Vintage Housewife Books, $0.99, ISBN 978-0-6925071-8-6
Contemporary Romance, 2015

Evie Barker is burned out. She has a not-quite-there upstairs mom to care for, and she also works at the nursing home because… I don’t know, maybe she likes to take care of old people? Still, when she sees that someone is moving in next door, she hopes it’d be some nice elderly person that lives a quiet, peaceful life.

Well, too bad, because the new neighbor is Grady Duke, the guy she gave her vee-vee to. He moved on shortly after that, and she caught him with another woman. Ouch.

He’s now back from a stint in the Marine Corps because he has to take care of his ill daddy. Wait, what is with all the sick old people in this place? Did some train carrying nuclear waste got upended nearby or something?

His excuse about hurting Evie is that she made him feel too much back then, so he had to ditch her. Okay, so he’d always wanted to ditch her behind as he moved out of town to hopefully something better, but still, she made him feel too much, y’all.

Still, he eventually admits that he was a selfish kid back then, she accepts his apology, and… wait, that’s it? We just move straight to a happily ever after one year later?

Hmm, I feel like I’m missing not just something in Kristi Rose’s Once Again; try a whole lot of somethings. What’s happening? Is there a reason why the author had to abruptly pull the curtain down on the couple like that?

This one is akin to the first few chapters of a much longer story, hastily glued to the epilogue of the same story with the rest of it gone who knows where. I’m not sure what the point of this thing is, therefore, aside from giving the author some pocket change. It’s not going to pack even a mild tap of an emotional punch, for one, and the story is not going to do a darned thing for me as a result.

No, really, what is this?