt like it could’ve been written better at times. It seemed kind of rushed. But if you don’t want a book that’s overly spicy then you may like this one.

One of my favorite micro tropes are when the main characters are communicating with each other in ways other than speaking verbally. In this book, this happened in the form of texts, hand written notes, and also through a silent chess game. I don’t know the why, but for me, this is just something that I love love love in books.

What Didn’t Work for Me

While I did give this book a favorable rating of four deer-stars, there are some areas I feel could have improved upon, and some things that just weren’t my preference as a reader.

• This book is told from Emma’s POV the whole time and I would’ve liked to have had a few chapters from Dan’s POV.
• Eden’s writing style uses a lot of em dashes and for me and it made the sentences very long because the em dashes were used to combine two separated thoughts and when I got back to the original thought, it was just kind of confusing.
• While I don’t need everything explained to me, I think the transitions could be smoother: “I ordered waffles. The waffles were delicious.”
• I thought it was weird that towards the beginning of the book it was already established that Dan knows who Erica is, so I found it weird that Emma referred to Erica as “the diner owner”  when talking to Dan well into the book. The way it was written makes it seem as if Dan doesn’t know who Erica is which isn’t true.
• This could be kind of nitpicky but towards the beginning of the book there are mentions of it being late, but a time is never given. The reason why this was an issue for me is because Emma makes this 4 hour drive to a will reading for her grandparents. She attends the reading, has car problems that takes hours to fix, then she proceeds to drive 4 hours back. It seems to me she would be driving home way past midnight, to which her boyfriend never checks in on her, and she didn’t sleep at all.
• Dan’s catch phrase is “All right, Emma?” And maybe it’s supposed to be sweet but after the 50th time of him saying that, (okay that’s an exaggeration but you catch my drift), I found it annoying.And on the topic of overused words / phrases, the word “mischievous” was used A LOT and, again, I just think we can have some more creativity with the words we’re using. There’s no way that everything that was happening in the book was mischievous.
• Emma makes it a point to be called “Emma” and not her full name “Emmaline.” When she first meets Belinda, she calls her Emmaline and Emma doesn’t correct her. Dan is sitting there and he calls her “Emma” and Belinda comments on how it’s cute they have nicknames for each other. But then towards the end of the book Belinda is calling Emma “Emma.” Seems to be a continuity issue because as far as we know, Belinda only knew Emma as “Emmaline.”And on the topic of names and continuity, Max was referred to as “Max” for 95% of the book until all of a sudden Emma starts referring to her as “Maxima.” I understand using a character’s full name for dramatic effect, but in this instance it just felt very random and misplaced.

Yikes! These are a lot of notes! I promise I did like this book lol.

Final Thoughts

Despite my critics, I did like this book and do recommend it. It’s nice seeing black people and people of color represented in these small-town romance books on a farm setting. I really liked the plot and the diversity of the cast. If you liked Done and Dusted, then I would say give this one a chance! The books are different tropes, but similar-ish genres.

P.S. This book is a little spicy and if words like “velvety steel” and “sensitive folds” make you cringe, consider this your warning!