Secretly Yours by Tessa Bailey on February 7, 2023
Genres: Fiction / Romance / Contemporary, Fiction / Romance / Romantic Comedy, Fiction / Women
Pages: 384
Format: Paperback
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“Bumpier journeys lead to better destinations. You. Me. We’re the best destination of all.”
Hallie Welch fell hard for Julian Vos at fourteen, after they almost kissed in the dark vineyards of his family’s winery. Now the prodigal hottie has returned to their small town. When Hallie is hired to revamp the gardens on the Vos estate, she wonders if she’ll finally get that smooch. But the grumpy professor isn’t the teenager she remembers and their polar opposite personalities clash spectacularly. On sabbatical from his ivy league job, Julian plans to write a novel. But having Hallie gardening right outside his window is the ultimate distraction. She’s eccentric, chronically late, often literally covered in dirt, and so unbelievably beautiful, he can’t focus on anything else. Until he finds an anonymous letter sent by a woman from his past. Even as Julian wonders about this admirer, he’s sucked further into Hallie’s orbit. Like the flowers she plants all over town, Hallie is a burst of color in Julian’s gray-scale life. For a man who irons his socks and runs on tight schedules, her sunny chaotic energy makes zero sense. But there’s something so familiar about her… and her very presence is turning his world upside down.
Now I am a huge fan of Tessa Bailey, but this one fell way short for me. I’m not sure if it was the story in general or the characters that I just couldn’t get into. In the beginning it was going great, in the middle of kind of fell off, then it picked up again, and then finally it fell off again. I was rushing to finish it because I just wanted to get over it already. Most of the characters didn’t have much personality and I didn’t connect with them. The ending was good, but it was a bit predictable. Overall, it was an okay book that had good romance but lacked depth.
I rated this novel with three stars. There were several aspects that I didn’t like about the book including the pacing, the characters (except Julian), the miscommunication at the end and the plot was all over the place. The pacing was slow throughout the book and the plot dragged. There were a few interesting parts, but I didn’t feel engaged in the story and the storyline was inconsistent.