This was SUCH a cute read!

LIKES:
1) interracial couple!! Love seeing this love represented!
2) strong women characters: you have to love Caila and her girls!
3) Wyatt 🥵🥵🥵
4) small town romances are the best! It’s also insta attraction (not instalove, although…)
5) I know it was enemies to lovers but it had that vibe because she was there to shut down the factory… omg it sounds like a hallmark movie, must by why I loved it
6) open door romance to make you BLUSH!

DISLIKES:
🚫

Nice small town novel reminiscent of a Hallmark movie with some spicy sex sprinkled into the story. It appears that there will be follow-up novels centered around Caila’s group of college girlfriends. Plot was pretty standard - not a lot of surprises, but still cute story with happy ending.

Caila Harris is a workaholic. She is driven and gives her job all of her attention. She is at a precipice at her job just about to land a major promotion. While on a yearly vacation with college friends, Caila struggles to stay focused on the vacation due to work pressures. Then the unthinkable happens, she receives a phone call from her mother telling her that her Pop-Pop has passed away.

Caila deals with this major loss in her life by diving deeper into her job. Now, she has to land the promotion. When she is invited out to dinner with upper management Caila thinks, "This is it." However, when she arrives at the restaurant she is surprised by the assembled guests and what follows is an embarrassment that she would sooner forget; but, will everyone else?

The next day she is called into her boss' office and told that mistakes, behavior, and poor judgement are not good signs to upper management that Caila is ready for such a huge promotion. That is when she is given the assignment to head to Bradleton, VA, to analyze a packaging factory's worth in the big deal she is hoping to be promoted to manage.

Once in Bradleton, Caila meets Wyatt Bradley, the town's mayor. She also finds out that the packaging factory is the main employer for the entire community. How will Caila and Wyatt handle their instant attraction? Will Caila doom the factory? Will Wyatt convince Caila that the factory is worth saving? Will Caila get the promotion?

Thank you #BookClubGirls and #WilliamMorrow for the #FreeFridayRead in exchange for an honest review.

I am not normally a sweet romance reader and this was enjoyable. I do with the friendship had more of a forefront in the story. The romance between them was just not what I hoped. Caila and Wyatt were both interesting characters with an intriguing back story but I wanted more romance from them. It fell a bit flat for me and I was hoping for more.

3 stars for me.

Sweet Talkin' Lover by Tracey Lovesay is a Hallmark movie with sex. You know the one: the corporate person comes to town to close down the factory that supports it and falls in love, this time with the mayor. That being said, it was a pleasant enough book. The characters were good: Mayor McHottie, oops, I mean Wyatt Ashley Bradley IV, the mayor of the town named after his family, where his father, his grandfather, his great grandfather had been mayor before him. He had a way about him. The woman loved him and so did everyone else. Caila Harris, had been upwardly mobile until her grandfather died, then she kind of fell apart. This was her last chance: an assignment they gave to rookies. She had left her small town and she didn't want to go to another one. What a mess.

There were plenty of subplots in this book to keep it interesting, between the goings-on in Bradleton and at Caila's company, not to mention her girlfriends, with whom she had been close since college and still went on vacation with every year. The ins and outs were complex and interesting. The pacing was good. The outcome was as expected. It was a romance after all. It was an entertaining read, worthy of an afternoon. Fun, entertaining, hot.

I was invited to read a free ARC of Sweet Talkin' Lover by Netgalley. All opinions contained herein are solely my own. #netgalley #sweettalkinlover

This book was like reading a hallmark movie. It was light and predictable but I still really liked it!

This book was a typical love story. There was nothing wrong with it. Just nothing really special about it either.
Things I did like about our was that it brought up race and also that it has little lessons about forgiveness in it.
If you are looking for a cute, easy read with a happy ending, this is your book!
Thank you to netgalley for providing me with a copy of this book for an honest review.

Somebody get Tracey Livesay a trade paperback contract with cartoon characters on the front, stat! I've read the first two books by Jasmine Guillory, and I struggle to figure out why everyone else seems to rave about them and put them on must-read lists. The story Livesay puts together here is what I was expecting from those stories, and yet I hear very little about her. This story is about a workaholic woman that has spent her life and her career fighting against stereotypes to succeed, at the expense of a personal life, love and friendship. When she finally lets loose it bites her in the butt, and puts a promotion she's been working for in jeopardy. So she's packed off to a small town in Virginia to close down a plant that is the livelihood of the community. Except the plotting of the very attractive mayor, Wyatt, keeps her in town with the hopes of convincing her just how much those jobs and family means. As Caila falls in love with Wyatt and the community she's placed in an untenable position - save her job and career or her budding relationships with Wyatt, and the people of the community? This book was on point, full of depth and realistically looking at something from two points of view with both characters having enough maturity to see the merits in the other's perspective. For people that want some funny thrown in there's some of that too (Mayor McHottie, and a serious pinball throwdown), but the book really shines in showing how gracefully people can deal with problems and conquer them.

DNF - I tried engaging with the story but after a couple chapters, could not connect with characters or plot, so I stopped reading.

Received a free copy from Netgalley!
What a fun story! First book I have read by this author & I Loved it. The characters are typical - funny, snarky, wonderful! - in books I like to read.
Definitely reading more of her books!
Thank you!!