"Coming Home to You" by Barbara Rohr

Kate Kennedy has left Boston and come home to Gull Harbor, Michigan. Her mother has suffered a stroke and is recovering in a care facility, and Kate’s older sister is too busy with her business in New York City. Kate has not only left Boston behind; she’s also left her former husband, and their final divorce decree is imminent. 

Cole Campbell is a developer in Gull Harbor, determined to make sure that the town doesn’t go the way of so many other towns and die. Not everyone in town is thrilled with the changes he’s bringing. Cole is divorced from the girl he dated in high school and then married; no one knows the whole story, but she’s off in California and he has full custody of their young daughter. 

 

In high school, Cole and Kate were on the debate team together. He’s two years older, and Kate always had a crush on him, and perhaps more than a crush. But he broke her heart by taking the girl he eventually married to the senior prom. Kate finds herself just as attracted to him more than 10 years later, but she doesn’t like how he’s changing the town. And she joins the opposition, including secretly printing and distributing leaflets opposing Cole’s plans.

 

Barbara Lohr

Coming Home to You by Barbara Lohr is the story of Kate and Cole, and it turns on several narrative themes – the romance between Kate and Cole, Kate’s decision on whether or not to return to Boston, Kate’s relationship with her mother and older sister, and Cole’s plans to revitalize and save Gull Harbor.

 

Lohr is the author of numerous romance novels, developed under three series. The Windy City series is comprised of seven novels, as is the Man from Yesterday series (Coming Home to You is the first in this series). She’s also published two novels in the Friends to Lovers series, as well as three novellas and several short stories. She lives in the South. 

 

Will Kate’s anti-development activity become public? Will she resolve longstanding issues with her mother and sister? And will Kate and Cole work through their individual pasts to find each other? Coming Home to You is a fast-reading, entertaining story – and smoothly sets the stage for the novels-to-come in the series.

Cheryl Shireman’s “Cooper Moon: The Calling”

Cooper Moon drinks too much, has trouble holding down a job, and is irresistible to virtually any women in the small town in Michigan he lives in. His long-suffering wife Sally has no illusions about her errant, wandering husband, but she also finds him irresistible, especially when she looks into his eyes. They live in a trailer (mobile home being too fancy a word). Sally works at a local diner. Cooper works wherever he can find employment. 

And then Cooper has an epiphany. He discovers he believes in God, and that God is telling him to build a church. He has no idea where to build it or how to pay for it, but he knows that he’s supposed to build a church. 

Cooper Moon: The Calling by Cheryl Shireman is Cooper Moon’s story. And it’s a surprise. It’s the kind of novel you might expect to find set in the Deep South, like Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Café by Fannie Flagg or Crazy in Alabama by Mark Childress. Instead, it’s set in Michigan. Who knew people in Michigan could be as crazy as people in the Deep South? (I can ask that question; I was born and raised in the Deep South.) 

Cheryl Shireman

Shireman keeps us guessing throughout the entire story. Will Cooper build his church? Will he finish it before an irate husband burns it down? And what about the irate wives, none of whom are pleased with Cooper’s new direction? Or the pastor of the big church in town who doesn’t like the idea of competition?  

Carefully and almost joyfully the author weaves these stories together with several others, including the town’s police officer whose wife desperately wants a baby and instead has to deal with her mother-in-law slipping into dementia, and his brother who’s in serious training for a reality TV show, and Sally Moon herself becoming entrepreneurial, and characters (female) trying to dissuade Cooper – some rather strenuously – from his new calling. 

This is one rollicking novel, and you’re never quite sure what’s going to happen next. But there is a sequel – Cooper Moon: The Temptation – and Shireman is working on a third novel in the series. 

When I started reading it, I wasn’t quite sure where this story was going to go. But I held on. And I’m glad I did. (And it's currently free on Amazon Kindle.)

The Deep South arrives in Michigan!