| Title: | Welcome Home Garden Club | |
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| Author: | Lori Wilde | |
| Publication Date: | April 2011 | |
| Publisher's Description | Caitlyn Marsh stopped believingin happily-ever-after when high-school sweetheart, Gideon Garza, left for Iraq. Now she raises her small son whjile her matchmaking gardening club members drive her crazy. Then Caitlyn's world turns upside-down when Gideon swaggers back to Twilight. Gideon had left town in the middle of the night with threats ringing in his ears. A lot of things have changed since then. This bad-boy-turned-Green-Beret bears scars from the war, the timid girl he loved is an independent mother, and the father who refused to recognize his son in life has, in death, left him a vast cattle ranch. He still aches for Caitlyn, and now there's a dark-haired boy who looks exactly like Gideon did at that age. Could the child be his? And can this war-weary soldier overcome the scars of the past to claim the family he so richly deserves? |
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| My rating: | *** | |
I really wanted to like this book, but the characters seemed pretty clueless and I never could get into it. Caitlyn and Gideon came into the book with a lot of baggage, which is something that I normally love, by the way that Ms. Wilde resolved things never felt quite right to me. Honestly, for such otherwise capable people (one is raising a child and running a business, and the other stayed in a war zone for several years and lived to tell about it), they made a lot of silly assumptions about their friends, families, and neighbors. All the things they are good at seem to be detail-oriented, but they seem to miss important information left and right, almost to the detriment of their son. The protagonists’ somewhat willful cluelessness meant that, for me, the potentially rewarding premise never really paid off; I can only really become emotionally invested in characters if I find them realistic.
This book could be a nice, fast read, but I wouldn’t recommend it to somebody looking for a romantic homecoming story that really rises above the rest of the books in this genre. Maybe I’m just a heartless Grinch, though, because pretty much everybody else seems to love this book.