Georgia Ballantyne lost her partner of 12 years to cancer.
It’s been two years but it is not easy to stop missing your partner of over a
decade. Besides the house in Brisbane that she lives in, Georgia has one more
piece of Amy’s estate still left – a country cottage which Georgia has never
seen but Amy had fallen in love with. Together they’d made plans about their
time in the cottage at some point in future. A future that never materialised.
Georgia plans to renovate the cottage and sell it, pay off her mortgage on the
apartment and maybe start dealing with the fact Amy is truly and completely
gone from her life.
Zoe is the identified
builder for renovating Georgia’s house. Building is Zoe’s family business
though it wasn’t what she wanted to pursue in her life. Her dream was to
qualify in social work and hold word working classes for troubled teens. Now
she is the head builder while the business part is handled by her
wheelchair-bound brother. When the renovation comes their way, Zoe’s brother
believes that this could be the turning point for their struggling business.
Zoe doesn’t buy into his optimism and is prickly about working with a project
manager, who just happens to be Georgia.
The two get off on a poor start entirely because of Zoe’s
attitude problems but working together reveals more facets of their
personalities – facets that mesh.
This book has both characters dealing (or not dealing) with
loss of loved ones. The way people deal with loss and the time they need is
entirely individual and deserves respect. This kind of dealing shouldn’t be
forced or hurried by anyone else’s timeline.
Georgia is entirely understandable and a perfectly nice
character. But Zoe (eyeroll). For almost half the book Zoe is a shoo-in into
the Hall of MCs who are Jerks in Lesfic. She is aggressive, abrasive,
judgemental, confrontational, rude, superior – you get the gist. She tones down
a tad later, but not entirely.
This is an okay book but not something to scramble for.
PS: It’s said never judge a book by its cover, but we
totally did and got into this one expected a romcom. It was quite a bummer to
get something much more serious.
⭐⭐☆★
