Hannah Robinson should be raising her glass and toasting her new business venture; instead she’s drowning in sorrow and trying to pick up the pieces of her shattered heart. Patrick, the man she’s lived with and loved for the past year has left her for another woman. With only a few weeks until the opening of her shop Cupcakes Around The Corner, she has no time to focus on her heartache. Fortunately her family and friends rally round as she goes through the struggle of getting over her lost love, making a success of her business, and finding a way to let a new love into her life.
In the contemporary novel Semi-Sweet, Hannah’s Irish hometown of Clongarvin is a cozy affair where it’s not hard to run into the same people often; and when Hannah discovers that Patrick has left her for Leah, a girl she went to high school with, her heartache swells. In a-six degrees-of-separation type atmosphere, author Roisin Meaney, brings together a delicious cast of characters creating a mixture of love, hate, friendship, despair, longing, and desire. What begins as a story of Hannah’s struggles morphs into the most marvelous storytelling as the author interweaves the lives of people Hannah knows from both her past and her present.
Hannah’s road back to love is not an easy one, but the author doesn’t portray her as a ‘tortured heroine’. Instead, Roisin has written a character with such a sense of reality that she had me thinking of Hannah as a real person – someone who must deal with the struggles, fears, and expectations of the future.. Semi- Sweet not only brings Hannah’s story vividly to life, but features a wonderful ensemble cast of characters. Her best friend Adam who has an obsession for a woman whose shyness borders on invisibility, and the extreme lengths he goes through to get her to notice him. Adam’s sister Nora, who is sexy beyond description and whose only objective in life is to have any man she wants. And Patrick, who turns out to be a serial cheater and someone you love to hate.
This is a book with prose and dialogue that makes you feel as though you’re not reading, but actually viewing a fabulous BBC production that’s going on inside your head, it draws you into a world you’re happy to experience.
Patrick cheated on Hannah – and then he left her. Would you take someone back if they cheated on you?
Maria Lokken is an avid romance reader and an award winning television producer
