Cheryl Phipps, $0.99, ISBN 979-8215765760
Contemporary Romance, 2023

Cara and Brad used to be an item until she went off to be a doctor in the big city and he was looking for a more conventional kind of coupling in which, I assume, the woman wouldn’t have such a busy career.

Well, they are in luck, because his grandmother is now dead and she has a reason to come back to the small town!

Now, there is nothing objectionable in Cheryl Phipps’s Listening for Love.

Okay, I roll up my eyes a bit at the whole “Oh, is she going back to the big city… for her career… or will she stay in the lovely small town?” thing because, while I know in real life careers can and do get in the way of relationships sometimes, such a thing often comes off as rather judgmental and even sanctimonious against female characters that dare to have a career. Still, this is a very minor thing.

I also roll up my eyes a little at Cara being portrayed as a victim of discrimination against her being a woman and being black. Really? In the present day, it’s more likely she’d face discrimination in a small town than in a big city—it’s usually easier to seek redress in the big city against these things. Still, this is a tiny part of the story so it’s not a big deal.

The characters on the whole are okay, and with this being a short story, they are as good as they can be, given the length constraints of the format.

However, I’m not sure if I could buy a happily ever after that is born from a circumstance in which these characters spend more time crying and reminiscing about the dead than doing anything romance-y.

It’s far more likely than once they get a better hold of their feelings, they’d eventually go separate ways again as I don’t get any credible reason here that Cara and Brad have settled the issues that drove them apart in the first place. Unless someone is going to die each time these two have a rift—there is an annoying kid here, not that I’m suggesting anything of course—I don’t see how these two will have a convincing happily ever after.

In the end, this one is an unintentionally morbid kind of love story. A part of me wishes that this one had gone a bit darker or more wacky to capitalize on the fact that it takes a dead old woman to bring the two main characters together, but maybe that will be too vulgar or rude for romance readers on the whole. Still, it manages to be a readable kind of morbid, so there’s that.