Title: Love of a Lifetime (formerly published as Love, Lies, and Homemade Pies)
Author: Sally Bayless
Date: 2019
Publisher; Kimberlin Belle
ISBN: 978-1-946034-08-3
Quote: "Cara wasn't a professional mechanic."
But she has an idea how to fix the car she passed on the road, in which the mayor just happened to be stuck. Right away the new girl in the little town of Abundance has a job in the town hall. Right away she meets, and likes, the editor of the town newspaper--except that she doesn't want any news about her to be known. Cara, short for Caroline Ann, used to be known as Ann and work with her father...before he was sent to prison. Now she's looking for a fresh start in a place where no one remembers her family business, which she always believed was legitimate; with her father being in prison her townsfolk were venting their feelings on her.
Then money is stolen from the town hall. Could Cara have done it? Who is Cara, anyway, and why is she so secretive about her past? For a few minutes even her admirer, Will at the newspaper, thinks about running a headline that accuses Cara: like father like daughter. They share a taste for the sweet treats sold at a local bakery, but what does he really know about her?
Then, realizing that he hates Cara's being in jail (she can't afford to post bail), he gets busy acting like a real newsman, finding out who did have means and motive to steal the money. But this is not a mystery, it's a romance. The mystery is solved with one guess and the couple will live happily-ever-after.
It's a Christian romance, specifically. It's part of a series; in each volume a different character quotes different texts from a different translation of the Bible. (In the 1980s, at least where I was, there was controversy about whether to call "The Living Bible" a translation or a commentary, and The Message was unmistakably a commentary. Both are paraphrases--free interpretations that reflect individuals' background and beliefs. Some characters in this series quote TLB and The Message. If authentic, this would mean that Christians were more liberal in Missouri than on the East Coast, or maybe the standards varied by denomination.)
Some tropes are all very well in their way, but they're used more often in fiction than they seem actually to happen in the real world. Romance itself is one of them. I enjoy stories where people marry each other and live happily ever after, but I love stories, much more common in real life and less common in fiction, where people have adventures, stay single, and live happily ever after.
"Everyone is happier when all the secrets are told" is another one of that kind. In real life, sometimes unfolding all the secrets leaves everyone happier, and sometimes it leaves them less happy, and sometimes everyone's better off when some of the secrets will never be known. Love of a Lifetime is a very sweet story. (A little too sweet. Will and Cara share the lifelong taste for sweets that identifies a genetic predisposition to alcoholism and/or diabetes.) Abundance is a sweet little town. Small town people who have learned to say "It's their business not mine" and "I don't need to know anything about that" are rare, but they exist. A story I'd like to read might be about a town where most or all the characters have learned that they can be happier when they don't pry into each other's affairs. I like to know where people came from and what they're doing in my town, too, but I don't take offense and suspect them of being criminals if they don't tell me their life stories.
But this story is set in 1980, tapping into the fad for 1980s nostalgia. (Which makes me chortle because in the 1980s a major part of pop culture was remembering as much as one could about the 1960s, Working was back in fashion and freshman-class baby-boomers, as P.J. O'Rourke named people my age, were always trying to keep up and fit in with the senior-class boomers with whom we worked.) That "let's tell all the secrets" line of thinking was very much a part of the Age of Therapy so, like other details in this book, it belongs in the 1980 atmosphere. People did oldfashioned pre-electronic jobs; women damaged our carpal tunnels whacking staplers; people who liked or used computers were expected to be eccentric, which made computers all the more attractive to young people who felt socially awkward and made people like Will and Cara leave us alone. And women carried "buttery soft leather" purses, in those yellowish and orange-ish brown tones that made bornw-eyed redheads look so fabulous and made the rest of us look as if we'd been ill. And the grocery store that was about to sell out to a big chain probably had a big cash register that rattled in a special way when it added up prices, with a little bell that went ka-ching when the cash drawer popped open. And people enjoyed stories where everyone ws happier for all the secrets being told.
If you are a Christian who enjoys small-town Midwestern romances (Abundance, we're told, is in Missouri) that expand into series and are set in the totally awesome Eighties, this novel is for you.
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