Confess & Last One Home

Two Romances

For light summer reading when on vacation or staycation, here are two bestselling romantic novels to pick up.

Colleen Hoover’s Confess has all the elements needed for a young love story and enough twists and turns to make it unpredictable.

The prologue has fifteen-year-old Auburn lose the love of her life when he dies of a terminal illness.

Still hurting years later, she runs into Owen, a handsome and charismatic young artist, when he hires her to help with his new exhibition. Auburn is a hairdresser, but needs extra money, so she accepts the temporary job.

Owen has a unique style—he asks people to leave anonymous confessions taped to his studio window and his paintings are inspired by the lines scribbled on those pieces of paper. Owen and Auburn have the same middle name (Mason), so he thinks fate has brought them together. There is a back story to explain his instant attraction for Auburn, but she does not know it yet.

She is cautious but mildly flirtatious, and tries to keep Owen away because she has a secret she is not yet ready to share. At just 21, she has lived through a lifetime of pain, and her quirky roommate Emory is all for encouraging this new romance.  But there is another man on the scene, the violent and possessive cop Trey, who will go to any lengths to keep Auburn away from Owen,  including framing him for a crime.

Owen has daddy issues as well as a painful past, but his love for Auburn washes it all away. Between the two, there are enough problems that would easily make an interesting movie of The Fault In Our Stars variety.

The confessions used in the book are real and the paintings used as illustrations were made for this Hoover book. Romance fans will enjoy the plot, appreciate the emotional tenderness and the lack of any steaminess (the sex bits are sanitized for young adult readers), which is almost de rigeur for love stories these days.

Confess

By Colleen Hoover

Publisher: Atria Books

Pages: 320

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From Debbie Macomber, author of Blossom Street and Cedar Cove series, comes another romantic novel Last One Home. It is about family and second chances at love and peppers the story with a social message about standing up against domestic violence.

Cassie Carter escapes a violent marriage with her daughter Aimee, but she is left to cope with her difficult life all alone; she had abandoned her loving family to elope with her boyfriend when she was just eighteen, and they never forgave her.  Twelve years later, her parents are dead and her two sisters have cut off all ties with her.

She works as a hairdresser (another one!), volunteers at a shelter for battered women, and does odd jobs to make ends meet. Then she is given a chance to work on a construction site in return for a home of her own, and there she meets the supervisor Steve.  The two begin by sniping at each other ( a romance staple); she can’t understand why he is so nasty, but he is stand-offish because he is still grieving over his dead wife.

 Cassie receives a curt letter from her sister, which. Nonetheless opens that sealed family door  crack, for which she is pathetically grateful.

As the Cassie-Steve love story develops, Macomber also follow the lives of her smug sisters Karen and Nicole in seemingly happy marriages. But underneath the polished suburban exterior, trouble is brewing that takes the two women by surprise. Last One Home is a quick read with likeable characters and a relatable plot-- what’s interesting is that both Cassie and Steve are ordinary people, not in the least glamorous or complicated.

Last One Home

By  Debbie Macomber 
Publisher: Ballantine Books

Pages:  338