Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I was really hoping to escape the cold that appears to be moving through my house, but no such luck–it got me. Which is why, instead of going to bed early last night, I sat and finished a puzzle and listened to my audiobook while my nose dripped and dripped and dripped; when I finally did go to bed, falling asleep was still hard because I couldn’t breathe through my nose. Which (again) is why a)I’m extra tired today and b)I was able to finish listening to Katherine Center’s The Love Haters this morning. (I got through quite a chunk of it when I was, you know, not sleeping last night.) And while I would vastly prefer NOT to be taking cold medicine every four hours and keeping Kleenex in business, I am glad to have finished Love Haters before its due date. It always stinks when you have to wait for an audiobook to cycle through other people’s holds before you can finish it.

Katherine Center, in a lot of ways, does for contemporary romances what Julia Quinn does for regencies; both combine witty banter with solid stories in ways that make their books compulsively readable. (Julia Quinn is spicier than I’d prefer while Center does drop the occasional F-Bomb, but they both have completely likable characters, and nowadays that is not exactly a given.) In Love Haters, for example, Center gives us Katie, whose already fraught relationship with her body turns positively antagonistic when her musician boyfriend gets famous and internet trolls start taking shots at her. She can’t swim and doesn’t even own a swimsuit, but when her company starts an extremely aggressive series of layoffs, she avoids mentioning that in order to get an assignment in Florida that might just save her job. Enter Hutch, the Coast Guard rescue swimmer starring in the recruiting video she’s filming, and his dog George Bailey, who falls in love with Katie at first sight. (You read that right, by the way–the dog is definitely the first character in the book to fall in love.) With the help of splinters, more than one phobia, and a hurricane, the right people end up together and personal growth is achieved, which is a nice thing to vicariously experience when you’re mouth-breathingly miserable. If you need an enjoyable read in your life right now, you should definitely give this one a try.

In other news, we’ve been planning my daughter’s farewell brunch, which is this Sunday, so cross your fingers that we’ll all be more or less well by then…