Review: It Had to Be Him

Title: It Had to Be HimSeries: It Had to Be Series
Author: Tamra Baumann
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Genre: Romance
278 pages
Release Date: April 2015

Even though Meg Anderson’s hell-raising days are over, coming home to Anderson Butte isn’t easy, especially when her impossible-to-please dad is the mayor and her do-gooder siblings run the place. But with another job lost and the gorgeous father of her daughter trying to make contact after disappearing three years ago, a break is definitely in order. Hopefully the little town filled with big, juicy secrets can help.

After being off the grid for years, Josh Granger, a man with his own secrets, wants Meg and his daughter back. But first he has to get past townspeople as protective as a pack of rottweilers. He’s not the man Meg thinks he is, but he can’t tell her why…not yet.

As Meg slowly warms to Josh, it’s clear the old spark is still there. But when his secret is exposed—along with Meg’s own shocking revelation—will it tear their family apart again, or bind them forever?

-taken from Goodreads

I'm kind of weird about the order in which I read books. If I read a complex mystery or something really heavy and dark, then I can't just switch to a YA novel or a comedy memoir immediately after that. For some reason in my brain, making that switch harms my perception of the lighter/younger stuff, so that's where romance novels come in.

Romance novels are my palette cleanser.

Now I'm not trying to be rude to romance novels so let me also say I LOVE romance novels. That's pretty much all I read growing up (my grandmother ran her church library and clean romance novels are the heart's blood of church libraries) and I still read a lot of them. They're the perfect escape from reality - they're usually light fluffy reads intended to have a feel-good ending.

Anyway, after reading the long epic novel, Kushiel's Dart, I needed a palette cleanser so I downloaded It Had to Be Him from Amazon's Kindle First program. It was very cute - what really made it stand out to me was the variety of unique characters. Meg's gun-toting grandmother is hilarious and doesn't hesitate to shoot trespassers - even if the trespassers are part of her family. Meg has a strained relationship with her father, and yet fixing that relationship isn't really a focus in the story. Her siblings are all very protective of each other in very different ways - all in all, I just really loved everyone. I'll probably be looking into books in the same series in the future.



Buy it: Amazon (free with Kindle Unlimited!), Barnes and Noble