If you’ve been around here a while, you’ve probably seen multiple reviews of Mazey Eddings‘ books. I got an ARC of A Brush With Love [Buy Bookshop Amazon] back in the day, and I’ve read everything she’s published since. So it should come as no surprise that I also excitedly jumped into Late Bloomer after talking to her about for my YouTube show back when she was still drafting it.
Late Bloomer [Buy Bookshop Amazon ] is a dual-POV story. First, we meet Opal. She’s a bit of a chaotic mess. Her “friend” gives her a scratch-off ticket as a late birthday present and it turns out to be a winner. Opal impulsively decides to spend the money on a flower farm, sight unseen, so she can set up an art studio and paint shoes.
However, when she arrives, she finds the farm is inhabited by Pepper, whose grandmother owned the farm but passed away a few months early. She had no idea the farm was being sold by her con artist mother and is now forced to figure out how to save the farm while getting along with the new legal owner, who is 100% her opposite.
Mazey writes characters with neurodivergencies and I love her for it. Opal is ADHD and Pepper is Autistic, and those characteristics are pretty clear early on. However, there are some changes that don’t seem to fit beyond making the story move along. While I understood the characters at the beginning, they got a little off the sensical path in a way that didn’t feel like growth, but rather, confusion.
I normally fly through Mazey’s books, but this one took more effort. I don’t really know why, but it did. Something was missing, and maybe that was just the consistency in the characters or just a sense of realism in how things wrapped up. The spicy scenes were sold, as usual for Mazey, but the rest of it didn’t quite get me.
If you love sapphic romance, this might be worth your time, but for me, it just wasn’t the right book at the right time.
Literary HypeWoman 