Reviewed by Stephen K.

TITLE: Nothing Like Paris

SERIES: (Bend or Break #2)

AUTHOR: Amy Jo Cousins

NARRATOR: Cooper North

PUBLISHER: Insatiable Press

LENGTH: 8 hours and 2 minutes

RELEASE DATE: October 7^th 2016

BLURB:

Humble pie wasn’t supposed to taste this sweet.

Jack Tarkington’s life is in the toilet. He was supposed to be spending his junior year studying someplace cool, like Paris or Rome. Instead, after taking out his anger on the campus golden boy, whose dad ripped off his parents, Jack is facing possible expulsion.

Sure, it’s all his own fault, but coming back to the small Iowa town he thought he’d escaped, after crowing about his admission to a prestigious school, has been a humbling experience.

When he runs into Miguel, Jack braces for backlash over the way he lorded it over his old friend and flame. Instead Miguel offers him friendship – and a job at his growing farm-to-table store and café.

Against the odds both guys bond over broken dreams and find common ground in music. But when Jack’s college gives him a second chance, he’s torn between achieving a dream that will take him far from home and a love that strikes a chord he’ll never find anywhere else.

Warning: This book contains a humbled guy who’s on the brink of losing it all, a determined entrepreneur who seems to have it all together, apologies issued through banjo-picking duets, and two lovers who can play each other’s bodies like virtuosos.

REVIEW:

Jack Tarkington returns to his home-town in rural Iowa after being suspended from a prestigious east coast college. The school was to have been the first step on his journey out. Out of his red-necked, rural excuse for a small-town in Iowa, to which he swore he’d never return. Of course leaving that town had also meant leaving Miguel, his “better half.” When Miguel’s father had a heart attack, Miguel had chosen to stay behind, choosing family of over Jack.

Three years have passed and Mike/Miguel is still in their small Iowa town, attending community college. and “adulting.” He’s running his own business, a boutique farm-to-table market/cafe. Of course he’s still recovering from the sudden departure of his best friend and lover. When Jack shows up on his doorstep, Mike must decide just how willing he is to forgive. And how far he can go without repeating the mistakes of his youth.

Coming in in the middle of this story, all I saw were two guys that really belong together finally sort out their issues.

I haven’t read book 1 and perhaps that’s a good thing. Some critics found Jack (the villain of book 1) unlovable. But it was pretty easy for me to see the wounded kid he’d been, and the angry young man he still is. It’s clear than Jack is impetuous and makes mistakes, but see things from his perspective. Learning his back-story makes him hard to hate, for me anyway. I guess I’m going to have to go back and read Book 1 now to see just how much of a jerk he was. Given how much I enjoyed this one, that will be no great hardship.

This is a tale of forgiveness and repairing burned bridges. It’s also about looking beyond the childhood images of someone you thought you knew to see the flawed, but lovable, real man beneath.

RATING:   & 4 Bonfires

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