Book Review: Twice Shy by Sarah Hogle
December 2, 2024
Here I am, once again, ( torn into pieces ) admitting that I loved a romance novel. I think the “I Hate Romance Novels” thing has been broken, because I absolutely loved this book. It was a little slow for me to get into, but it was so cute and so unproblematic, it was exactly what I needed.
We follow the story of a woman named Maybell who is down on her luck, and stuck in a job that promised her a future, but has kept her exactly in the same position for the past ten years. She recently got her heart broken and her friendship is forced and fake ( at least on her part ) with the girl that is supposed to be her best friend. One day, a woman shows up at the hotel that she works at, and introduces herself as Ruth, the woman that has been taking care of her Great Aunt Violet for the past handful of years. She is kind and warm and informs her that her beloved aunt, that she hasn’t visited in years due to guilt, has passed and left her estate to Maybell. Nothing this good ever happens to Maybell, and she is in complete shock. Upon arrival, she is shocked to find the house is nothing like she remembers it from when she was a child, and that she was not the only one who was going to be living and working on the property, but that she was going to be sharing ( fighting over ) the space with a, ridiculously handsome, embarrassingly familiar, and wildly aloof, Wesley. Will they end up getting along? How will they decide what happens with the property, and the things that Violet left them both? Will they ever become friends?
I ate the second half of this book up in one sitting, and I just adored the flawed and sweet characters that lived in this book. It was not perfect, I really love Sarah Hogle’s characters. They feel real and relatable in a way that I feel like a lot of authors do not, at least for me and the experiences I have had. She wrote another one of my favorites this year, Old Flames and New Fortune, so I wanted to see if that story was just something that I liked, or if she could write something else that I would love equally as much. I would say that I loved that story more, simply because I related to it on a deeper level than this one. Anyway, I would suggest it, and look forward to reading more by Sarah Hogle.
