Read React Review

This is my first review for my first challenge: Avidbookreader’s TBR Challenge, and already I am one day late. Sorry Keishon!

This month’s challenge theme is categories, and I chose a book by a SuperRomance author I really enjoy. Johnson takes on pretty heavy personal topics — PTSD from the Iraq war, surrogate motherhood, and, in this one, serious mental illness and homelessness — which makes her categories much less fantasy driven than most, and also less focused on just the romance. She tends to write very realistically. Her romantic couples tend to be about pretty average, pretty flawed people. Perhaps because of her serious subject matter, there isn’t much humor beyond a few wry comments in her books, so I have to be in the mood for them. This is just not the author to turn to for a sexy, escapist read. But when I am in the mood for a dramatic, emotional, story about two people who find love while dealing with very challenging personal crises, I find her books extremely satisfying, and Someone Like Her is no exception.

Lucy Peterson owns a cafe in the small Washington town of Middleton, a few hours and a ferry ride away from Seattle. Lucy has always lived there with her large family, and while she yearns to travel, and sometimes wonders if she has made the right choices in her life, she is pretty content. When the book opens, we are introduced to “the hat lady”, an elderly homeless woman whom Lucy, and the other townspeople, have grown attached to. The hat lady is mentally ill, and appears on any given day as a different “Elizabeth” in literature. No one knows her real identity, and she refuses more than casual assistance. Together, the people of Middleton who sympathize with the hat lady (there are others who fear and mistrust her, the kind of realistic touch I appreciate in Johnson) manage to keep her safe and fed, until the day she gets hit by a car and ends up in a coma in the hospital.

Lucy takes it upon herself to find “the hat lady’s” family. Because I am reading a Harlequin, I am not surprised that Elizabeth’s son is a good looking, successful partner in a large Seattle law firm. He’s a workaholic, known for being ruthless in court and tyrannical in the office. When he comes to Middleton, Lucy doesn’t know what to make of him: he doesn’t seem all that sympathetic to his mother, and his low opinion of small town life is grating.

But Adrian’s perceptions of the town are not just easy stereotypical snap judgments. He’s a thoughtful guy. Here’s an example:

There was another thing, Adrian realized, making this town feel so backward: there were definite gender roles here that had mostly been abandoned by his friends and contemporaries.

This book is as much about Adrian coming to terms with how he lost his mother as it is about his relationship with Lucy. Adrian’s loss of his mother at age 10, his memories of what life was like with a mentally ill, loving, creative, unusual, parent, her departure from his life, and the long term emotional ramifications form the core of this book. And if you think Adrian’s mother suddenly wakes up and is miraculously cured of her mental illness, reconciling with perfect harmony with the son she hasn’t seen in decades, you haven’t read this author. The ending is bittersweet but very satisfying.

As Adrian falls in love with Lucy, and with Middleton, and begins to come to terms with his mother’s reappearance in his life, the conflict emerges over how to reconcile his Seattle lifestyle with his new relationships. In so many romances, we see a heroine giving up her city career for a simple life with the hero. in this one, the dynamic is the opposite. I loved the fact that Lucy, while she had the occasional reasonable doubt about her attractiveness to the Armani wearing Adrian, never apologized for Middleton or her life there. She was pretty clear on who she was and what she wanted. The significant character arc here is Adrian’s.

Like the previous Johnson books I have read, there isn’t much focus on the sexual relationship, and there are only a few intimate scenes, with a lot of euphemisms (Lucy can’t even form a definite noun, using the word “there” for Adrian’s genitals). But I did find them unusually intense and a bit more frequent in number for this author. I wonder if that has to do with the fact that this book was published in 2009, and the others I have read by her were older.

If I had one gripe about this book, it would be that I did not quite understand why Adrian never sought his mother out as an adult.

I really enjoy Johnson, and I think Someone Like Her may be my favorite of hers.

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