Lauren Evans

Thank you to NetGalley for providing an ARC of this book, this review is my objective opinion. I liked this book, and felt it was a good debut novel with a great premise. Nora is running her family's casket store in small-town Alabama, which she took over after both parents died in a car accident about a year prior to the story. Garrett is a sophisticated and mysterious gentleman who appears in town and is cagey about his job. They meet and grow romantically attached pretty quickly. She's pretty insecure and neurotic, which is consistent throughout the book. His pattern is to keep distance in his relationships because of his job, but maybe Nora is worth changing that pattern for. We know from the description that he works for Death but just what is it that he does? As Nora and Garrett's relationship grows, questions arise and Nora struggles to reconcile what she suspects about Garrett's job with her feelings for him.

So while I liked the book, I didn't love it. I really liked the premise but in actual reading of the story the pacing felt off for me for almost the whole book, which made it hard for me to want to keep reading. It took awhile for me to get invested in the story and even then there was a flatness to the characters that I struggled with (Garrett especially). The writing seemed most peppy when Nora was interacting with Johnny (a childhood acquaintance who ran his family's funeral home business). To me, Johnny felt more engaging than Garrett on-page, which seemed a disservice to the character who was supposed to be the male main character. Also, it seemed like it took too long for the story to get into the actual details of Garrett's job. Considering his job was revealed in the book's description I genuinely didn't think it would take as long as it did (about 30-40% of the way in). His job was a central part of the romantic conflict but it didn't take as much of a front seat as I thought it would. Rather, most of the story development focuses on Nora's personal growth and her feelings about living back in her hometown and running her family's business (and on deciding her romantic future). And there's nothing wrong with that, but it's not what I thought I was getting going in.

There was some humorous phrasing that made me laugh out loud, frequently from the way Nora saw the world and her struggles. She had a wry voice at times that I really enjoyed, but I don't think we saw enough of it to make this book really shine. There were some twists that I didn't see coming and I won't spoil for you, which gave the story a much-needed edge. As I said, I would read further work from this author and this was a good debut but I would like to see a bit better pacing and ability to keep the reader's interest.… (plus d'informations)