Title: Me and the Cute Catastrophe
Author: Jessie Gussman
Date: 2021
Quote: "[M]y name is Claire Harding and I'm a home nurse, divorced with two girls."
And with gray hair. We meet one of the three narrators of this romance hiding from Trey, the man she used to have a crush on, because she's halfway through dyeing her hair. Trey, who used to have a crush on Claire, too, is getting flabby around the middle but decides to fight it, while he's back in Good Grief, Idaho, coaching the boys' basketball team. Claire doesn't really coach the girls' team so much as lead the girls in community service projects, and the girls love her, they tell her at one point in the story, they really do, but they'd like to win a game some time. Trey comes to their rescue.
It's a romance. Trey doesn't care that Claire's hair is gray. Claire didn't really notice Trey's flab. Gussman delivers reader's money's worth of family-friendly rom-com scenes with kids, dogs, and social life, but the main goal of the story is to get Trey and Claire into the church. (They're Christians; they don't talk about it much.) Getting Claire's sister, who is also divorced and who gets to narrate some of this first-person present-tense story just to make it a little more of a challenge to read, happily remarried will come in the next volume.
If you like a romance whose characters probably liked Charles Schulz (and act a bit like his characters, Charlie Brown and the Little Red-Haired Girl, grown up) you'll probably want the whole series of stories about how the population of the town of Good Grief get married.
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