Blog Archives
Second Chances: A Later in Life Love Story
Jodi Culliney’s Second Chances is a warm, emotionally generous romance about people who’ve already lived full, complicated lives and are still brave enough to want more. At the center are Charlotte Berg, a newly divorced English teacher looking for a fresh start, and Henry Livingston, a small-town auto shop owner carrying decades of regret, loyalty, and loneliness. Their relationship unfolds in Beverley, South Dakota, where family history, old heartbreak, town gossip, and late-life desire all overlap in a way that feels busy, lived-in, and affectionate.
What makes the book especially engaging is the way it gives Henry and Charlotte room to be adults. They’re attracted to each other, absolutely, but the romance isn’t just about chemistry. It’s about hesitation, timing, misread signals, and the vulnerability of trusting someone after disappointment. Charlotte’s move to Beverley gives her a new community, while Henry’s connection to her forces him to confront the unfinished parts of his past, especially his complicated history with Melanie and Diadema.
The novel also works as a family drama. Henry’s son Josh, future daughter-in-law Effie, niece Cait, brother George, and best friend-like town connections give the story a wide emotional circle. The late revelation involving Sophie adds another layer to Henry’s life, shifting the book from a simple second-chance romance into a story about forgiveness, parenthood, and what it means to make room for the unexpected. Amy’s line to Charlotte, “He’s your second chance at forever,” captures the book’s heart without making it feel overly tidy.
Culliney’s style is conversational, nostalgic, and full of sensory detail, from classic rock and coffee scents to snowstorms, diners, rodeo dances, and small-town celebrations. The alternating points of view help the story feel expansive, especially when the past chapters fill in Henry and Melanie’s early marriage and Charlotte’s earlier life with Brady. Those sections give the present-day romance more weight because the reader understands what both characters are risking when they open themselves up again.
By the end, Second Chances is a heartfelt romance about choosing love with your eyes open. It’s sweet, steamy, family-centered, and emotionally sincere, with a strong belief that life can still surprise you after grief, divorce, regret, and years of loneliness. When Charlotte tells Henry, “I choose you, Henry Livingston,” it feels less like a grand gesture and more like the honest arrival point of the whole book: two people deciding that the future is still worth reaching for.
ASIN: B0H4WXGLH7
Mixed Messages: A Love Story
In Mixed Messages by Jodi Culliney, Lana Miller and Liam Livingston collide in New York through one impulsive night that refuses to stay casual. What begins as a nameless, combustible encounter becomes a romance stretched across cities, family loyalties, old wounds, missed texts, and the dangerous question of whether two people can trust what they feel before they fully understand one another. Lana, a brilliant surgeon shaped by class insecurity and betrayal, and Liam, a charming South Dakotan tired of being underestimated, spend the novel trying to reconcile desire with fear, fantasy with reality, and love with the bruising messages they have learned to send themselves.
I was drawn in by the book’s emotional velocity. Culliney writes romance as both spark and excavation: the heat is immediate, but the real story is in what the characters are hiding from themselves. Lana is especially compelling because her guardedness never feels ornamental. Her intelligence, pride, shame, ambition, and longing all jostle inside her, making her retreat from happiness frustrating but believable. Liam could have been only a golden-boy fantasy, but the novel gives him a tender, dented center. His hurt at being dismissed as unserious gives the romance a pleasing ache beneath the flirtation.
I appreciated the book’s crowded, affectionate sense of community. The texts that open chapters give the story a fizzy, modern rhythm, while the South Dakota family network adds warmth, comedy, and just enough meddling to keep the plot buoyant. At times, the novel luxuriates in its emotions; it wants every longing glance, every misread silence, every delayed confession to have room to bloom. For me, that expansiveness worked best when it deepened Lana and Liam’s insecurities. The book has a generous heart, and its best scenes shimmer with the particular suspense of two people who are obviously meant for each other and still might ruin everything.
Readers who enjoy contemporary romance, second-chance romance, family sagas, and emotionally driven romantic fiction will find plenty to savor here. Fans of Abby Jimenez may recognize a similar blend of humor, tenderness, romantic heat, and wounded people slowly learning they are worthy of being chosen. Mixed Messages is for readers who want love stories with banter, ache, meddling relatives, grand gestures, and a happily-ever-after that feels earned by both desire and repair. It’s a lush, heart-forward romance about learning to stop mistranslating love before it has the chance to speak plainly.
Pages: 448 | ASIN: B0FG8CC36G
Cutting Losses: A Redemption Story
Jodi Culliney’s Cutting Losses is a contemporary small-town romance about two people who return to South Dakota carrying the wreckage of old choices. Josh is a surgeon whose life in New York falls apart after a broken engagement, professional failure, and a painful betrayal. Effie is newly separated, bruised by a bad marriage, and trying to rebuild herself in a town that feels both familiar and strange. When their lives cross again in Beverley, the story becomes less about a neat second chance and more about whether two wounded people can be honest enough to choose something better.
What I liked most is that Culliney lets the romance grow out of ordinary spaces. A library. An auto shop. A porch. A diner. A street dance under fairy lights. The setting gives the book warmth, but it never feels like simple decoration. This is a romance deeply tied to place, where South Dakota is not just scenery but part of the emotional weather of the characters. Josh and Effie both have to figure out what “home” means, and I appreciated that the answer is not handed to them too easily. The writing is candid and often funny, especially through Effie’s sharp inner voice, but it also makes room for grief, shame, family history, and the strange embarrassment of starting over as an adult.
I also found the author’s choice to move between several points of view interesting. Josh and Effie carry the heart of the book, but voices like Ruth, Lana, Henry, and Diadema widen the story and make the town feel lived in. Sometimes that broad cast slows the pace, especially when I wanted to stay close to the central romance, but it also gives the book a more generous shape. This is not just a love story between two people. It’s a story about the lies people tell to survive, the truths they avoid because they are afraid, and the quiet courage it takes to stop performing a life that no longer fits.
I would recommend Cutting Losses to readers who enjoy small-town contemporary romance with emotional baggage, family complications, and characters who are old enough to have real regrets. It will especially appeal to readers who like their love stories tender but messy, with humor in the middle of heartbreak and a strong sense of community around the central couple. If you like romance that treats redemption as something earned one honest conversation at a time, this book is worth picking up.
Pages: 344 | ASIN: B0DNZBG88T
Excess Baggage
Jodi Culliney’s Excess Baggage is a warm and emotionally tangled romance about Tess Lefferts, a Brooklyn baker on a cross-country train trip with her gloriously blunt pregnant sister Ruth, and Sam Charles, a writer trying to finish the third book in his series while avoiding airplanes and his own loneliness. Tess is engaged to Josh, her childhood sweetheart, but the farther the train carries her, the more her old life starts to feel like a dress that no longer fits. What begins with lost glasses, monster cookies, a missing engagement ring, and a too-charming waiter named Todd slowly becomes a story about desire, timing, family, and the hard, frightening work of admitting when the safe choice has become the wrong one.
I was surprised by how much I liked the book’s messy emotional honesty. Tess could have easily become a simple “woman torn between two men” heroine, but she feels more bruised and specific than that. Her panic isn’t just about Sam. It’s about being unseen by Josh, being edited down by the life she thought she wanted, and still feeling obligated to honor the girl who once loved him. The train setting gives the romance a lovely sense of suspension, like Tess and Sam are living inside a pocket of borrowed time. Their conversations over tea, wine, Van Morrison, and Sam’s writing have that dreamy almost-unreal quality travel can create, but the book is smart enough to let reality rush back in. I especially liked the ache of Sam’s lost letter, because it turns a romantic misunderstanding into something sharper than a gimmick. Both of them are waiting, wounded, and misreading silence as rejection.
The writing is at its strongest when it leans into intimacy and familial texture. Ruth is a scene-stealer, profane and tender and meddlesome in ways that made me laugh even when I wanted to shake her. Her hiding of the ring and later the invitation is not exactly defensible, but it feels rooted in fierce sisterly terror rather than plot machinery, and that gives the story some bite. I also appreciated how food, music, and books keep threading through the emotional life of the novel. Tess’s baking, especially the monster cookies tied to her grandmother and childhood kitchen, gives her softness and history. Sam’s writer’s block breaking open after meeting Tess is a little grand, but it works because the book is so sincerely interested in how love can reawaken a person’s voice. At times, the prose can run hot, with repeated intensities and a few moments where the longing circles the same feeling, but I didn’t mind much. The excess is part of the book’s unique feel.
The novel isn’t really arguing for impulsive romance so much as it’s arguing for self-recognition, for the courage to stop performing gratitude for a life that’s quietly draining you. I closed the book with affection for its big feelings, its sisterly chaos, and its belief that sometimes the person who helps you lose your baggage is also the one who sees you most clearly. I’d recommend Excess Baggage to readers who enjoy emotional, character-driven contemporary romance with family drama, slow-burn yearning, fated timing, and a heroine who has to break her own heart a little before she can choose joy.
Pages 274 | ASIN: B0D6DWKSLN
