Tuesday 4 September 2018

In Too Deep - Dani Collins


In Too Deep
Dani Collins
(Blue Spruce Lodge #3)
Publication date: August 7th 2018
Genres: Adult, Contemporary, Romance
The family he didn’t know he needed…
At her wit’s end with her twelve-year-old niece, Wren Snow takes the manager’s job at Blue Spruce Lodge so Sky can get to know her father, Trigg Johanssen—a tycoon snowboarder with a playboy reputation.
Gold-medalist Trigg Johanssen is furious she kept Sky a secret, but quits competition to focus on his newly discovered daughter only to have his chemistry with Wren complicate their attempts to co-parent.
When outside forces threaten the ski resort he’s rebuilding, a marriage of convenience seems like the answer. It would give his daughter the life she deserves, but is it too much for a heartbroken woman still nursing past hurts?


Author Bio:
USA Today Bestselling author, winner of 2013 Reviewer’s Choice Award from Romantic Times Book Reviews
Before making my first sale to Harlequin Mills & Boon in 2012, I spent two decades writing and submitting to every publisher with a transom while holding down a day job and raising a family with my high school sweet heart. Since then, I’ve gone to contract on over thirty books.
While Harlequin Presents remains my first love, I also write romantic comedy, medieval fantasy romance, erotic romance, and small town contemporary romance for Tule Publishing’s Montana Born. In fact, I write just about anything, so long as it’s romance. P.S. I’m also Canadian.

My Review

I should probably start by saying that I haven't read the other books in the Blue Spruce Lodge series. Although this is part of a series, there is no need to have read the other books, it works fine as a standalone. I would say though, I don't think this is a romance novel, at least not in the traditional sense. This is actually a story about love and family. Told from three points of view, Trigg, his newly found daughter Sky and Sky's Aunt, Wren. There is a romance angle, which gets quite steamy, but for me, that took second place to the story of the three of them working out what it was to be a family and learning about one another.

Having the story told from three points of view was quite unusual. There is actually a fourth storyteller, in the form of diaries written by Sky's Mum Mandy. It worked really well and built this story into much more than your usual man meets woman and falls into bed with her that many romance books are.

Trigg was a little annoying, to begin with, a little too full of himself, but his character grew and develop into something more. Wren is quite a reserved and quiet character, but she too grows over the course of the book, showing how strong she really is and that strength isn't always expressed with noise and bluster. I struggled a little bit with Sky, not that she wasn't a well developed and interesting character, but to me, she seemed a few years older than 12. Perhaps this is the difference between American children and those from the UK and New Zealand? I noticed when I was younger, that American's do seem to mature faster than we did, but then by their late teens, early twenties seemed younger. In any case, Sky seemed to me to be older than she was supposed to be in the book. I did really enjoy reading about how she discovers and comes to accept herself as one of the family she hasn't known until now.

This was a really interesting read and I found myself engrossed, wanting to know how everyone was going to fit in the new family dynamic. The romance element worked and although Trigg was a very overbearing character in many ways and Wren so quiet and unwilling to rock the boat, they worked. There is a fear with characters like that that the dominant personality will crush the other. I didn't feel that was the case here and there was a balance between the two of them that worked well.

I said at the beginning of this review that I hadn't read any of the other books in the Blue Spruce Lodge series. Having read this one, I'd definitely be keen to go back and read the others.


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