Title: Grumpy Contractor Next Door
Author: Josie Frost
Date: February 10, 2026
Quote: "That answer is somehow worse than grumpy. It's careful."
Was it the popularity of Grumpy Cat (said to be a mellow animal with grumpy-looking spots on its face) that made "grumpy" into what Harlequin calls a hook?
Hooks are the elements in romance novels that attract certain readers: cowboys or European aristocrats, country inns or bookstores or bakeries, Texas or a Greek island or a New England village. "Grumpy" is definitely a hook featured in the titles of many romances these days, but more often than not it doesn't mean grumpy. Often it means quiet, calm, thinking before the character acts.
That's why a set of romance readers deeply love the "grumpy" characters, I'm sure. I don't think it's a good thing. I think "grumpy" ought to mean grumpy, actively discontented, intentionally discouraging, quick to anger, the sort of sore-headed personality that can be considered attractive only when it's the way very immature people react to the anxiety of feeling that they like someone more than the person likes them. I also think that the consummation of a "grumpy" romance ought to be that the character stops saying he hates all girls, or agrees to go to the prom. Characters who really are grumpy have, at best, a long way to go toward being fit for anyone to wed or even bed.
Fortunately Grumpy Contractor Next Door is one of those novels where neither of the characters is grumpy at all. Both are quiet. They're quiet because they're serious people who don't want to rush into relationships--the sort of steady, responsible, reliable introverts so many readers would love to meet.
Less fortunately, they see themselves through that awful extrovert lens that makes so many introverts feel that we're supposed to be grumpier or more panic-prone, or something, than we really are. It does not take some terrible trauma to make nice people quiet, serious, and responsible.
In this novel Jack and Lily have left the same city, and come to the same small town to make a fresh start, because each of them had a terrible trauma on their "big career-type" jobs. Neither is in any hurry to tell the reader what the jobs were but, when they do, their confessions to each other will give them opportunities to impress each other. Meanwhile she manages the town's inn and he does the town's handyman work, and it's hard for them to believe how well liked they are. He's decided to stay in Willow Harbor first; he wants to make sure she's decided to stay, for her own reasons, before making any commitment to become another reason for her to stay.
It's a sweet romance about lovable characters so you know how it will end. The question is whether the conversations work for you. They work for me. We may still be a few years away from admitting, as a society, that people like Jack and Lily take their time getting acquainted because they want to take their time, but at least their terrible trauma is easily resolved and they stay quiet, serious, and responsible even through the happy ending of the book.
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