New Book Review: Rustic Denim Love

Title: Rustic Denim Love

Buy it from my Bookshop

Author: Frances Dell'Alba

Date: 2024

Publisher: Poinsettia

Length: 306 pages

ISBN: 9780645116267

Quote: "You know I'll always stand by Dad, sorry but...there must be a fire!"

There is a fire. Zoe dashes off to do her bit and soon finds herself, singed and bruised, tumbling down the steep bank into deep water along with a handsome young man. He just happens to be Flynn, the marketing expert she was about to consult on behalf of the Herberton historic village in Queensland, Australia (a real place btw). There is something about fighting fires together while young and single...it's a contemporary romance. You know how that goes.

But it's not only a contemporary romance. Flynn is one of Ella's rich American relatives, whom we met in Little Black Box, who are "Australian At Heart." He wanted to come to Queensland to find out more about his family and see if he can't find a job and/or a wife while he's there. 

In the process of discovering both with Zoe, who has a unique (we can hope) way of throwing herself at a man while being excitingly elusive at the same time, Flynn will also be bitten by a snake, fight another fire, solve a murder mystery, try to save the life of one of those new-found relatives, lift substantial weights (including Zoe), and take the chance of premarital pregnancy more than once in the same day. He identifies as a cardiac patient but his heart seems to be pretty sound. (I had a brother-in-law like that once.) 

Zoe is Highly Sensory-Perceptive, which makes her the sweetest romantic heroine I've met in this calendar year at least. She deeply loves the parents with whom she's quarrelling on the first page of the book. She bonds with the retirees who volunteer to help maintain the historic village, especially Mavis, who seems to be all alone in the world, and Syd, who is so shy and sneaky that he may be a ghost. She will sit with Mavis in the hospital. 

If you have mixed feelings about "paranormal" fiction, Syd may particularly please you. It's hard to tell whether he's meant to be a fantastically tough, well-preserved, and competent old man (like my late Significant Other, though he wasn't ninety years old) or a ghost who can move objects in the real world. Only Zoe and Mavis ever seem to see him but he does his share of work in aid of the village. I prefer to read him as a man who survived his reported death; you can read him as you choose. 

That's not all. I suspect that someone told the author that Little Blue Box was a sketchy, written-for-Amazon story with a simple plot, and just to show them what she could do, she constructed this novel with a wonderfully complex plot. Taking the real Herberton village as inspiration, she put just about everything into this book. There's a cozy comic mystery as well as the murder, Flynn's habit of phrasing compliments as dad jokes, the history of Queensland, the history of sewing machines, the British royal family, drugs and other addictions, cancer, last-minute jet travel, society weddings, babies, funerals, legacies, spoilt rich brats, and more. 

This web site does not bother with the disclaimer about receiving free copies in exchange for brutally honest reviews, because that's almost the only way I could get new books on the sub-poverty-level income of an Internet writer. We do, when I remember them, use content warnings: The romance is steamier than Little Blue Box, with fairly explicit bedroom scenes. There's no physical violence between characters, but there's physical danger, pain, and deaths. For an attractive man Flynn uses some ugly words--repeatedly.

And, the brutal truth: Although it stands alone, this novel does refer--repeatedly--to episodes in volumes two and three of the series, and the characters refuse to retell those stories here. If you didn't buy volumes two and three, you'll be sorry.

Ella and Zane make an appearance in this book, too. With a child.