Where Love Blooms. Kimberly Brown. 2022. b. love publications. 284 pages. [Source: Kindle Unlimited.]
The debut book of the Jareau Family novels starts with the eldest son, Jamison. A father of four, he was widowed at the birth of his youngest son. After more than two years of struggling as a single parent, he finally gives in by hiring a live-in nanny. All he expects is to get some live-in help in managing a household with four kids; what he gets is a battle to fight his attraction to his new, beautiful, nanny Aliveyah.
This is certainly a trope I’ve seen (and enjoyed before), but it’s not super cliche here. There’s the obvious question around integrity of sleeping with your boss, but to her credit, Aliveyah is a professional focused on what’s best for the children involved. She’s great for them, readily stepping into a mother-ish role for the three older girls, and a mother figure for the toddler who has never known a mother. In her role, she also has to balance Jamison’s late wife’s own family in addition to Jamison’s — these interactions provide depth to the story as it confronts the grief that Jamison and his kids shouldered in different ways.
One of Brown’s trademarks is her ability to have a strong supporting cast of characters who are both integral to the story but who also don’t take over. In this introduction to the Jareaus, she plants the seeds for the siblings’ stories with just enough to see something is coming without stealing the spotlight. She’s written the family in a way that easily shows how close they all are and how interwoven their day-to-day lives are. The true is same for Aliveyah’s closest family — her livewire sister Jorja, mother, and grandmother. Between the two families, there are more than enough voices of reason as Jamison and Aliveyah figure out whether an attraction is enough of a reason to rock the boat and the kids’ lives.
This was a fast-paced and enjoyable read. There is suitable tension as the main characters confront their feelings, but not so much that it feels like constant discord. It had a healthy dose of humor with well-place laughs, and plenty of sexual chemistry. Where Love Blooms is the perfect book to pick up on a quiet night when you can sit long enough to finish, because you won’t want to put it down.
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