Meet Me on Love Lane, by Nina Bocci

Series: Hopeless Romantics (book 2)

Publication: Gallery Books; December 10, 2019

meet me on love lane About the book:

Charlotte Bishop is out of options in New York City. Fired, broke, and blacklisted by her former boss, she’s forced to return to her hometown of Hope Lake, PA to lick her wounds. Although she’s expecting to find a miserable place with nothing to do, she is pleasantly surprised to discover it is bustling and thriving.

She’s only supposed to be in Hope Lake temporarily until she can earn enough money to move back to New York. She’s not supposed to reconnect with her childhood friends or her beloved grandmother. She’s not supposed to find her dream job running the local florist shop. And she’s definitely not supposed to fall for not one but two of Hope Lake’s golden boys: one the beloved high school English teacher, the other the charming town doctor.

With a heart torn between two men and two cities, what’s a girl to do?

A perfect blend of humor and heart, Meet Me on Love Lane is the second in a new series from USA TODAY bestselling author Nina Bocci that is sure to charm fans of Josie Silver and Sally Thorne.

My Review

Back in October, I read On the Corner of Love and Hate, the first in Nina Bocci’s Hopeless Romantics series. Unfortunately, I just wasn’t crazy about it. But when I saw this new novel in the series, Meet Me on Love Lane, I just knew I wanted to read it – and I’m so glad! Once again, we are back in the adorable, yet progressive small town of Hope Lake where we first met Emma, Cooper, Henry, and Nick. This story is about their childhood friend Charlotte that moved away when they were ten years old. After her career taking a nose-dive in NYC, Charlotte returns to Hope Lake to stay with her Dad and her grandmother, Gigi in order to save money, regroup and get back to the city to start again. When she gets to Hope Lake, she not only doesn’t recognize anything but realizes she has very few memories of her best friends and her time spent growing up there. Although she plans on returning to New York and her best friend Parker as soon as possible, she soon finds herself torn between two men, running a new flower shop, and falling in love with her home town.

Like On the Corner of Love and Hate, this is a long book. However, I really loved reading this one. Charlotte is a likable and relatable protagonist and I found myself very quickly invested in her story. Her grandmother Gigi is one of the best characters that I have encountered while reading in quite some time. Dear Lord, please let me be just like her when I’m ninety! Then there is the absolutely wonderful, hot, sexy specimen of perfection – Henry. I fell in love with him instantly and it did nothing but deepen throughout the novel. The other love interest, Dr. Max, was great too, but oh my goodness – Henry…

Anyway, the plot and subplots to this novel held my interest, were entertaining, and kept me engaged. I was rooting for Charlotte the entire time, although, like Charlotte, I wasn’t quite sure what I was rooting for at first. But about halfway through I thought to myself, “how wonderful would it be to return to such an amazing home town and start over with friends and family from your childhood?”

This ended up being a 4-star read for me and there was only one reason that I am not rating this 5-stars. Like the previous book in the series, I found it to be too long. It definitely was not as long and tedious as On the Corner of Love and Hate, but there were several times I found myself starting to skim over the pages when things became yawn-worthy and arduous. One minute everything would be exciting, interesting, and so on. But then there would be pages of a conversation that seemed very unimportant or pages of situations that could have been resolved much earlier. It reminded me of when I used to be grading essays by my high-school English students and I would realize that they used every word possible to meet the word-count and/or page requirement, regardless of whether it was relevant or enriched the paper in any way. If not for that, this would be a perfect, 5-star read.

Nevertheless, I certainly recommend Meet Me on Love Lane to fans of small-town romance and friends-to lover romance. The setting is amazing and the characters are well-developed and extremely likable. Now I just have to muster the patience to wait for the 3rd in the series about Parker and Nick!

*Thanks to NetGalley and Gallery Books for providing this review copy in exchange for my honest opinion.