Rachel Beck needs a fresh start: she's been wrongfully fired from her job, her daughter's father is unreliable, and she just feels stagnant.  That fresh start comes as a job for a new inn on an island on Lake Erie in Ohio.  The inn's proprietor, Mason, gives her free reign to decorate as he brews the beer for the inn's taproom, but they keep crossing paths, and it's tough to deny their growing chemistry.  Rachel's determined to create a life just as she wants it - can it include Mason?

This book just wasn't for me.  I didn't find it particularly compelling, and the connection between the two main characters somehow felt much more genuine to me before they got together rather than after.  Additionally, there's a lot of detail about her sister, who set off on a sailing journey after her fiancé died by suicide, and her sister's new relationship.  I explicitly avoided Doller's first book in this series because of the way she lost her fiancé, so it was frustrating to have to still read what is a lot of information about Anna for a book that's not her's. 

I think the final knell for me was the conflict introduced at 90%.  I think this is too late to bring in your one last challenge - it's a lot to wrap up in very few pages.  But it's also totally manufactured and Rachel even acknowledges that it could have been totally avoided if she'd not gone with her gut reaction.  It was super irritating to me.  

Thank you St. Martin's and NetGalley for the ARC!

CW:

parental abandonment, mentions of suicide, unreliable co-parent, divorce, non-narrative character has lost a child