| One Reckless Summer |  | Author: Toni Blake
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Category: eBooks
In Stock
Rating:  28 reviews
Sales Rank: 32,288
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Edition: Original
Pages: 384
Number Of Items: 1
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
Publication Date: May 21, 2009
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Product Description
It's tough to play it cool on a sultry summer night . . . The perfect daughter. The perfect prom queen. The perfect wife. Jenny Tolliver's been the good girl all her life, and it's gotten her nowhere. Now that her marriage has been busted up by her cheating ex, she's decided it's time to regroup and rediscover herself. This summer she's headed back to her hometown of Destiny, Ohio, to the very lakeshore cottage where she grew up, to figure out what life holds in store for her next. She never dreamed the answer would be Mick Brody, Destiny's #1 hellraiser. He comes from the wrong side of the tracks (or in his case, the lake), and he's landed in hot water more times than he can count. He's exactly the kind of guy Jenny's always kept her distance from . . . but soon the good girl and the bad boy are caught in a raw heat that's out of control. Too bad Mick's got a secret that threatens to tear them apart and ruin Jenny's perfectly, passionately reckless summer . . .
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 28
 Loved every minute...... September 9, 2010
Krista Lyn (Minneapolis, MN)
Boy did I ever love this book!
This was an all night read for me. I value my sleep and don't give it up for just anything. This one was worth every lost moment in dreamland. I loved it!
Mick and Jenny knew each other as teenagers, but that is where their commonality ended. He came from poverty and abuse, she came from affluence and security. When they meet again as adults, the passion that simmered as teens boils over into something so hot that I felt like the pages were going to burst into flames. Seriously, their first encounter is a good enough reason to read this book ASAP!
This book did all the things that great books do. It was captivating, steamy, heart breaking, redeeming, and transforming. I looked how both Jenny and Mick became better people throughout the book. More tolerating, accepting, and willing to compromise and change to be together. The tension between these two is awesome, and I wanted them to get their happily ever after. This is great stuff. The only issue I have is that this is the second Toni Blake book that I've read where the hero nickname's the heroine"Cat" or "Kitty" or some other weird feline name. Maybe she's got a thing for cats, but it got really old and tiresome. Other than that...no complaints on this one. Loved it!
The lake, the lust, the lemon bars... August 22, 2010
JenB
Jenny Tolliver is recently divorced and comes back to her quaint Mayberry-like lakefront hometown to hide out and recoup after her marriage ends. Mick Brody is the bad-boy from the other side of the lake that Jenny remembers being afraid of as a teen, but now he is all grown up. She decides to let her wild side free and have an illicit afair with him... but what would people in her town think of good girl Jenny if they knew what she was up to? This is the premise for this amazing love story.
I loved this book, for me it was everything a romance novel should be. A couple with lots and lots of chemistry, going through real life struggles of love and loss. I loved the lake setting, there is something so perfectly romantic about a couple rowing a boat back and forth across a lake to see each other. There were steamy scenes and also some really emotional ones that had enough of a pull on your heartstrings. I liked the quaint town stuff too - the women in their flowery dresses, going to parties and serving deviled eggs. It may be a little cutesy but I found it was part of illustrating the conflict of the good girl/bad boy, and the reality of obstacles like being from the wrong side of the tracks. I got so into this couple that when their conflict moment came I really felt pangs of hurt for them. This one is a keeper I will re-read again.
I will definitely read more books by this author.
 Liked It - 3.5 stars July 23, 2010
J. Holmes (Atlanta, GA)
I wasn't sure about this book at first. The whole getting a divorce because she was "too good" didn't grab me. I wished that Jenny & Mick would have met up, as adults, in a different way too. I'm not against hot sex in the woods, but I think it happened too quickly. Once I got over these two things, it turned into a pretty good story.
Lake-Crossed Lovers July 4, 2010
The book lady
After her divorce Jenny comes back to her home town to spend her summer at her childhood home and lick her wounds. When her husband left her because she was too good she decided to rebel, and that rebellion takes shape in the form of Mick, a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, or lake in this case, who had more than one run in with the law in his younger days.
I loved the beginning of this book. The first half is just wonderful and I especially liked Jenny's father, and her best friend Sue Ann. I also really liked the progression of her relationship with Mick who is tender and considerate (in trying to get into Jenny's pants) and shows he really had changed from the boy she knew in her younger days. But after about the halfway point I got frustrated by the fact Jenny put up with Mick's booty calls. He just shows up, they talk for about 3 minutes they get it on and he leaves and this is the extent of their relationship for the first 3/4th of the book. He has a good reason to leave when he does but I can't understand a woman trying to take control of her life through her sexuality would let a man call all the shots like that, even if it wasn't a real relationship, just a fling.
The ending was rather unfulfilling in a way because it was all about Mick coming to terms with living on the other side of the lake and not at all about Jenny being more than just a good girl, meaning getting mad at Mick when she had just as much right to be mad at him as he had to be mad at her and it just seemed that things were wrapped up a little too quickly.
But for all my complaints this is a wonderful book, even just for the town and lovable characters. I would have to hear about Sue Ann's romance with her husband but I have a feeling that isn't going to be a part of this Destiny series but I will most likely check out some of the others. Hopefully the there will be more interactions between the leads without sex involved. Not that I didn't like the sex scenes but you can't fall in love with someone when you don't talk to them.
4 stars.
 Too much description, not enough story July 1, 2010
Zosia (Australia)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I'm going to have to go against the grain here and say I am extremely disappointed with this book. I'd seen it compared to Robyn Carr's Virgin River series, but - sex scenes aside - it read more as a small town cosy. The first half of the book was so slow I didn't think I could possibly rate this above one star, but it picked up a bit as the story went on. By the end I enjoyed the story quite a bit, but I had so many issues with this book.
Jenny is a `good girl', and her husband cheated on her, claiming that was the reason he did it. Newly divorced, she returns to her home town and starts having an affair with former town bad boy, Mick. Mick is there in secret and keeping a massive secret of his own that would get him in huge trouble if people found out. This is a fairly simple plot, which is probably why I didn't enjoy it much. Next to nothing happened, and the relationship between Jenny and Mick consisted solely of him turning up at her door for sex, and then leaving again. It wasn't enough for me, and after a while I wanted more than sex from the leading couple. A little more plot wouldn't have been unwelcome either.
The sex was good. There was plenty of it and it was written well. It didn't quite seem to fit the characters though. I thought Mick's tragedy was nicely-written and quite emotional, but that only took up a few pages of the book.
There was far too much pondering. After a few pages of introductory pondering, the story started with a bang (of sorts), before dissolving into a good seventy or eighty pages of nothing much happening. Sure, we found out what colour everyone's clothes were, and got lots of teen-level gossiping between the thirty-something characters, but there wasn't an actual story. Telling, telling, telling and not one iota of showing. I could have made a drinking game out of how many times we heard about Jenny tingling between her legs and her nipple reactions whenever Mick was within a four hundred-thousand mile radius. And then her father started having groin-tingles about a woman of his own! It was like an erotica author was having a go at writing a conservative story but kept slipping up.
This was one of those annoying small towns, where everyone's so GOOD. They all go to church and run cute little businesses and wear pearls and twin sets and attend tea parties with all the old biddies. Everybody was offended by things that weren't offensive, and everyone was so old-fashioned. It was scary, and I couldn't at all identify with most of the characters in the story.
Jenny wasn't quite too stupid to live, but she had a few TSTL moments. It's a common problem for me in these small town romances. All the women are so impossibly naive and GOOD. They do annoying, stupid things that put the hero in jeopardy because they've lived such sheltered lives they think their meddling is the best thing to do in any situation. I just can't identify with them, and quite frankly, I couldn't see the appeal Jenny had. Why would Mick be so attracted to boring little Jenny in her 1950s outfits? I don't understand women like that, and I struggled to find anything to latch onto to make me sympathise with such a sheltered, naive character.
It was strange then that all the characters spent so much time discussing their sex lives in disturbing detail. These GOOD women discussing exactly what their lovers do with ice cubes?! It didn't ring true for the characters. And because there was nothing but sex to the main relationship, all we got in the way of conversation between the friends was rehashing of the sex we'd only just read about. It really dragged.
Both characters became more likeable as the story went on, and in the last third I was invested in their relationship. I only wish there had been more to like in the beginning.
I had some trouble getting into the writing style of this book. We met so many people, and as soon as they came onto the page we learnt the length, colour and style of their hair; what they were wearing and what colour it was; and what they'd been like back in high school. And then we got updates on what they were doing now. There were big information dumps all over the place for no good reason. I don't ever need to know what colour a minor character's jacket is! It was especially strange as we didn't even learn Jenny's eye colour until about a hundred and fifty pages in. And even then that was the only information we got about her appearance. I simply could not picture her. Was she tall, short, thin, fat, blonde, brunette, pretty, hideous??!! The first mention of her hair came on page 185!! I know things like that shouldn't matter, but I need something to picture her by!
I wasn't buying the instant magnetic attraction thing the hero and heroine were supposed to have. They ran into each other in the forest in the dark, weren't even sure what the other person looked like - two completely different people arguing about trespassing on private property - and we're supposed to believe from that they're destined to have wild sex? I just didn't buy it.
I was really hoping to find this more like Virgin River (minus all the things I hate about that series, like the all the babies and the medical stuff). In fact I was really excited by the possibility of finding a Robyn Carr replacement. But I didn't find it here. I liked some things about this book, and hold out some hope for the next book in this series - Sugar Creek - as the heroine is a far worldlier and potentially more relatable character. I'd love to find some more contemporary romances set in towns that aren't populated by such infuriatingly narrow-minded characters, but maybe the next book will be more satisfying in that respect.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 28
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