There are things about this story I liked, but unfortunately, there are more things that I disliked.

KH is an intelligent writer and I never have a problem with the way her stories flow. This one was written in first person POV and I have no problem with that. I liked the setting and I enjoyed that it involved bakeries, cooking, chefs, etc. I like that there is always humor in her books as well as decent character development. This book had all that.

I do believe I have a love/hate relationship More...

At 400 pages, this book is 100 pages too long. There are some fun things in this book but the heroine wallowed too much in the grief of being widowed. She was so blind to the hero's love that she was cruel to him. And selfish? Oh, man. Even at the end where she finally realized she wanted him, she had to tell him on her timetable. The hero was either a saint or a doormat, depending on how you want to see him. She walked all over him enough for me to vote for the latter. What gripes me the most i More...

Un livre qui commence fort en nous plongeant à pieds joints dans la vie amoureuse de Lucy. Celle-ci est quasi inexistante, torturée, triste et Lucy est tourmentée, déphasée et probablement maudite.
Mauvais tableau au premier abord mais le veuvage de Lucy est abordé simplement sans que cela devienne lourd à force d’en entendre parler.
On se prend en effet très vite d’affection pour Lucy et sa gentillesse. Plus elle nous explique comment est sa famille et comment s’est déroulée sa vie, plus on compr More...

When meeting the man of your dreams, having children, building a life together and growing old together is pretty much the only thing on your minds, and thinking of being apart is the last thing that is brought into the equation. But things to happen to tear us apart, be it divorce or death, and in the end there is not much we can do about it, except fight our way back to the top in our own way.

However we all deal with loss of any kind in our own way and sometimes it changes us for the worse, an More...

Voici la troisième romance par Kristan Higgins que je lis. On y retrouve les thèmes importants: la famille (souvent bien allumée) de l’héroïne, de la cuisine (ici pain et gâteaux et cuisine hongroise mais surtout italienne, le tout vous mettant sacrément l'eau à la bouche), et les deuxième chance après un coup dur ou simplement des relations bancales pour une incorrigible romantique (ici une jeune veuve qui veut la totale mari-enfants-etc. sans la douleur et le chagrin de la perte).
Un coup de cœ More...

I decided to read The Next Best Thing having just finished Somebody To Love. Somebody to Love deals with Parker and Nicky as main characters and with Ethan and Lucy as side characters. The Next Best Thing is Ethan and Lucy's story of how they ended up together. I kind of like that Kristan Higgins did that with the stories. It sort of adds more depth to the characters on both sides.

Lucy and Ethan were friends from school. Lucy married Ethan's brother Jimmy after they fell in love at first sight. More...

Lucy Lang had it all once…until a car accident took her husband. Now, she’s just another in a long line of widows in her family, but rather than accept that fate, Lucy decides she wants to remarry and have children. If she’s going to start dating, though, maybe it’s time to call it quits on the booty calls from her dead husband’s brother. She tells Ethan that part of their relationship is over, but then she becomes upset when Ethan backs off and no longer even seems interested in maintaining the More...

I actually avoided this book for so long because of the generally low reviews and the very overt use of my least favorite, icks-me-out Higgins trope (relationship with a brother figure, in this case a brother-in-law), but I was actually quite fond of protagonist Lucy and her reluctance to get attached to another man after being widowed at a very young age.

I thought the way the relationship between Lucy and her brother-in-law Ethan developed was a) surprising and unexpected and not the approach a More...

Cover & Title - 3 out of 5.
Favorite Character - Ethan.

Jesus christ the first 40% of this book was dull with a capital D. I barely got into the story at all, i actually considered giving up but since 9pm was too early to go to bed i continued. In the end i am glad i continued as i enjoyed the ending (and i hate not finishing a book), that was my favorite bit (maybe actually the only bit i liked - yikes). I found the story really depressing and not in a way that i liked or enjoyed, in fact i More...

Okay, so I thought I might not finish this book because I was getting really frustrated with the main character, Lucy. I admit that I speed read through the last third of the book. I had many conflicting feelings about this story, which is a good thing in that it made me think. At first, I wanted a tidy story without too many conflicts but I think this story was actually more believable. I tried to think about what my relationship with my husband was the first year. You have very few problems an More...

I wish I could give this book 3.5 stars. I liked this book a lot......However, there were just too many issues with the family to make this a true winner for me.
1. Family curse says that husbands will die young. So when Lucy's husband dies after eight months of marriage, she is destined to be a lifelong widow. Her sister Corrine is so obsessed with the curse that she drives her husband crazy. Lucy's worship at her dead husband's altar was getting on my nerves. At some point I just wanted her to More...

Generally Kristan Higgins manages to knot up my throat at one point or another in her books (sometimes it happens more than once), but that moment never happened in The Next Best Thing. Which is a bit of a letdown, considering how this book tackles a very emotionally heavy sort of subject matter.

Part of it may be that I found Lucy's grief and many neuroses too excessive, but maybe that's par for the course for that sort of grief. Maybe six years isn't enough time. What do I know, really?

Part of More...

Cheeky Summary: CRIED! LAUGHED! ADORED! Seriously, there are too many good things about this book to sum up except to say that Kristin Higgins continues to win over my reader heart with each and every book I read. She's a master at funny, emotional books that stay with you long after you close the book. I'm not kidding – I apparently talked about this book so much that my husband came in when I was writing the review and asked, “Is that the book you talked about and cried over on our vacation?” More...

OMG! This book was fantastic! As with the other books by Higgins that I’ve read, this one really took you through all the good, the bad and the ugly, but cleaned you off and gave you a happy ending in the end. Higgins lives in Connecticut and I’m going to try to see if she’ll do a book club with this book at some point–just need to find the right library to do it at.

Lucy Lang is a widow. She’s pretty much put her life on hold since her husband’s tragic death that occurred before their first anni More...

Hmmm...this was kind of an anti-romance for me. I spent 348 pages developing a very strong dislike for the heroine who was so neurotic and blocked by her grief and her inability to move forward that she needed counseling considerably more than a happily-ever-after. (I started out with compassion, but by 2/3 of the way through, that had changed to annoyance.) I felt--and still feel sorry for the hero, and hope his martyr complex, and selfless unfailing love holds out for him and that the HEA and More...

I don't really care for books written in first person POV, especially when I don't like the main character as it was the case here.

The first 100 pages was alright, your typical chic-lit. There were some witty dialogs and some laugh-out-loud moments (I dont think I will ever breast feed after reading this book).... and then, the heroine just started getting on my friggin nerves.

Did the author have to create a girl this self-absorbed and selfish? Seriously, the book is all about, me, me, my pain More...

The thing that I enjoy about some of these romantic comedy type books is that sometimes they'll surprise you. You'll find the headless wonder couple on the cover, and a pretty font to make you feel lovely on the inside, but then you get to the innards and it's pretty much what you expected.

Given in a way that meant something. Through character's you found yourself up late reading about and maybe, just kind of started to care about.

This is one of those books.

I like Kristan Higgins. She has a k More...

A tale of grief and second chances

“The Next Best Thing” (Contemporary, HQN, 397 pages, $7.99), by Kristan Higgins: In a story of love found in a most unexpected place, Lucy Lang is a 24-year-old widow in a family of widows who have dedicated their lives to the memories of their spouses and have never remarried.

Lucy’s mother and three aunts, known as the Black Widows, also lost their husbands at a young age. While Lucy would like to have a family, she believes that any man she marries will have More...

Lucy married the love of her life, then not even a year later she was widowed. It’s been over five years now since her husband has died and when her niece is born and after getting a whiff of that yummy baby smell, she decides to start dating; she wants a family. The only trouble is she has to cut loose her best friend with benefits, Ethan, who just happens to be her brother-in-law.

This was the first book I have read by Kristan Higgans, but it won’t be my last. This book tugged on all my heart More...

There is something about the way Kristan Higgins writes that appeals to me. The stories, the people, the craftsmanship - I just love 'em. I come away wishing I lived in those small New England towns, convinced that I could be friends with her characters.

So it is with The Next Best Thing. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I will state straight away that this is not my favorite of Higgins' books. Lucy Mirabelli, the 30-year-old widow around whom the book turns, is the reason. She's just not More...

I've gone back and forth between two stars and four for this book. It was terribly frustrating and depressing at times but it is also a well written novel. I think it qualifies more as chick lit than romance though and I did not find the HEA completely satisfying.

The heroine is the book's biggest problem. She is one of those characters too much in need of counseling to make a plausible romantic lead. She weeps constantly throughout the story. She is self-centered to an absurd degree. She is also More...

Lucy Lang is in her twenties, she has been a widow for five years. After her sister gives birth to baby Emma, Lucy decides it is time to move on and start dating again. So maybe it is time to stop sleeping with her husband's brother- Ethan Mirabelli.

Lucy wants to find a man whom she can love just a little. She is terrified of falling head over heals and wants to settle for someone she can have a kid with but is not crazy for.

The females in her family seem to loose their husbands at an early age. More...

There are a lot of things ever-present in Higgins novels.

1) A crazy heroine, literally and figuratively.
2) A dog. Or, in The Next Best Thing's case, a cat. Which I find annoying cause I'm not fond of dogs, cats or any other animals with fur. Blame it on allergies. Not my fault!
3) The guy the heroine 'loves' but realizes in the end she doesn't.
4) A leading man who gives out the "untouchable" vibe.
5) An unsatisfying ending. All I Ever Wanted and The Next Best Thing excluded.
6) A little town. Alwa More...

Okay. So. I loved this book. *fangirlish squeal!* This is the first Kristan Higgins book I've read (and in restrospect I've realized I should've read at least Catch of the Day next but oh well :P).

It was just... ugh, I don't know how to describe it. It was just exactly what good "chick lit" should be! The characters had depth, the story was interesting and believable, the romance was real but not the absolute center of the story. I cared about the people and their lives, even the little "boring More...

Author Kristan Higgins is an award-winning author of several published books in the romance genre. Other titles include: Too Good To be True, Just One Of The Guys, Catch Of The Day, and Fools Rush In. She resides in Connecticut with her firefighter husband and two children.

Lucy Lang has been a young widow long enough. Finally feeling like it's time to settle down again and remarry, she says goodbye to her 'friend with benefits', Ethan Mirabelli, and hello to the dating scene. Except finding the More...

Kristan Higgins rend un hommage vibrant à ses racines hongroises dans une comédie romantique comme on les aime. Elle entraîne ses lecteurs au coeur d'une histoire pleine d'émotion, à la fois drôle et émouvante, à l'image des personnages qu'elle a créés.

Lorsque j'ai choisi Tout sauf le grand Amour de Kristan Higgins, je m'attendais à tout sauf à lire une histoire aussi poignante ! La couverture, gourmande à souhait, était surtout pour moi la promesse d'une lecture sucrée, un peu mièvre et dégoul More...

It's been almost six years since Lucy's husband, Jimmy, died in a car accident. It's been about three years since Lucy and Jimmy's younger brother Ethan's relationship turned from "best friends" to "friends with benefits". It's been only a few hours since Lucy's little sister Corrinne delivered a healthy baby girl. That's when Lucy realizes she's missing something--and that something is not just Jimmy, either. It's a baby. And then she decides that she needs to get back out there, get on that ho More...