The saga continues...

I've known many women who read all of the books in a series.  Karen Kingsbury is known for writing book series with five to eight books in them.  Series typically drive me crazy because they leave me hanging at the end of the book and I have to wait for the next one.  That happened to me with the Cedar Keys novels.  The books were released so far apart that I couldn't remember what had happened in the other books and who was who.  It was quite frustrating for me.  

When Jen Turano began her series of books that began with A Change of Fortune, I wondered how the series would go.  The first one was a funny melodrama and I had high hopes that this would be a fun, lighthearted series to read.  The first book turned out, in my opinion to be the best one of the series.  The others seemed to all follow the same kind of formula revolving around the same families (which I did like), which seemed to be entirely (entirely!) predictable.  I missed the humor from the first novel in the other books.  

I just finished reading the most recent edition to this series, A Talent for Trouble.  This story centers on Miss Felicia Murdock.  This young woman is crushed when the minister she had been pining for marries another woman.  She's actually quite a spunky lady who has suppressed her own outgoing personality for four years in hopes of being the demure woman the minister might choose to court.  Alas, she was not and the beginning of the novel finds her quite crushed in spirit.  From there, she sets out to remake herself into who she really is--a talkative, bubbly, energetic twenty-something young woman.  Her wardrobe and behavior lose the demureness that had shrouded them for the past four years.  Along the way, Grayson Sumner comes into the picture.  He consistently ends up in her path day after day.  Several times he rescues her from her own naive behavior.  And so the story goes on...

This is a historical Christian romance novel like all the Lori Wick novels and others that are out there.  The focus of this novel definitely more on the romantic element than the historical one.  A Talent for Trouble, like its predecessor A Most Peculiar Circumstance, did not live up to the enjoyment I had in reading A Change of Fortune.  These are stand alone novels and do not need to all be read in order to be understood, but the same characters are linked through the stories.  

Please note that I received a complimentary copy of this book for review from Bethany House Publishing.