Review: Chasing Perfect by Susan Mallery.

Rowena’s review of Chasing Perfect by Susan Mallery.

Hero: Josh Golden
Heroine: Charity Jones

Welcome to Fool’s Gold, California, a charming community in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. There’s lots to do and plenty of people to meet, especially women. Because there’s just one tiny problem in Fool’s Gold: the men don’t seem to stick around. Maybe it’s the lure of big-city life, or maybe it’s plain old bad luck, but regardless of the reason, the problem has to be fixed, fast. And Charity Jones may be just the city planner to do it.

Charity’s nomadic childhood has left her itching to settle down, and she immediately falls in love with all the storybook town has to offer—everything, that is, except its sexiest and most famous resident, former world-class cyclist Josh Golden. With her long list of romantic disasters, she’s not about to take a chance on another bad boy, even if everyone else thinks he’s perfect just the way he is. But maybe that’s just what he needs—someone who knows the value of his flaws. Someone who knows that he’s just chasing perfect.

I saw this book a few months ago and though I had planned to read it, I wasn’t too excited about reading it..until I saw the Fools Gold website that Susan Mallery and her peeps put together for the fictional town. The site is adorable.

I won’t lie, the picture of Josh (the hero in this book) on the website is what sold me on reading this book. LOL. Have you seen him? Go check him out here. He’s hawtness.

So in this book, we have Charity Jones moving to Fools Gold to plant some roots down since she’s never had a specific place to call home. As child, her mother moved her around a lot and Charity was always moving from place to place because of a bad break up or whatever. So after a bad break up, the job as the city planner in Fools Gold falls into her lap and Charity makes the leap and moves her entire life to Fools Gold, hoping to build a life for herself there.

Once there, she runs into her fair share of problems but the town hero, Josh Golden puts out one of her fires and the story kind of takes off from there. The story follows both Charity and Josh as they get to know each other, fight their demons and fall in love.

I thought it was cute. Charity was a great heroine who I wanted to be friends with and Josh was such cutie patootie. I wanted to marry him and have all kinds of little Josh babies with him. But as much as I loved the both of them, they were pretty dumb some of the time and they annoyed me. Like that cut and run job Josh did after Charity shares her news with him. That was so dumb…and then Charity and her dumb assumptions. I hated that she didn’t just man up and ask Josh how he felt, she thought she knew so much that she almost lost the one man that she loved all because she was dumb.

Ugh.

Then there was the whole thing with the money being stolen. That whole mystery fell flat on its face for me, it seemed forced but I didn’t mind it too much because I enjoyed the story as a whole. I enjoyed the little town of Fools Gold, I enjoyed getting to know the different characters from Marsha to Pia to Ethan and just everyone, really. This book had a cute small town feel to it and I adore small towns in my stories.

I very much look forward to reading Ethan’s story and getting to know Liz. There’s so much to look forward to and I’d definitely recommend this series to lovers of small town, contemporary reads.

Grade: 4.25 out of 5

Reading Order:

This book is available from HQN. You can buy it here.

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