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There’s no other way to say it, darlings, but Virtual Book Club is tomorrow. So, if you’re going to be joining us in discussing A Treacherous Curse, A Veronica Speedwell Mystery #3 by Deanna Raybourn, you had best speed up that audiobook tout de suite! You have approximately 32 hours to complete your reading before 7:30pm Central Time and the beginning of our discussion about the curse of the Egyptian Princess Ankheset from the Eighteenth Dynasty and the shenanigans of Veronica and Stoker. By the time you are reading this blog post, both Nikki and Ashley will have finished the book – go us – and be ready to get their feelings out to you, our fellow readers. So SIGN UP HERE!

Now that we’re solidly in the second week of December, please pull up your favorite chair and join us in our comfort.  Yes, today we are solidly in comfort reads territory, dare I even say … blankie reads?!  It is definitely a phrase that comes to mind for this author, but I think I’ve only heard folks use “blankie” to describe their ultimate comfort shows, and darling readers, that level of comfort applies here, at least for Ashley and me.  Yes, we love romances, the ones with the doors wide open, and we adore Pippa Grant, as you may recall, even if she makes us regret drinking and reading on occasion.  We have read all of the books she’s written (by herself) and published except the latest, and we even got Advanced Review Copies of today’s title, Rich in Your Love (Tickled Pink #2)!  Thanks to NetGalley and Montlake Publishing, with a little help from Pippa Grant’s Facebook Group, we received ARCs that have been burning a hole in our Kindles until the last few days.  As usual, all opinions are our own.

Darling readers, you know we are sticklers and we do tend to follow the order when reading our books, with limited exceptions for romance series, because we know how those end.  This is not one of those series I’d suggest you skip around on, because the setup is glorious, ridiculous, and complex.  Let me set the scene painted in The One Who Loves You (Tickled Pink #1): we have a rich, cut throat Manhattan family, with a matriarch who has a near death experience and desperately needs to facilitate her family redeeming their souls, just like the movie that made the town of Tickled Pink a tourist attraction, briefly, years ago.  She buys the abandoned high school and makes her socialite family move in, because she’s frozen their trust funds, and help clean and renovate it for themselves to live in while they do good deeds for the town for a year.  Hilarious, vulnerable drama ensues.  It is over the top, and I loved it, and was thrilled to know it was the start of a series.  Fast forward to Rich in Your Love, the baby of the Lightly family, social influencer Tavi, is up to some things and needs to keep them a secret while also following Gigi’s rules, so she can get her trust fund back and get out of town.  One of those rules is to use her influencer power to help the locals set up their own socials to support consistent tourism after the Lightlys leave town, souls redeemed.  Dylan, the local bad boy turned good guy plumber, is selected to be Tavi’s first approved project.  Both Tavi and Dylan have histories of not being the best versions of themselves, but they’re already working SO hard at redeeming themselves well before Gigi decides it’s needed.  These two are amazing main characters because they’ve been doing the work for years, but they aren’t done yet, and demonstrate how their families of origin can bring out the child within, which feels like an important reminder this time of year.  

Visit Tickled Pink for a deep, yet light-hearted romantic comedy, and stay for the side stories and supporting characters that enrich the experience of the story.  Snowshoe baseball in the summer, a cafe run by sisters who only serves the good coffee to the people they like, and secrets galore make what could be a ho hum story a fantastic hang, with bonus points for LGBTQIA+ characters and awareness.  I’m giving Rich in Your Love a solid four stars.  It was a great reading experience, but I am not as likely to reread it as some of Pippa’s other books.  I am very much looking forward to the next title in the series, and consuming reading the last published Pippa Grant book with my favorite reading buddy very soon.  

Who’s an author who you’ve read all their books and are not so patiently awaiting for more?

~Nikki 

Pippa Grant is a USA Today and #1 Amazon bestselling author of romantic comedies. She has also written other romances under the name Jamie Farrell, but we haven’t read any of those, yet. When she’s not sleeping, reading, or writing stories about ridiculous, almost unbelievable hijinks, “she’s being crowned employee of the month as a stay-at-home mom and housewife trying to prepare her adorable demon spawn to be productive members of society.” I’m so grateful that her demon spawn allow her to write as much as she does, because we absolutely love everything we have read of hers.

As Nikki stated above, the premise of the Tickled Pink series of books is very important. Unlike some other romance series they truly need to be read in order so don’t jump into Rich in Your Love before having read The One Who Loves You. It is immensely important to learn about the townies of Tickled Pink, Wisconsin, to understand the role they each play in the saga of Dylan and Tavi. Tickled Pink Floyd is an important player in book two, who is a different person from Deer Drop Floyd, and without the prior knowledge of Tickled Pink Floyd’s role in the story of Phoebe and Teague you won’t know how important these distinctions are for the story.

What I love about a romantic comedy by Pippa Grant is that it takes a highly unlikely situation – a society family living in small town America in order to save their souls – and makes it over the top, while also getting down to the humanity of the characters. Tavi might be a vegan instagram influencer, but she has family trauma, body issues, and more goals and desires than fit into the persona she has created for mass consumption on the internet. Dylan has gone through life with the thought that he was in love with his childhood best friend for years even though she married someone else. He has to grow to accept the person he had become since high school, realizing that this new person is the real him, not the troubled boy and young man he was over a decade before.

Rich in Your Love is a testament to the power of change in a person’s life and the need for self-awareness, -acceptance, and -actualization. I am giving this deep and emotional roller coaster of a romance novel four solid stars. It definitely exceeded expectations in several ways but not quite enough to warrant a re-read in the future. Always here for the next Pippa Grand romance to plop right onto my TBR.

~Ashley

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