My Review: Already Home

Already Home

About the Book:

After nearly a decade as a sous-chef in a trendy eatery, Jenna is desperate for a change. She’s supported her ex-husband’s dreams for so long that she can’t even remember her own. Until she sees a for-lease sign near her parents’ home andenvisions her very own cooking store.

Her crash course in business is aided by a streetwise store manager and Jenna’s adoptive mother. But just as she’s gaining a foothold in her new life, in walk her birth parents—aging hippies on a quest to reconnect with their firstborn.

Now Jenna must figure out how to reconcile the free-spirited Serenity and Tom with her traditional parents, deal with her feelings for a new love interest and decide what to do about her ex’s latest outrageous request. In the end, Jenna will find that there is no perfect family, only the people we love....

Coming Unraveled, Mallery's story in THE KNITTING DIARIES anthology (April 2011), is loosely linked to the story in ALREADY HOME.

My Comments:

I got this from NetGalley, and as I've expressed before, one thing I like about NetGalley is the total lack of pressure to review books, and therefore, a total lack of pressure to stick with books I'm not really enjoying.  When I started Already Home I didn't care for the writing style, and after about 10% of the book,was considering abandoning it.  However, shortly thereafter, it grabbed me.  It is a love story, but not really a romance.  We learn about the love her birth parents have for each other, and for her birth siblings, the love her adoptive parents have for her,and for each other, the love she learns to have with her birth parents and the love that develops between her and a guy, and between her friend and another guy.  Jenna also needs to  learn to love herself again.  

I enjoyed watching Jenna's business grow and prosper.  I really liked her friend and employee.  She'd had a real lack of love in her life, and now is thriving under the love of Jenna and her family.  

Jenna's birth parents are portrayed as aging hippies, but in doing the math, I discovered that they were my age, and the hippies were definitely before my time.  Still, by the end of the book I had learned to care for them and realized that I had pre-judged them by outward appearances.  

I'll give this book a B.  It has a couple of intimate scenes that happen before marriage but they aren't graphic.