Book review: 'When We Found Home' by Susan Mallery

"When We Found Home" by Susan Mallery (HQN, 432 pages, in stores)

If you like your contemporary romance light on romance and extra heavy on family melodrama, Susan Mallery's latest was written for you. “When We Found Home” is really more accurately described as women's fiction with two sex scenes.

The story follows three strangers, born by single mothers, who discover they are half-siblings by the same philandering father, an heir to a frozen food dynasty. The father has since died, and the grandfather has discovered and collected these offspring to live together as a family in his Seattle mansion.

The three have been raised in very different circumstances. Malcolm, in his 30s, was discovered as a teen and brought up in the family's wealth. He now runs the family company. Callie, in her 20s, is a felon from Oklahoma, struggling to make ends meet in Houston when she is found by the family lawyer. Keira, 12, is a traumatized but spunky preteen whose mother abandoned her to the foster child system.

Malcolm has a romantic possibility in Delaney, who quit her job in financial management at Boeing when her fiancee was killed and her father paralyzed during a shootout they experienced as cops. She's now a barista in Malcolm's building. Callie's romance is with Malcolm's best friend, Santiago.

Hey, I like contemporary romance. I like the occasional chick-lit. I can handle a little heartwarming family kerfuffle. So why did I not like this midsummer release from an author who has already cranked out more than 50 best-sellers, some of which I have previously enjoyed?

Because there is so much crying in this book.

Everybody is crying. Page after page with the irrational, unnecessary waterworks. Even I couldn't take this much bawling. These characters go to work and to school and out on dates and shopping and, in between, cry. A lot.

The harder Mallery tried to touch my heart, the less she succeeded; it seemed like overwrought cliché. I suspect I prefer understatement as a strategy. The craft is unexpectedly sloppy as well for this prolific author, with writing that felt forced and awkward at times.

Even the character Callie admits toward the end, “I may have overreacted.”

It could be also that this reviewer becomes bored if a dead body doesn't turn up in the library or there's no Orcs to cut down with a named sword or wand. The book is currently receiving 4.3 stars out of 5 on Goodreads.com. Mallery's fans are having no problem connecting with these characters and this sap-fest.

Did I mention this book is emotional? I probably should. The publisher's one-page news release contains the word “emotional” four times, the word “relationships” three times, and the word “heartwarming” twice. One might say it's an emotional, heartwarming story about relationships.

I realize this is a family newspaper, but I do want to give Mallery an important nod due to her for a careful, responsible, intelligent approach to sex scenes that reflect a modern, top romance author's commitment to the health and well-being of impressionable readers. The sex in this book is the only thing not driven by exaggerated, emotional impulse as characters are respectful and protective of each other when making these decisions. Mallery has an admirable personal agenda to educate with sex scenes that incorporate the latest research in this area.

I recommend this book to the devoted Mallery fan who is a completist and must read everything by this inveterate women's author. That reader will be very busy. Two additional book releases are scheduled for this September and October in her newest series, “Happily Inc.” This ninth series is set in a wedding-destination town in the California desert. “When We Found Home” is not attached to any existing series.

In between the four to six annual releases, this beloved author's tremendous website offers plenty to engage her fans with excerpts, recipes, discussion questions, free giveaways, personal birthday greetings, games, puzzles, contests, character lists, a girlfriend getaway to meet the author, maps, coloring pages of characters and artist's sketches of specific sites in the Happily Inc. town.

— Marcie Everhart, for The Oklahoman