Leeanna Morgan, $6.99, ISBN 978-0995143524
Contemporary Romance, 2022
The cover doesn’t lie. Leeanna Morgan’s The Flower Cottage is a wholesome small town romance that is part of the author’s master plan to get Hallmark to pick the whole thing up.
Our heroine, Paris Haynes, left behind a string of bad relationships and bruised hearts upon arriving in Anchor Lane about three years ago.
This place is so idyllic and postcard perfect that the people here seem to exist just to wave at the camera as some treacly opening theme song plays, and our heroine naturally finds a job at Blooming Lovely, the only flower shop in town.
Interestingly, while normally progress and gentrification would be perceived as a great evil that needs to be fought back, here it is presented as something good. In fact, Paris has a dream that she hopes to get the rest of people behind it—she wants to help bring more tourists in and make everyone richer and happier!
Crossing her fingers, Paris hoped she felt the same way after she’d heard her idea. “While I was walking through the cottage, I thought about the number of clients we’ll have to turn away when you’re working fewer hours. What if there was another florist who specialized in providing flowers for large events and gifts for the Christmas shop? Blooming Lovely could focus on smaller events like birthday parties and wedding anniversaries, and provide flowers for people who haven’t preordered anything.”
“That could work, but there isn’t another flower shop in Sapphire Bay.”
“There might be. What if I opened my own store? We could work together to make sure we aren’t taking customers away from each other. Hiring more staff won’t be too difficult, either. A couple of people in the adult flower arranging class I’m tutoring would be perfect apprentices.”
You can tell that these people aren’t Chinese, because had they been Chinese, this discussion would quickly devolve into a screaming match about how Paris dared to train and learn under her employer’s magnanimous time and generosity only to want to stab her in the back and steal her business. I can say this with great authority because I am Chinese. Now, where were we?
Our hero, Richard Dawkins, is a former military that has lost his leg while pew-pew’ing nasty brown people in Afghanistan, and he comes with a kid so I’m sure we all know where this is heading. He’s the one that is remodeling the cottages that Paris has her eye on, and he’s the one also that annoys her with his condescending remarks. Oh, don’t worry, he’s hot, so his condescension is a sign of true love or something.
You know, if this hadn’t been marketed as a romance, I’d have assumed that this is some ensemble mainstream fiction set in a small town.
For a romance story, the hero and the heroine spend perplexingly fewer scenes together than I’d have expected. In fact, a part of me wonders whether those two had met and started their thing in a previous story, but then I take a closer look to find out that this is the first entry in the The Cottages on Anchor Lane series. The romance only feels like one in the sense that I fill in the many blanks in this particular love story with the tropes that I am familiar with. Even then, I still don’t have the full picture, such as why these two would fall in love and how their feelings develop from point A to B and so forth.
Instead, the story takes its time meandering around, letting the main characters interact with various other people in this town. Suspense? Build up? Anticipation? Nothing like that here, as these characters are incapable of having anything in their lives that is out of place for even an inch, and if something does feel off, it’s quickly righted because heaven forbid there is anything like conflict or drama to taint the perfection of Anchor Lane.
The incessant sickly sweet vibe soon becomes monotonous and even dreary, and the author’s dry narrative style, which tends to lean more towards more tell than show, only adds to my sense of tedium. I find myself yearning for the gruesome bickering of a Modern romance, anything just to shake things up.
Still, I feel that this one could be a three-oogie read had it been cut down to half or one-third of its length. At least then, it won’t go on and on without actually taking me anywhere, and the constant tidal wave of saccharine sweetness would be tolerable instead of nauseating.
In the end, it’s pretty evident from this one that too much perfection can be too much indeed. Reading this is akin to being force fed prodigious amounts of cotton candy—everything feels insubstantial at the end of the day, just empty calories and not much else.
