This was a sweet story. I enjoyed it and will continue on with the series. ( )

Kaylie Flynn has returned home to Hope Springs, Texas, where she lived as a foster child from age ten to age eighteen, in an unusually fortunate foster experience. Having built a successful career and a nice nestegg as baker, she has now bought the old home of her late and much-loved foster parents, Winton and May Wise, to be not only her home, but her new business, the Two Owls Cafe, serving lunch from 10am to 2pm.

She also has another mission, finding out what happened to her birth parents, and why they never came back to get her after the awful events that landed her in foster care.

Hope Springs is a charming town, and the characters are likable and interesting. Having spent ten years in Austin, Kaylie is sometimes surprised at how many people remember her and her foster parents, here in small-town Hope Springs. They also remember her brownies--then and now, her method of dealing with emotional crises is to bake brownies, and then find people to eat them before she can eat them all.

But Kaylie has her own memories, some clear, others buried, and she wants to find out her parents didn't want her. Like many children, she blamed herself for the upheaval of her childhood, and as an adult hasn't shed those feelings.

Old neighbors and classmates, as well as people she didn't meet as a child, become new friends. The hunky contractor the old classmate who became the realtor who sold her the Wise home recommended, Tennessee Keller, is skilled, perceptive of her needs in the renovation, and, oh, yes, very attractive personally as well as physically. Luna Meadows, local maker of a stunningly successful line of hand-weaved wool scarves, becomes a good friend--but turns out to be sitting on a potentially explosive secret. Tenn Keller has his own secrets. Kaylie herself is keeping secrets from her new friends as well as from herself.

Of course this all has to explode over all of them, and the question is whether the relationships she's built, and her new business, are strong enough to survive it.

There were points at which I wanted to give Kaylie, Tenn, Luna, and others whacks upside the head with a clue-by-four, as I felt they were being more obtuse than the reasonable demands of the plot required, but really, I liked them all, and I'm not fond of violence.

Recommended with the above-noted reservation.

I bought this audiobook. ( )

The Second Chance Cafe was an easy to read, although predictable romance. This book seemed pretty squeaky clean at first, so much so that I was reading it to my 73 yr old aunt. But, then I got to a sex scene that I thought was a little too explicit for this book and found myself skipping that whole section as I didn't feel comfortable reading that part to her. But, that being said, my aunt enjoyed the story and didn't seem to really notice when I was improvising through several pages. My aunt enjoyed the recipes that were included within the pages, and all in all it was an enjoyable story.
( )

I picked up this book mostly because I was curious to see how the main character would turn a house into a café. I thought the undercurrent of sexual tension was a bit distracting and the sex scene too long, so I probably shouldn't have read this book. ( )

The Review:

I read Alison Kent's Love in Bloom a while ago, and loved it. So when I read about this one on her blog, I knew I had to read it. And, I got to read it early, since I received a galley through Netgalley.
Am I glad I read it? Oh yes.


The setting of Hope Springs felt believable. It was small, closeknit and the citizens supported each other. But, I also liked the fact there were secrets. One of the thing that annoys me the most in contemporary romance novels is when everyone know everything about everybody, which is unrealistic.

This was a heartwarming story, about healing past scars. All the characters had scars and secrets. It was touching to watch how Ten and Kaylie struggled with their scars, and how it affected them. But gradually, they started to tell each other about what had happened in the past, to each other and to their friends. I liked the secondary characters. They had their secrets, and had made their mistakes. What I especially liked, was how their secrets affected the plot.

The plot was filled with unexpected twists. The transformation of the Wise/Coleman's house into a cafe felt believable. From how Kaylie listen to Ten's suggestion to how they discovered problems that delayed them.
I liked the fact that a lot of the plot twists stemmed from the secrets the characters had. But I also liked the fact that they struggled with their decisions, and knew they would have consequences.
That said, one thing I missed in this book was that their HEA never felt threatened. It is possible that it was affected by the fact that I read this on my phone, since I tend to skim more on my phone. ( )