This was complete drivel and I mean that in a mostly nice way.

Look, sometimes you just need a really fluffy novel. One you don't have to worry about at all. The equivalent of a Hallmark Christmas movie. The difficulty is in finding your sweet spot. A book that is just charming and engaging enough for me might be completely, mind-numbingly dumb to someone else. It's a deeply personal thing, like humor or whether you sleep with a flat sheet.

For me, this fit the bill. I loved the scenery, the characters were at least amusing, and even though the entire plot was perfectly obvious, I enjoyed the ride. Sometimes you just need a story that you don't have to worry about, where true love wins, the good guys get rewarded and the bad guys get what's coming to them. It's very comforting.

It only works if you don't think too hard about it though. If you do, you're going to get upset at some things. Those include a vein of body-shaming that ran through a lot of the narration. I got really tired of reading about "trim" and "fit" women who had flat tummies three months into pregnancies, and how all the people who were contemptible also had bad teeth and thin hair and were not "fit" or "trim" as well as a plot thread that I thought was going somewhere and then just . . . didn't.

But if you're looking for a novel with an improbably beautiful, sensitive, good-in-a-crisis, badass, goodhearted woman and her sensitive, ex-Marine, over 6 foot bartender with broad shoulders who takes care of his community, is good with babies and housekeeping, voluntarily gets blood tests for STDs, and wants to have lots of conversations about consent, then this is for you!

Also, there should have been a dog. Or a donkey. Maybe a horse or a lovable hen.