Frankly I’m embarrassed to admit that I read anything from Harlequin. I’m more of a 
literary fiction reader and I find most romance novels just stupid (sorry but that’s how I feel!). However, I make a complete exception for Kristan Higgins. Her novels are hysterically funny and well written. Yes, they definitely fit the romance genre, but the women featured are all women I would love to get to know (and to join my book club!).
Anyway, this new one is a good one. Tiny Scupper Island off the coast of Maine serves as the beautiful locale for a story with all of the traditional Higgins humor, emotions, and complex relationships. I fell in love with most of the characters – Nora, the “good” daughter, who won the town’s all expenses paid scholarship to Tufts; her sister Lily, beautiful and doomed, and Lily’s daughter Poe, tattooed, angry, living with the grandmother (a character with a real kick herself) on Scupper Island while her mother is in jail. Plus, of course, the men! A whole array of attractive, but sometimes flawed men, for our array of women to choose from! As a side note, I was very impressed with the diversity of Higgins’ characters in this book – without her focussing on the diversity as the main purpose of the novel. Everyone was treated as simply another person with individual characteristics some of which mapped to identified categories of diversity. I’d like to see more novels take this approach.
