Jenna Anderson

Healing Touch is a short, stand-alone, contemporary romance novella set in a small town in Iowa. Our heroine, Tracy, is a divorced, single mom of a three-year-old who is dealing with a lump on her neck or perhaps more accurately not dealing with it. She’s been called into the office of the young, new, town doctor, Jeremy, several times, but while he does try to persuade her to take action on her medical problem, he also tries to keep the visits more casual and friendly. He’s clearly interested in her, but Tracy is kind of oblivious, and she also doesn’t think she wants to date anyone. She comes up with many different reasons why a relationship between them wouldn’t work, but through patient persistence, Jeremy finally gets through to her on both the romantic front and the medical one.

The story is told entirely from Tracy’s first-person perspective. I could relate to her as a mom of a young child. She seems to be doing the best she can under the circumstances and her little boy, Cody, appears to be pretty well-adjusted for a kid whose dad essentially walked out on them. I could also sympathize with her having a cheating husband who left and the uncomfortable feeling of the small-town rumor mill run amok. However, I didn’t think that her feelings about these things were brought out sufficiently for me to fully understand why she was so adamantly against getting involved with Jeremy. For his part, Jeremy is a total sweetheart who seems to do nothing but care for Tracy and immediately hits it off with Cody, so her stubbornness and even occasional outright rudeness toward him could grate at times. Even though she’s attracted to him and deep down seems to appreciate his attentions, she has a dozen reasons for why things won’t work between them, some of which weren’t all that logical. One of the bigger ones is that he’s seven years younger than her, but once again, Tracy’s feelings about the age difference weren’t sufficiently explained to make me fully understand her objections. Tracy’s refusal to get medical treatment for the lump on her neck was frustrating, too. I understand being afraid of a scary diagnosis, but her excuse is that she fears what will happen to her son if she has to undergo cancer treatments. This didn’t make much sense to me, because she seemed to have plenty of family and friends around who likely would have been happy to help. Not to mention, delaying treatment could have worsened her condition and what would have happened to her son if she’d died?

Overall, Tracy was just a little too obstinate, abrasive, and snarky for me to completely relate to her, which also made it a bit difficult to figure out what Jeremy saw in her since we don’t get anything from his point of view. I have to give him credit, though, for exhibiting persistence coupled with extreme patience, which eventually won the day. He was certainly a gem of a hero, which is why I had a hard time understanding why Tracey was fighting it for so long. If I had a man paying me the kind of attention he was giving to her, I’d have melted long before she did. I don’t want to make this novella sound bad, though, because it’s not. My frustration with Tracy aside, Healing Touch was a gentle story with a sweet ending. My love for Jeremy is a large part of why I didn’t rate it any lower, and Cody is as cute as a button and rendered very age appropriately. If Tracy’s character had been toned down just a little and/or her feelings about all the things that were driving her to brush Jeremy off had been brought out in more stark relief, I could have seen this becoming a keeper. As is, it was an okay read with some things that I liked about it, just not enough to propel it up to a higher rating. Unfortunately it appears that this novella is no longer available for purchase at this time.… (plus d'informations)

I received this book as a free gift in exchange for an honest review.

Here's my problem-- there's a lot of things to like about this little novella. I love bichons and own one, and Phoebe was downright cute! There are several moments that really work-- like when Candice meets Mark's mom for the first time, when she starts really figuring out what is important to her, etc. But then there are the moments that didn't really work for me. I never really liked Candice that much. I figured out by the end that she was making this journey to figure out who she was, but by the time I started to warm up to her, 80% of the book was over. I was still wondering why Mark put up with her for so many hours. He's a good guy, I know, but most good guys I know would have been nice to her but have been very turned off by her snobbish attitude and overall ridiculous behavior towards someone who has been bending over backwards for her.

I almost think this book would have worked better not as a romance, but an exploration of this character and why she made the journey she did.… (plus d'informations)

Healing Touch is a light, quick read at 23,000 words. It is a sweet romance dealing with the heroine’s inner conflict about her own lovability and her fear of being the subject of gossip and derision in a small town. The book moves along at a nice clip, without getting bogged down in backstory before pulling the reader into the current action. Told in the first person, the tale clearly presents the heroine’s point of view, but fails to do the same for the hero. I found myself not entirely convinced that the relationship would endure, as I wondered, just as the heroine did, exactly what she and the good doctor had in common. I was also a bit frustrated with the lack of final editing, which left a number of minor typos in the text and a bout or two of rapid summarizing, which should have been expanded into full scenes. Those particular flaws notwithstanding, however, the book’s ending still left me smiling and glad to have invested the time.… (plus d'informations)