Another delightful “Lovelight Farm” romance
This one has been in my Libro.fm app for a while now; I kept getting distracted by the news (you know, the news … ugh …) and listening to podcasts when I should have been relaxing with another delightful B. K. Borison audiobook instead. I finally buckled down this week and pushed the noise aside and finished the story of Layla and Caleb, and I’m glad I did.
I’ve read/listened to three of the “Lovelight Farm” books so far — the first “Lovelight Farms,” focusing on Stella and Luka; the followup “In the Weeds,” about Evelyn and Beckett; and now “Mixed Signals,” about Layla and Caleb. I’ve enjoyed them all more or less equally — the characters are delightful, the setting is charming, and the stories are generally fun and lighthearted, even in their emotionally charged moments. The recurring side characters are like old friends you bump into on the streets of town, and the tone of good cheer manages not to be cloying (owing perhaps to the bristliness of some of the fun side characters, like the town sheriff Gus and Layla’s “rival” baker who turns out to be one of her best allies).
As a new reader (and aspiring writer) of romance, I’m paying close attention to the “beats” that are a big part of the genre. So far, the “Lovelight” series has been heavy on the initial meet-cute moments and the rising stakes in the relationship, with relatively truncated “dark night of the soul” sections and happy resolutions. They are definitely romantic comedies, very much focused on characters and situations and not especially plot heavy. Borison has very strong characterization, which helps overcome the slim plotlines, and a rich world in which her characters play.
There were, for example, quite a few plot points that felt like they would become important but which didn’t progress or resolve. Much of the first half of the book is focused on an upcoming magazine feature about Layla’s bakery at Lovelight Farm, and the challenges of making that a success; once the interview and photoshoot are over, though, about halfway through, we don’t hear any more about it. There’s also some interesting conflict suggested within Layla’s family — Layla comes from a Navy family, and went to college for engineering, and her successful career as a baker is not appreciated by her parents and siblings. This leads to a couple of interesting scenes, but doesn’t appear again when the second half of the book takes a sharp turn toward centering the “arrangement” between Layla and Caleb.
The “arrangement” is a “fake dating” situation: neither Layla nor Caleb has had much luck on the dating scene, and so they agree to “pretend” date so they can offer each other honest evaluations. Of course, neither is really committed to the “pretend” aspect: Caleb has harbored a long-standing crush on Layla, and Layla has a little bit of an “insta-love” moment with Caleb when she encounters him outside of his usual environment. Their agreement is set to last for just a month, and the angst in the book comes from the looming deadline, and their worries that they haven’t managed to overcome their personal issues that have prevented them from being lucky in love.
I find the “fake dating” trope to be a little contrived — I thought it worked well in “Lovelight Farms,” where Stella has a stake in convincing Evelyn that she and Luka are a couple, but most of my other encounters with the trope have felt forced. But it’s useful for getting Layla and Caleb together when they’re otherwise resistent, so it serves its purpose. Once they’re together in their “arrangement,” they’re a delightfully sweet couple, and it’s impossible not to root for them.
The heat level here seems medium to high: it was maybe a bit steamier than the cover suggests (there are three or four chapters that are pretty explicit, though not erotica-level hot), but all of the bedroom action was very much in service of the story and the characters.
Since I listened to the audiobook, the narration was a big part of my enjoyment; and that was a little on the mixed side. I’m pretty sure that I like romance novels with split first person narration the best — alternating between the main love interests — and that lends itself well to audiobooks. And I could listen to Pippa Jayne, who reads Layla’s chapters, forever; she narrates all of the “Lovelight” books, but with subtly different performances in each — for Layla, she adopts a soft Southern accent that is absolutely swoonworthy. The voice of Caleb, Julio Maxwell, left me a little cold; until things steamed up with Layla, his narration felt distant and a little too self-effacing. I didn’t dislike his reading, but Pippa Jayne’s was so good, it’s a challenging comparison.
The next “Lovelight Farm” book — “Business Casual” — is in my Libro.fm queue, but I’m going to be checking out a couple of other titles before I dive into it. It’s the last “Lovelight Farm” title, at least for a while — Borison’s next book, due in February, launches a new series — so I want to prolong my time in the charming town of Idlewild.
