Henrietta is a spiritual woman. She can communicate with spirits and she is a psychic. The people in her town do not care for her and make it known. Love has been out of reach for her until Sophia. The story may confuse some as time switches back and forth due to memories. Henrietta's life does not make sense and her actions seem far fetched. It's as if she is Marie Lavery from the opposite side of the Bayou. If you can overlook the nuances you can finish the book in one sitting. The formatting is off so there are several passages where the words run together and it is hard to read. There aren't any cliffhangers as all mysteries are settled when the book ends.

This book is about Henrietta Bailey who lives by the ocean. People in the town have mixed feelings about her because she has monthly séances and they think that there’s something odd about her. The first part of the book is mostly devoted to her flashbacks of her first love Mary. The two women must have had quite the love affair before Mary was shipped off and married to some man witch broke Henrietta‘s heart. I’m a say the first half of the story was a bit boring and very hard for me to get into. Probably because I did not like the flashbacks and the paranormal aspects that were brought into the book. The second part of the book moves a lot quicker and is much more interesting as Henrietta meet Sophia a younger woman, actually quite a younger woman and they begin to have a close relationship. As odd as the relationship might be Henrietta realizes that both she and Sophia have a lot in common. Sophia really has an understanding of Henrietta and that draws Henrietta into her.

One of the things that was very annoying about this book was that the editing was either poor or there was a malfunction in downloading this book to my kindle. Words were put together sometimes four and five in a row with no space between them which made it a little challenging to read. I do know that sometimes the formatting of a book may change when it’s downloaded and this might have been the case if not I don’t understand how all these errors could have gone by any good editor.

Paranormal with much self-reflection and interesting characters. In general, I enjoyed the read because of the characters. The read started off very slow with much uncertainty and I was loaded with questions because I thought the storytelling was disjointed. It did pick-up and get better as the story unfolded. Henrietta Bailey, housekeeper with a talent and skill to communicate with the deceased. She has quite the night time business. Sophia, student, interested in living life and pursuing Henrietta. The burgeoning romance between Henrietta and Sophia is quite lovely. There is quite the large age gap which seems to matter to only one of the characters.

I received an ARC copy of this book from the Publisher via Netgalley and voluntarily leaving my review.


This was ok read.

Henrietta has been living in town Crescent her whole life. She spends her time thinking of a loss love that had left her heartbroken.

The people in town fear her because of the gifts she possessed even though she tries to make the people of town life better.

There is a romance when young women comes to town looking for her soulmate and she finds her in Henrietta but she has to fight for her because Henrietta never thought she finds love again there a bit of age-gaped between them.

I don’t know I like it but I didn’t it was confusing because it’s like Henrietta was writing a story then it’s like she was remembering a memories. I like the paranormal in this book because I always wonder if there really is physic people in this world.

I’m giving it 3.5 stars because I like the romance even if it’s a big aged gaped and paranormal was good.

This was an interesting book. There were parts I liked and other parts that didn’t really work for me. While I had some issues for sure, I always wanted to keep reading. I was more willing to forgive certain things because the book kept my attention right through to the end. So while I will be talking about some of the problems I had, I do have to give Lawler credit for writing a story that was entertaining.

This is a major age-gap romance with some paranormal elements. The age-gap is up there with one of the biggest I have read before at 40+ years. I had a little trouble finding exact ages but I think it was 65 for our main character and 22? -she was in college- for the potential love interested. I’m always open for age-gaps in lesfic, it doesn’t matter to me since love is love, but that is a big one to accept. What helped a little was that the younger character seemed more in her 30’s and the older more like 40’s. However because of that, I don’t know if I completely believed the older character was 65. There is a maturity and intelligence that comes with age from living through so much and acquiring so much knowledge that I had trouble seeing the main character like that. I love diversity in books and that includes age. I want there to be books with older characters so that in 30 years I‘ll have characters to relate to, I just don’t know if I believed it here.

I do have to say I didn’t love the writing style. It was a bit choppy and mechanical at times. She did this, she did that, and I didn’t always need to know that she did all that. That smooth flow I was looking for wasn’t really there. Luckily, I did think the second half felt smoother, either that or I just got more used to the writing. I also didn’t care for how far away the physic distance to the character was. I felt like I was watching the character go through life. I like it better when you are right up close in the characters head so you actually feel what they are going through. A character is bulled in this story and I felt bad for them, but had I been more connected to the character, I might have teared up or even cried.

What I did enjoy was most of the paranormal aspects. This book takes place in the 70’s and the main character is physic so she gives readings and holds monthly séances to communicate with passed loved ones. Not only that, but there are a few little mysteries that are going on, while they are not super exciting, they were neat and enough to keep me turning the pages and never being bored. The character was very special in her paranormal “powers” and it helped to give her some depth. Unfortunately, towards the end her powers felt pretty common and not so special which was a real bummer that caused a few eye rolls on my side. I wish the author would have kept things the way they started out.

The romance is sweet. This book has two romances, one in flashbacks and the other in the present. I didn’t care for the flashback romance. I get why the author did that, it absolutely made sense to the story, it’s just a personal preference of me not being big on flashbacks. The sex scenes in the book are what I would call lightly explicit. Sometimes they were fade-to-black, other times they were more explicit but never really lengthy.

I have to be clear that I had some big issue with this book. I did not even go into all of my issues in this review. But, and it is a pretty big but, I could not stop reading this. I read this in one sitting and there was always some sort of family drama, or mystery, or ghost, something that just always held my attention. This book provided me with entertainment tonight that helped to keep my anxiety at bay.