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Every Little Kiss*

The Call of the Ocean and Romance in Northern California

I read one other book by this author, and I enjoyed it, so I was looking forward to this book. The book called to me for another reason. I am not sure precisely where on the northern California coast the fictional town of Blue Moon Bay is, but I traveled that route often when I lived in California when visiting family.

This is a sweet little contemporary romance. The heroine is a bit excitable, though she claims not to be. She does have a complicated and sad past, being abandoned by her parents when she was a young girl. They put her and her brother under the care of one of their grandmothers. The hero is an absolute sweetheart, thought that always makes you question if there’s something deeper that might be going on! The book felt a bit repetitious the way that the heroine would go on and on about why she couldn’t have even a little fling with a hero, even though there was definitely attraction and chemistry and he did actually changed his trip so he can spend more time with her. How can you turn down a nice guy even if the relationship might be brief? I thought it was odd, too, that both the hero and heroine had ties to reality shows. Not everyone in California is on reality shows! The heroine had her own briefly, and the hero’s father had one. It just was quite bizarre.

As someone who lived on the Northern California coast for more than a decade and did much traveling up and down it, I did have a few quibbles with the way the author described the area of course, I don’t actually know where this fictional town is supposed to be other than probably someplace where it would be comfortable to drive to Napa for the meet-in-the-middle visits of the heroine and her grandmother. In the fictional town, she described many two- and three-story houses. Where I lived on the coast, such dwellings were rare. I don’t think I ever saw a 3-story one. Also, compared to the Oregon coast, the Northern California coast does not have a ton of seafood restaurants. I know that one would think that it would have, but on the northern California coast, they’re actually surprisingly rare. You can find good seafood in regular restaurants, but there aren’t many strictly seafood joints. The Oregon coast is entirely different; I live in Oregon now, and I know that every little burg on our coast has some sort of seafood shack, joint, or restaurant. She also described sandy beaches. Much of the northern California coast is bluffs and cliffs with no sand in sight. Of course, there is sand in places, but if you drive from San Francisco to Eureka, it is surprising how little is sand there is in places. One last Coastal rant. She described the sunlight as glinting off the ocean surface as golden discs. As a coastal resident for many years, I never once saw anything like that. When the sun is out and fully shining down on that glorious Pacific Ocean, what it actually looks like is a scattering of glittering diamonds, little brilliant white shards reflecting back at you from the blueness. It is actually quite spectacular to have full sun on a choppy ocean.

I just had to share all that because, for me, having these kinds of details wrong kind of detracted from my enjoyment of the story. Perhaps if you’re not a foggybottom, you wouldn’t notice or care. Again, this is essentially a sweet little romance that is a pleasure to read.

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