Kimani, $7.99, ISBN 978-1-335-45842-1
Contemporary Romance, 2019

It’s a tale as old as time. Charlotte Pendergrass, fresh from her divorce, heads back to her small town to lick her wounds.

She’s a runway and pageant coach that has worked hard to set up her own company, only to lose it to her now no-good ex because the company is registered under his name, oops. He has set up her now ex-good friend as the CEO, so it’s not like Charlotte will get the satisfaction of seeing that company collapse without her.

Fortunately, she’s loaded so she’s going to have a nice getaway at her family’s posh cabin while thinking of her next direction. Right now, all she wants is a baby, but since this is a romance novel, the poor thing can’t just go to a fertility center and pick up some baby batter to knock herself up. No, she needs a man, and that man is going to be Richard Swayne, a farmer.

Oh don’t worry, he’s a super successful farmer. Our heroine is not going to don overalls and milk the cows or anything so working class, shudder.

Richard is divorced himself, and his ex-wife has washed her hands off their daughter Bailey, so he’s now basically a single daddy. A good one, too, which is nice as there are way too many neglectful single daddies in this genre. He and Charlotte know one another from way back, and given that this is a small town, they keep bumping into one another and they are even set up for a blind date.

Things come to a boil when, as conveniently as only fiction can be, her ex and her now ex-good friend show up in town to coach his ex’s new stepdaughter—the ex married her new man recently—in the local beauty pageant. Charlotte steps in to help Bailey both keep her head high and show her mother the middle finger, so to speak.

Most of Falling for the Beauty Queen feels absolutely, wonderfully right.

The main characters feel real. Charlotte has a life outside of her career and her marriage, and it’s nice that she’s working to get away from the messy divorce on her own, even before Richard comes into the picture. Sure, she has the usual disapproving mom and other trappings of a typical heroine in the Kimani line, but these otherwise tired old tropes feel like an organic part of her character instead of being the entirety of her character, if I am making sense here.

Richard is a generally nice guy, and he’s also a pretty good father, which together with his financial stability, looks, and sex-fu make him a most attractive romance hero. He, like Charlotte, has a number of predictable archetypal traits, but these traits feel like they are a natural aspect of his character.

Conversations feel real and natural, the secondary characters aren’t intrusive and annoying and instead feel like natural additions to the story, and the narrative is very descriptive. About the last part, the author describes the scenery and life in Black Wolf Creek is such detail that I feel like I can “see” the place in my mind. The people here aren’t busybody psychos for the most part, and the place is pretty much a top tier first world urban paradise with small town window dressing—an ideal Hallmark small town, in other words.

The pacing is also solid. Not once for most of the story do I feel like things are dragging on for too long. It also helps that the author for the most part avoids dragging me down into the dreaded information dump black hole in this one.

Even the villains don’t feel too much like cardboard cutouts of cartoon characters. I am pretty sure that I have met actual people in real life that behave just like Richard’s ex!

You may be thinking by now: there’s a catch here. Something, surely, can’t be this all around awesome.

Well, a more significant issue here is that the last quarter or so of this story is in dire need of some kind of drama, as by then the characters have acknowledged their feelings for one another and everyone wants them to be the royal couple of the neighborhood.

Filling the remaining pages with non-stop sex may be pushing it, so the author decides to do that one thing I really wish she wouldn’t: the dreaded big misunderstanding and communication breakdown drama. Worse, instead of Richard doing something to realize that he’s such an ass, the author has other secondary characters lecture him into a contrived epiphany.

Also, this kind of drama really tests my patience with the hero. Charlotte is the one that is still bruised from a divorce, and yet, she has to be the one to try to coddle the hero because of his insecurities from a divorce that happened way much further in the past. I may be more accepting of this tired old drama if Charlotte had been the one that instigated the whole thing, as her emotional damage is still raw, but this one… ugh. I was really liking Richard until he mutates into a big weenie crybaby at the last leg of the story.

Still, I really enjoy the early parts of this one, so I can be generous with the oogies. At the same time, I will always wish that the author had quit while she’s ahead and have the main characters walk off into the sunset without shoving that tired old drama into my face!