4 stars If you’re looking for a light and breezy fake boyfriend/girlfriend trope with an adorable 4-½ year old girl thrown in, this is the book for you. It’s a clean romance with wholesome characters and the expected ending. Maxine “Max” and Nate are an unlikely couple since he’s the town man ho and she’s the librarian, but they are fairly compatible, their main commonality being their love of Autumn, Nate’s surprise little girl. Max is 27, two years older than Nate, and was friendly with Nate’s older sister Rachael during high school. “She’d listened to Rachael talk more than once about the pieces of broken bottle and broken heart she’d had to pick up for her little brother.” Nate knows everyone and is friends with everyone, and it seems like he has slept with every woman. This influences Max’s decision not to sleep with him, because she doesn’t want to be like the others. When Nate finds out about Autumn and agrees to take care of her until her aunt can come get her, he doesn't know how he can do it without help. Meanwhile, Max has met Autumn and immediately feels something for her and wants to help. Both are secretly wondering whether Max could live with Nate and Autumn to help take care of her (nothing more than that at first), but Nate immediately shuts down the idea, thinking, “She was way out of his league.” I found this fascinating because Nate came across as extremely confident, and rightly so, based on his popularity. Nevertheless, he felt a certain amount of inferiority due to Max’s perceived superior intelligence and more mature behavior. At the same time, Max felt inferior because Nate appeared so confident and was so well-liked and well-known around town. Autumn, of course, was the primary focus of the story, and it was obvious that Nate would want to keep his daughter. It was also obvious that he and Max were going to fall in love. When he and Max found out that Autumn’s aunt Penny would be coming a month earlier than expected, they put off telling Autumn. I understand the tendency to procrastinate something unpleasant, but they waited until the night before Penny was scheduled to arrive to tell Autumn she would be leaving the next day! To me, that showed a poor understanding of the need to prepare a child for a significant change and demonstrated an immaturity and lack of fitness to care for her. The other thing that struck me as odd was that when Nate talked about keeping Autumn, he told Max that he would see if he could “adopt” her. That doesn’t seem like the right word to me, since he was her father. It seems like more of a custody issue. Other than that, the plot worked. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC of this book, a quick and fun Christmas read. December 28, 2020
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