K.J. Charles's Reviews > Bring on the Blessings

Contemporary small-town story (exceedingly small) set in Beverly Jenkins' fictional Henry Adams, a Black-founded town in Kansas. This means the inhabitants are descendants of some of my favourite ever Jenkins characters, including my beloved July family and the Fontaines. I did a lot of squeaking at surnames.

This is probably what they call women's fiction rather than romance, but what it actually is, is soap opera. Let me state clearly that soap is one of my highest terms of praise. What it means when done well is a large cast all of whom the reader has to engage with, multiple varying character arcs and ongoing interwoven stories, and intense compulsion to read on. This is not easy to achieve--there's a reason TV soaps have huge writer teams--and a good soap novel or, preferably, series of novels is a joy.

This isn't realistic fiction in the way Ms Bev writes historicals, because it's soap. We start with a first wife getting the kind of money you can do magic with in a divorce, and buying a struggling town, and importing a bunch of foster kids in a way that doesn't trouble much with the usual lengthy administrative process. People behave in soapy ways. Dei ex machina abound. Problems are solved, and solvable, by love. There's a comedy giant pig. Just go with the flow, okay, because it's pure escapism with villains to hiss and romantic affairs to untangle and magic to happen in foster kids' lives once they get a bit of love and responsibility. I got to the end of this one, one-clicked the next, and am seriously considering binging all ten in a row.