#fallromance

Two rivals. One fall festival. Forced to work together, Emma and Jake discover that beneath the bickering and autumn chaos, the sweetest love stories often start as the most unexpected alliances.

He made her see the beauty in things that don't come with a price tag.

Becca’s life is upended when she gets a call from a lawyer, saying that her beloved grandmother passed away two weeks earlier. Already wrestling with the guilt of not taking time to visit said grandmother, things get worse when the lawyer tells her that grandma left her house and her pumpkin farm to Becca. She has no time for dealing with a farm, so she decides she’s going to the small town of Maplewood to check things out and sell the place as quickly as possible.

Obviously, things don’t go that way, or this would be a very short book. 

The farm next to hers, run by Garrett Parker, is assumed to be her farm’s rival, though the properties didn’t start that way, and no one remembers how the to patriarchs became rivals. Garrett is a single dad to Mila, after his wife passed away three years earlier. He’s grumpy, stubborn, and sometimes rude, especially when he sees Becca for the first time, walking around the place in designer clothes and shoes. He’s certain she’ll sell the place to a stranger and be gone before the week is over. 

But in cleaning up the place, and staying in the farmhouse, Becca starts to wonder if this is where she’s supposed to be.

I definitely notice the “hustle” culture in this book; Becca is a product of it. I don’t know why, in this day and age, everyone seems to think that success equals putting work above all else. Frankly, I don’t live to work. I work to live. I can’t even imagine how awful it was for Becca to always be busy, always having something she needs to do for work. This makes Garrett perfect for her, as he works hard, but he still takes time with his daughter, with his friends, and still makes time for himself, though most of that time (at least at first) is in watching Becca spectacularly fail at pretty much everything having to do with the farm.

Though this story may seem like a slow burn, it takes place over the span of about three weeks. Some could call that “instalove”, but it didn’t feel that way to me.