Sweet Tea and Secrets

I don’t know. I just don’t know about this book. The basic premise, girl leaves town for a new job and new start after a bad break-up and we encounter her nearly a year later, dating her boss*. Her grandma passes and she has to go back to her small hometown and face everything she ran away from.

I never mind this as a premise. What matters is of course how the author handles it moving forward. And that is where I get hung up. Carlisle handled it ok. Not great, but not bad either, just ok.

I think my issue was I couldn’t connect with Jill or Garrett fully. Their breakup (which you get pieces of only when they reference it) and subsequent trying to mend it was not realistic. Maybe it is just me but they both felt like trust was a huge problem. They even bring up that Jill didn’t/doesn’t trust Garrett, but Carlisle didn’t do anything to have them work on that or talk about that.

And, this is a BIG AND, the big bad and mystery were super flat and felt tossed in to give the story a reason for being after the fact.

All-in-all I felt like Carlisle could have done so much more with this story. It had so much potential to be better than meh.

*Dating the boss as a rebound is ALWAYS bad in stories. And when he’s an ass, its an uber red flag.

Book summary (per Goodreads):

When beloved town matriarch Pearl Clemmons dies on a warm June afternoon, the folks of Adams Grove, Virginia, can hardly believe it. Sure, Pearl was eighty-five years old, but everyone — particularly her granddaughter Jill — just assumed she would live forever. Now Jill must return home to settle Pearl’s estate, comfort a town in mourning . . . and face Garrett Malloy, the man who broke her heart years ago.

Making matters worse, a string of break-ins at the Clemmons place has Jill and the rest of the town on edge. She can’t imagine what Pearl possibly could have had that is worth stealing. But when Jill’s safety is threatened, she and Garrett must join forces to unearth Pearl’s secrets before someone else — someone dangerous — gets there first. Garrett may have been the last man Jill wanted to see, but now, she may not want to let him go.