Rainy Day Friends by Jill Shalvis

BOOK REVIEW

JILL SHALVIS

Rainy Day Friends

Rainy Day Friends by Jill Shalvis is every bit the fun and emotional page-turner I thought it would be. Not only did the pages fly by in reading, but the characters ingrained themselves into memory. Lanie, Mark, and the entire Capriotti family are an easy group to like and love, and you immediately feel a kinship with all of them.

Lanie Jacobs is a woman with a life in shambles. Six months ago, her husband died and shortly thereafter, she discovered she wasn’t his only wife. Now she’s doing her best to scrape herself together and begin a new life, one that isn’t as anxiety-fueled as the one she left behind to work at the Capriotti Winery.

Mark Capriotti is a single father of twin daughters and the deputy sheriff of Wildstone. He’s an easy-going charmer with a sense of humor that will immediately draw readers to like him, the same way readers will be drawn to like Lanie and follow her on her search for life after loss, hurt, and disappointment.

Rich setting details, deep characterization, and emotionally compelling writing easily make Rainy Day Friends my favorite read of the year.

A heartwarming story of love, loss, friendship, secrets, and betrayal, Rainy Day Friends takes its reading audience through a wide gamut of emotions and all of it is geared to bring Shalvis’s readers on a journey through the heart and soul of two lonely, broken people who must learn how to live, laugh, and love again.

I would give this book 10 stars if I could, I loved it so much!

ABOUT THE BOOK

RAINY DAY FRIENDS

Author: Jill Shalvis

Series: Wildstone #2

Publisher: HarperCollins

Imprint: William Morrow Paperbacks

Genre: Fiction | Contemporary | Romance

Pages: 384

Following the USA Today bestseller, Lost and Found Sisters, comes Rainy Day Friends, Jill Shalvis’ moving story of heart, loss, betrayal, and friendship.

Six months after Lanie Jacobs’ husband’s death, it’s hard to imagine anything could deepen her sense of pain and loss. But then Lanie discovers she isn’t the only one grieving his sudden passing. A serial adulterer, he left behind several other women who, like Lanie, each believe she was his legally wedded wife. Rocked by the infidelity, Lanie is left to grapple with searing questions. How could she be so wrong about a man she thought she knew better than anyone? Will she ever be able to trust another person?  Can she even trust herself?

Desperate to make a fresh start, Lanie impulsively takes a job at the family-run Capriotti Winery. At first, she feels like an outsider among the boisterous Capriottis. With no real family of her own, she’s bewildered by how quickly they all take her under their wing and make her feel like she belongs. Especially Mark Capriotti, a gruffly handsome Air Force veteran turned deputy sheriff who manages to wind his way into Lanie’s cold, broken heart—along with the rest of the clan. Everything is finally going well for her, but the arrival of River Green changes all that. The fresh-faced twenty-one-year old seems as sweet as they come…until her dark secrets come to light—secrets that could destroy the new life Lanie’s only just begun to build.

BUY LINKS for RAINY DAY FRIENDS

Amazon: https://amzn.to/2so9RUr

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Book Excerpt

From RAINY DAY FRIENDS:

Chapter 1

Anxiety Girl, able to jump to the worst conclusion in a single bound!

Most of the time Karma was a bitch, but every once in awhile she could be surprisingly nice, even kind. Lanie Jacobs, way past overdue for both of those things, told herself this was her time. Seize the day and all that, and drawing a deep breath, she exited the highway at Wildstone.

The old wild-west California town was nestled in the rolling hills between the Pacific Coast and wine/ranching country. She’d actually grown up not too far from here, though it felt like a lifetime ago. The road was narrow and curvy, and since it’d rained earlier, she added tricky and slick to her growing list of issues. She was already white-knuckling a sharp turn when a kamikaze squirrel darted into her lane, causing her to nearly swerve into oncoming traffic before remembering the rules of country driving.

Never leave your lane; not for weather, animals, or even God himself.

Luckily the squirrel reversed direction, but before she could relax a trio of deer bounded across the road. “Run, Bambi,” she cried, hitting her brakes, and by the skin of their collective teeth, they all missed each other.

Sweating, nerves sizzling like live wires, she finally turned onto Capriotti Lane and parked as she’d been instructed.

It took a moment for her pulse to come down from stroke level. She’d been taught anti-anxiety techniques, but she’d never quite figured out how to make any of them work while in the actual throes of an anxiety attack.

It’s all good she told herself but because she wasn’t buying what she was selling, she had to force herself out of the car like she was a five year old starting kindergarten instead of being thirty and simply facing a brand new job. Given all she’d been through, this should be easy, even fun. But sometimes adulthood felt like the vet’s office and she was the dog excited for the car ride — only to find out the real destination.

Shaking her head, she strode across the parking lot. It was April, which meant the rolling hills to the east were green and lush and the Pacific Ocean to the west looked like a surfer’s dream, all of it so gorgeous it could’ve been a postcard. A beautiful smoke screen over her not-so-beautiful past. The air was scented like a really expensive sea-and-earth candle, though  all Lanie could smell was her forgotten hopes and dreams. With wood chips crunching under her shoes, she headed through the entrance beneath which was a huge wooden sign that read:

Capriotti Winery, from our fields to your table…

Her heart sped up. Nerves, of course, the bane of her existence. But after a very crappy few years, she was changing her path. For once in her godforsaken life, something was going to work out for her. This was going to work out for her.

She was grimly determined.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

New York Times bestselling author Jill Shalvis lives in a small town in the Sierras full of quirky characters. Any resemblance to the quirky characters in her books is, um, mostly coincidental. Look for Jill’s bestselling, award-winning books wherever romances are sold and visit her website, www.jillshalvis.com, for a complete book list and daily blog detailing her city-girl-living-in-the-mountains adventures.

Connect with Jill

Website: http://jillshalvis.com/

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Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/22370.Jill_Shalvis