Judith‘s review of Where Dreams Are Born
Fate brings Vicky Lowell to the house of Jack Hazlett, a harried widower and father in need of domestic help and childcare. She never expected to find a safe haven for her son and the man of her dreams.
It was supposed to be a win-win situation for everyone: a safe haven in which a single woman could raise her son, housekeeping and childcare for widowed Jack. Believing they’ve each had their shot at happiness, neither one wanted to complicate their lives with romantic entanglement. At first Jack sees Vicky as skinny and plain, guarded with him but openly warm and loving with his children, an important quality for a man who grew up in a foster care system. However, his growing attraction to the woman who scrubs his toilets and washes his underwear complicates their working relationship. Vicky, too, is reluctant to get involved, having been down that road with disastrous results. Add in the discovery of her son’s father and his plan to take the boy away from her, a dark secret that a child has had to carry since her mother’s death, and a vindictive ex, and you have a novel rich in the stuff of good romance fiction.
I don’t think anyone is surprised to hear me state that I really like romance novels of all kinds. I’m one of those kinds of people who probably subconsciously believes that ” . . . love makes the world go ’round.” But I especially like romance novels that add in the spice of mystery and suspense. There you have a literary “dish” that is just right for my “consumption.” So it is with this new novel from Joyce DeBacco. Having read and reviewed one of her other novels some months previously, I was delighted to have the opportunity to do so once again. And like the last time, I was not disappointed either.
The people in this novel are contemporary, struggling with life challenges, trying to make the money go as far as possible, dealing with some serious misfortune and grieving over what was no more. Vicky was a woman who just never seemed to be able to get past the hurts of her early life. The father of her son had left her high and dry, and while she had a comfortable and affectionate relationship with her husband–a man who accepted Vicky’s child and gave him his name–that marriage ended far too soon when her husband died. She was living with an abuser, a man who had conned her into thinking he was a nice and caring guy, but who used her for income, bed sport, housekeeping, etc. He was a mean drunk on top of everything else. Now she has inadvertently come to Jack’s front door, was mistaken for the new housekeeper/nannie, and has found a place for herself and her son that promises kindness and safety. No way was she going to allow herself or Jack to step over any of the professional boundaries and mess up a good thing. She loved living there and she love Jack’s girls.
Jack was a man who had few if any models for relationships having been raised in the foster care system. He was a foundling–left on a doorstep with the morning paper and the mild delivery–and his understanding of family and parenting was certainly lacking. Yet his wife, the mother of his daughters, had seemed to be the perfect woman. Why she would have given Jack her love never failed to mystify him. Yet she seemed to be the woman who would make all his “family fantasies” come true. Her death brought all that to an end. Now he has to find a way to pay the bills–there was no insurance money on his wife’s life–and to care for three really little daughters and his appreciation of Vicky knows no bounds. When she is threatened by her former live-in abuser Jack immediately takes her and son Tommy into his family and ultimately into his heart. But the course of true love never runs smooth for these two.
This is a novel of real, flawed, multi-layered, sometimes happy, sometimes hurting people. There is joy mixed with grieving, contentment mixed with worry and tension, a sense of “coming home” on one day followed by deep and wounding disappointment the next. There is an awareness that the law enforcement/justice system really has no answers for stalkers and abusers. And there is deep caring–the kind that is willing to sacrifice one’s own future well-being in order to keep loved ones safe. In other words, this is messy living at its best, the kind most of us encounter at one time or another and in one form or another throughout our life journeys. I felt a deep kinship with both Vicky and Jack probably because they were people who had absorbed some fairly significant blows to their dreams and yet had managed to survive. Scars, yes, but they were still upright and in motion when all was said and done. And it was amazing to read how Vicky dealt with the worries and concerns of Suzy and Linda–both very young and both still wounded by the loss of their mother. Such wisdom can only come from having to find a way through life’s “mine fields.”
This is truly a compelling novel of real life and one that I think will stay with me a long time. I will probablygo and re-read it one day soon–way too much here to grasp just one time through. But then again, that’s the kind of good novels one enjoys reading, to my way of thinking. And it is what made this novel one that I read straight through. There are surprises, twists, turns, and some significant “speed bumps” in the course of the story. That is life as well. It is entertaining as well as deeply emotional, and it was remarkably free of those “dead spots” that seem to be in some stories–flat places where I find myself reading a sentence or two on one page before going on to the next.
I think you will like this book if you like a good contemporary love story populated with vibrant characters mixed in with some mystery and suspense.
I give it a rating of 4.25 out of 5.
You can read more from Judith at Dr. J’s Book Place.
This book is available from L&L Dreamspell. You can buy it here