From the blurb:

Falling in love is just not on Nora King’s To Do List…

Neither is accidentally super-gluing her shoe to her hand right before the biggest presentation of her life!

With all the hard work she’d put into securing the family business after her father’s death, Nora has no choice but to accept help from a knight in shining armour.

Disaster relief worker Ethan Love is still haunted by his last deployment, and desperate for distraction. He’s in town to ask Nora for a major favour, and swooping in to save her presentation is a sure way to get her on side.

As Ethan sticks around and helps Nora through her grief, her barriers tumble down…but will she dare to swap her To Do lists for a How to Fall in Love list?

What woman can resist a novel that opens with a fashion calamity! I knew from the first pages of the novel that I was going to thoroughly enjoy this book. Poor Nora has managed to glue a shoe to her hand, right before meeting an important client – the designer of the shoe in question – and meeting Ethan; not exactly the first impression you want to make on a handsome man!

There’s an air of Bridget Jones style humour to the opening, and a witty tone permeates the writing. The dialogue especially reached out and grabbed me for its realism and, occasionally, had me laughing out loud, as with:

‘Is she always this hyper?’ Ethan asked Fran, as if she wasn’t there.

‘No way. Only when she’s done something…oh, good grief, Leonora, have you been multi-tasking again?’

But the fun in the book does not detract from the passion between the characters and a serious issue to explore: Nora’s grief over losing her father.

Nora is an eminently likeable character. I love her strength. When Ethan tells her to let go a little, that he’ll catch her, she bristles: ‘You can’t help yourself, can you—you want to save me? You want to rescue me?’ For Nora, independence is key; she buries her pain deep down and won’t let anyone – even herself – touch it. But Ethan has made a life out of helping people in extreme distress, and it’s obvious to him that Nora is hurting.

The pace of the novel kept me turning the pages, and I was delighted by the ending – by Nora’s father’s legacy to her, and how the author connects adult Nora, doing her best to get along and be a successful businesswoman, with the girl she once was and the dreams she had for herself then.

In all, this is a great read, and I think the author, as she describes herself in her bio, comes shining through: ‘a book-devouring, slightly melodramatic, romance-writing sassy heroine’. I’m delighted to have discovered Eve. She writes on her website ‘in a world where it’s far too easy to settle back, opt out and be cynical, I like that reading romance redresses the balance a little’. Well, withThe Love List, she provides perfect material to help anyone redress the balance – read this book and you’ll come away with that warm, glowing feeling that makes the sun brighter, the sky bluer and your step jauntier.

The Love List is available now from Amazon; click on the book cover below to visit the store.