Desert Rose

Desert Rose

Romance in Blake’s Folly

J. Arlene Culiner

Fire Star Press, Nov 2018

152 pages, Kindle

Contemporary Romance

✭✭✭✭⭑

Provided by Author

The cover is totally appropriate to the story, but I didn’t find it eye-catching or particularly attractive. The pieces didn’t seem to quite come together to form a whole.

The story was great fun, complex, and straightforward at the same time. Girl meets boy and they fall in love. End of story. Well, not quite that simple, but there aren’t too many real problems. Jonah is totally dazzled by Rose, as are most of the other males in town. And she’s constantly surrounded by them wherever she goes. She doesn’t seem to favor one over the other either. Jonah has a major problem, though. He still has his ex living with him. She had problems and he offered her a place to live, now he’s sort of stuck with her. He has to declare his freedom from that relationship and find some space of his own to indulge his secret passion. So Jonah moves out and leaves his ex the old place. He gets himself an old warehouse loft with plenty of space to indulge his secret and be on his own.

Rose has her own secret, which she finally shares with Jonah. She takes him with her the next time she goes and lets him see for himself all about her other side. And she tells him all about her past with her late husband, the band, and why she doesn’t sing rock and roll anymore. She tells him about her mother and her drinking, too. She tells him the secrets of her shop as well.

To let him know he’s special and not just one of the guys surrounding her, Rose goes to Jonah’s place planning to seduce him and he shares his secret with her.

The character of Rose was really well done. Confident most of the time, and yet not sure how to approach Jonah and let him into her life. She was the main character, of course. Jonah was well done, too. Others weren’t done as well, but enough to understand them and how they fit into the story well. Lance was great, being eliminated as he was. The pace was brisk as the book is a short one. The tension comes and goes as things happen. The story was carried by conversation and action mostly. There was some description, but not a lot. Not even a lot of description of characters. I’m a big fan of description. That and the cover are why this book only got four and a half stars. The story is awesome and I look forward to the author’s other book in Blake’s Folly getting republished so I can read that. I really liked the intimacy of Ms. Culiner’s writing. I highly recommend this book to romance readers.