carolesrandomlife

This review can also be found at Carole's Random Life in Books.

This was just an okay read for me. I got off to a pretty rough start with this book and seriously considered giving up on it. I am glad that I stuck with it because the actual romance between Daniel and Samantha was really well done. Once the romance really got going and because the total focus of the book, I really did enjoy it. I actually ended up reading the book pretty quickly once I got over the difficult start.

Daniel and Aaron LeDeux are twins that come to Louisiana to meet their father's family after their mother's death. Daniel is a pediatric oncologist, which is an emotionally draining job for him. After his mother's death and a very difficult case at his work, he decides to leave medicine. They stay in Louisiana and Aaron pushes his twin into buying an old mansion that needs a lot of work.

Samantha is from a very wealthy family but she hasn't always had it easy. She works hard at the family business, Starr Foods, and seems to have it all together. Her ex-husband is always after her for more money despite the fact that he should be making a good living himself as a doctor. After her divorce, she starts to take in animals needing rescued and has quite the interesting menagerie, including a depressed pig and a bird with a dirty mouth.

I really liked Daniel and Samantha together. They just seemed to fit and they had a lot of chemistry. In the past the pair didn't get along very well but they soon figure out that what they each thought of the other wasn't very accurate. I liked how quickly Daniel jumped in to help when Samantha asked. They really seemed to work well as a pair while they were dealing with the larger issue.

There were some things that I really didn't like about the book. I hate to say it but Tante Lulu would have to top my list. I know that her parts of the book were supposed to be funny but I found them to be over the top and ridiculous. She is a very prominent character for the first part of the book and I couldn't stand reading about her. I was so glad when she faded from the story and I started to really enjoy the book. Hundreds of pages went by and then she entered the book again. I didn't think her character took over the story at the end of the book as she did at the beginning. A lot of the conversations in this book are written in the Cajun dialect which I found difficult to read after a while. I simply didn't enjoy reading so many creatively spellings. I am very thankful that Daniel and Samantha didn't have the same strong Cajun accent that some of the other characters had.

I am really not sure if I would recommend this book to others. This book is number 10 in the Cajun series and while it read fine as a stand alone, I do think that readers who know some of the characters from the earlier books will appreciate their appearance much more than I did. I am really not sure if I will be picking up any future books in this series.

I received an advance reader edition of this book from Avon Books via Edelweiss.

Initial Thoughts
This was an okay read for me. The main couple in the story were really the highlight of the book but some of the other characters were just too much. I actually came really close to marking this one as a dnf at the beginning just because of how annoying I found some of the other characters. I really didn't care for how much of the book is written in dialect. I understand that they are Cajun but some of the oddly spelled words are just hard to read.