Excellent book, and I highly recommend reading the whole series! ( )

I think I've mis-shelved this book. It doesn't really belong on "Heaving Bosoms" , but I refuse to start a "Fluttering Bosoms", so what can you do. I'm reading this Cedar Cove series because my family is doing it sort of as a group reading, and I'd like to stay in the loop with the family conversations. So I'm listening to them on audio, and Sandra Burr is her usual very competent self, bringing more life to the narration than I certainly could. The setting is the Anywhere USA town that every family sitcom from mid-century America was set in. Including those same values and mores. There's little or no crime, deviance, or depravity of any kind. Even the "bad" characters are, at worst, a little selfish and mean-spirited. Oh, and the one rich guy who's rumored to engage in shady business practices, has (gasp) divorced several wives, and dates women young enough to be his daughter. He's the only villain, as he wants to marry the young woman in spite of the fact that he can't get it up, locking her into a sexless and passionless and, even worse, BABYLESS marriage, but is happy to facilitate her engaging in extramarital affairs . They strongly value getting married, having babies, and interfering in each other's personal business. They do not seem to value birth control, rational adult communication, or an individual's right to self determination. Work and career are only a setting in which to carry out their personal dramas. The judge's mother routinely barges into her office to carry out personal conversations which for some reason can't wait until 5pm. My chief amusement in listening to this audiobook was continuously telling the characters what I thought of them and in imagining each annoying character getting just desserts for their refusal to communicate and interfering busybodiness - the judge disbarred, her mother occupying that jail cell with "Big Bertha" for theft and HIPAA violations, etc.
( )

Got this yesterday and had finished by this morning.

This is the start of another series by Macomber about a community just outside Seattle. It starts with two young people who married fast and young and whose relationship is on the rocks after the premature birth and death of their daughter - which the husband wasnt around for due to being on a submarine for the Navy. Up in divorce court, the judge decides to deny them a divorce, and the stories go from there.

There are plenty of different relationships - those who have been divorced or widowed for years, those whose long time marriage dissolves when he walks out, sudden marriages and pregnancies, reconciliations. Not all are finished cleanly by the end of the book, allowing for further books to come alone (are you surprised? really?), whilst also displaying that life doesnt always finish cleanly. ( )

Solid start to a family saga series. ( )

A really enjoyable read set in the lovely small-town setting of Cedar Cove, Washington, with lots of characters with interesting storylines that I found myself caught up in. ( )