Sadly, this was not the book for me. The pacing was off and it felt way too long for a short book which is never a good sign.

"Welcome Home, Caroline Kline" is a poignant and heartwarming novel that explores themes of love, loss, and the power of forgiveness. Written by Courtney Preiss this emotionally resonant story follows the journey of Caroline Kline as she returns to her hometown after years of self-imposed exile, confronting the ghosts of her past and rediscovering the true meaning of home.

At the heart of the narrative is Caroline Kline, a complex and compelling protagonist whose struggles and triumphs will resonate with readers on a deeply personal level. Haunted by painful memories and unresolved guilt, Caroline embarks on a journey of self-discovery and healing, propelled by the desire to reconcile with her estranged family and reclaim her sense of belonging.

One of the novel's greatest strengths lies in its richly drawn characters, each with their own hopes, fears, and flaws. From Caroline's stoic yet compassionate father to her spirited and resilient childhood friend, every character feels authentic and fully realized, adding depth and nuance to the story.

Moreover, "Welcome Home, Caroline Kline" is distinguished by its evocative prose and vivid sense of place. Set against the backdrop of a small, close-knit community, the novel captures the sights, sounds, and smells of rural life with breathtaking clarity, immersing readers in the world of Caroline's hometown and inviting them to experience its joys and sorrows alongside her.

As Caroline navigates the complexities of family dynamics and confronts long-buried secrets, the novel explores universal themes of redemption, forgiveness, and the enduring power of love. Through moments of heartache and triumph, readers are reminded that healing is possible, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

In conclusion, "Welcome Home, Caroline Kline" is a captivating and emotionally resonant novel that will tug at the heartstrings of readers from beginning to end. With its unforgettable characters, lyrical prose, and timeless themes, this book is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the transformative power of love. Whether you're a fan of heartfelt family dramas or simply in search of a beautifully written story, this book is sure to leave a lasting impression.

As a former softball player who would do anything for her dad (except practice when he told me to), I adored this book.

I do think the sports theme will bore you if you’re not a baseball fan, but the petulant-20-something-moves-back-in-with-her-parents-in-her-small-hometown storyline really pulled at my own small-town heartstrings.

The author is a debut author, and I’m so impressed with how she pulled this all together (alcoholism, family drama, long lost preteen crush, growing apart from friends, etc.). Can’t wait to see what she does next.

One more note: this isn’t a romance. The first chapter goes down this path, and then wildly veers directions. It was very clear to me…. But I’ve seen several reviews calling it a romcom, so wanted to raise the flag.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy!

A heartfelt debut with a seriously adorable cover. Caroline finds herself in a predicament after she loses her job, relationship and home. When her dad is injured he asks her to return home not to care for him but to take his place on third base in a men’s softball league. Returning home puts her back in touch with her first love. As she returns home she can finally figure out what she wants out of life. This was a cute one!

Huge thank you to #putnam and @netgalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to PENGUIN GROUP Putnam | G.P. Putnam's Sons and NetGalley for the ARC!

Anytime I can read a book with true emotion, character development, a little humor, and female empowerment - I am in! This checked all of those boxes for me, and with witty writing to top it all off.

A great start for a debut!

Thanks to Netgalley and PENGUIN GROUP Putnam for the E-Bok. While this was a solid book there was not much else for me. I totally enjoyed a lot of the parts but found Caroline to be childish at some points of the book. I enjoyed the baseball aspect of it and I really did enjoy the journey that Caroline found herself on to become a better person.

While her own life is in a state of upheaval, Caroline returns to her hometown to help her dad. The return home is fraught with complications and Caroline struggles with her relationships and with finding a direction for her life. Overall this story didn’t hold my attention as well as I would have hoped but I think the characters were well written and I wanted to know how their story ended.

I enjoyed reading Welcome Home, Carolyn Kline.
It was entertaining, went at a fast pace, left me wanting to read more, and described New Jersey perfectly. Caroline is requested to return home after he father has a fall and can't continue playing on his softball team. Caroline is jobless, homeless and had recently broke up with her boyfriend. Caroline will make you mad on some of her decisions she makes but you will also be cheering her on from the sidelines.
This is a book I recommend. I will definitely keep looking for the next book written by this debut novel, Courtney Preiss.
Thanks to Net Gallery for the ARC.

I wanted to love this book, but I did like it! Seeing Caroline come out having overcome so many of her struggles felt very triumphant. However, I think this book could have really benefited from slightly different pacing. It felt like the story got a bit sidetracked and tangental at points, which both threw off the pacing and carried me away from the central story. However, this was very entertaining and I did enjoy it.

Caroline Kline has been left behind by her long term boyfriend right as they were about to move to California together. While she's trying to pick up the pieces of her NYC life in the wake of her heartbreak, she gets a call that her dad has taken a fall. With nothing tying her to New York anymore, she heads back to central New Jersey to help him. What he really wants most is for her to take his place on his softball team and take them to the championships. Caroline is back in a town she couldn't wait to leave, playing a sport she has a complicated relationship with, and the hits just keep coming.

There were so many things I loved about this book. As a Yankees fan and a Springsteen lover with a lot of ties to central NJ, this book had so many references that made me feel like I was visiting with family. There were a couple of story lines that I wish had a little more attention, but overall this is a great summer read.

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Group Putnam for the ARC of Welcome Home, Caroline Kline.

Welcome Home, Caroline Kline has a lot of relatable topics. Caroline was unlikeable at times because she made stupid choices but the book is so well written that it kept me reading.

The concept of this book was really unique. It had the "moving back home to take care of a parent" plot, but in a clever way.

Mostly a character-driven book, it was really nice to see Caroline coming in terms with her choices, both past and present. I loved her bonding with her dad and how they teamed up for softball.

A lot of times it can be a struggle to watch Caroline make the wrong choices and keep going backward or when she was stubborn to ditch plans. The love interest added an amazing touch to the story & Caroline's life.

The writing was great & I'd definitely check her other works out!
Thank you Netgalley and publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review

Caroline Kline had quit her job and given up her apartment, planning to move to the west coast with her boyfriend. Then he dumps her. Sleeping on the couch of her best friend Winnie's apartment and blowing through her savings while trying to figure out what to do next, Caroline receives a call from her stepmother telling her her father, Leo, is in the hospital. Of course Caroline rushes home to the Jersey shore, thinking she'll be there for a few hours.

But her father wants her to stay. See, his baseball team is really promising this year and there's a loophole in league rules allowing a family member to take the place of an injured player, even if she's a woman. So Caroline grudgingly agrees. Returning to her hometown and the house she grew up in not only brings back memories, it also brings back people. Her first love, her frenemy and fellow softball player.

As Caroline navigates her father's illness and these old/new relationships, she finds her life taking a strange and unexpected turn.

Okay, so the book description mentions the Jersey Shore, which would have been enough for me anyway, but ASBURY PARK is a significant setting for this book, as is the very charming but lesser known Ocean Grove. But you had me at Jersey Shore. Caroline Kline and her family are characters I can really relate to (personality if not the vaping--ugh). This book grabbed me from page one. #WelcomeHomeCarolineKline #NetGalley

DNF at 40%.

The main character, Caroline, is in a transitional time in her life and a mess. I wanted to connect with her but the story was also all over the place, so it was hard to stay engaged.

The conversations seemed consistently negative plus there was a lot of fluff that lost my attention. I felt myself skimming pages to get content that pushed the story along.

Though it was not for me…..

👉🏻Read if you like:
•Family Relationships •Second Chances •Baseball

Thank you Netgalley & Penguin Group Putnam for a gifted eARC in exchange for my honest review.

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This was posted to Goodreads today. Will share book details without formal review on my Instagram Stories.

Welcome Home, Caroline Kline is the story of a woman who returns home to take care of her father and has to take his spot on his softball team. This book cracked me up. The cast of characters on the softball team were all so quirky and entertaining. The anxiety of being an adult and returning home was thoroughly explored with so much realness. I also loved seeing Caroline be forced to face her issues brought on by being home and seeing her tackle everything head on with strength and determination. This book was fun and sweet. And the main character has my name which never happens!

I received a digital ARC of this book from PENGUIN GROUP Putnam and NetGalley.

What's not to love with this book? It combined my love of baseball/softball and memories of my childhood growing up in the late 80's/early 90's. The Bruce Springsteen references, the laugh out loud moments... all fabulous!

Welcome Home Caroline Kline might be my favorite book that I've read to date this year! I loved the author's wit, her characters, and her writing style. The touches of nostalgia throughout were the perfect touches to the story. I may have Googled and watched the video of Bruce Springsteen's Dancing in the Dark because I learned something about that video in the book. I have been singing Bruce Springsteen for days since finishing this book!

The only thing I didn't like? She was a New York Yankee's fan and I'm a New York Mets fan!

I rated this book a 5/5 stars and I would recommend it to a friend.

Many thanks to NetGalley and GP Putnam's Sons for the digital ARC of Welcome Home, Caroline Kline. This debut novel by Courtney Preiss follows Caroline as she navigates the collapse of everything she wanted her life to be. Following a surprise breakup that also stops her planned move across the country in its tracks, Caroline gets a call that her dad has taken a fall. He asks her to come home, ostensibly to take care of him while he recovers, but also to take his place in the men's softball league. What follows is a chaotic effort to fit into the boys' club, reconnect with a former flame, and get her life together.

What I Liked

Caroline is a confident woman who doesn't tend to care what other people, which is refreshing in a female protagonist. She's not necessarily likeable and doesn't expect to be. I won't say I loved her character personally, but I did appreciate that she's different from a lot of women's fiction protagonists.

This book tackles some challenging topics, including the illness of a family member, alcoholism, and sexism. It manages to make space for all of these things within the life of our protagonist, showing how even the big struggles are still just a portion of who we are.

What I Didn't Like

For a first-person narrative, I felt like I had trouble understanding why Caroline makes the choices she does. There's not a lot of reflection in the narration, which is maybe the point, but since Caroline makes a ton of questionable choices I found myself wanting a little more of an understanding about why she does them, even if it's just reflection after the fact.

Back to my comment about this not being a romance, I felt like the love story was an afterthought in fierce competition with everything else that's going on in this book. We could've cut it to make space for some of the other elements and I think the book would've been better for it.

That brings us to my next point, which is that there is a lot going on in this story. There are a ton of threads competing for our attention as readers, and some of them feel underdeveloped as a result. In particular, there's a thread about a childhood friend that feels like it wanted more space in the story.

Final Thoughts

Overall, this book wasn't quite a home run for me. I enjoyed some elements of the story and liked that this felt different from a lot of the Romance-not-romance women's fiction I've read recently.

However, there was just too much going on for any one thing to really feel like it got a satisfactory story by the end. I also just didn't like Caroline, which is totally a personal issue.

If you enjoy a story about complicated people and their family dynamics and/or stories about sports, I'd say give Welcome Home, Caroline Kline a go. If you're looking for a swoony love story, however, this probably isn't going to hit the spot.

This is an amazing debut book for this author. She hit it out of the park with this one!

Can you go home again? Do you want to?

Caroline Kline is living her best life in New York City with plans to relocate to California with her boyfriend. That is until her life comes crashing down after her boyfriend, Ben, (Who she was better off without.) informs her that he is moving to California without her. With no boyfriend, no job, and no place to live, and quickly evaporating savings, Caroline reluctantly makes the decision to move back home to New Jersey. Her father needs her after a recent health issue. He needs her to fill in for him on his men’s softball team. She does run into Chrispin Davis, her middle school crush who she hasn’t seen since eighth grade.

With softball and baseball as a backdrop, this is a story about finding yourself, reinventing yourself, and accepting the curveballs that life throws your way. I was not always happy with some of the choices Caroline made, but I found myself rooting for her. She learned to face the consequences for her choices. As she spends more time home in New Jersey, staying there permanently becomes a possibility.

As a baseball fan, I loved the New York Yankees references in this book. Just like in the Kline household, I made my son sit in the lucky chair during the playoffs and World Series. The superstitions baseball fans have!

I also learned several Hebrew words and phrases.

“We kissed, and even though I’d never been there before, it felt like coming home.”

When Caroline’s dad has a fall resulting in a hospitalization, he asks her to move home and take his place on his softball team as they are headed to the World Series.

While the writing is both funny and witty, it’s full of self identity struggles and “not so perfect” family dynamics that balance out the story. I loved following as Caroline rebuilt herself and learned that her “ideal life” maybe wasn’t what she wanted after all. I enjoyed the romance between her and Crispin but also found that I enjoyed reading about the complex relationships between her and her dad, step mom and sister just as much.

Welcome Home, Caroline Kline started off really strong for me. I love a story of a woman coming back to her hometown for plot reasons and needing to reckon with things from the past. There was a paragraph about her mom’s original play that I won’t spoil but I absolutely loved.

However once Caroline got home, this one started to lose me. There’s a lot of softball and talk about softball which I guess I should have expected but it was still more. And I was really starting to find Caroline unlikable - so ultimately I decided to DNF at 50%. Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for the free book to review.