4 Smooches!
Synopsis
“So much for destiny. This was more like fate’s idea of a practical joke.”
Monica Prescott, writer and world traveler, has everything she wants … except a man who’s free-spirited enough to join her for a life on the road. But when she bumps into Jason, the guy who broke her heart in college, she lets him think she’s engaged. It wouldn’t take much to fall for him again—and that’s one road she doesn’t want to go down.
Jason Moretti has a job he hates, and he’d like nothing better than to tell his boss to shove it. Then he runs into Monica, the girl he never got over. Thinking she’s settling down with a wealthy fiancé, he reinvents himself as an ambitious career man in a desperate bid to impress her.
Old feelings start to resurface, but Monica has trust issues and Jason doesn’t like risks. To top it off, Monica is leaving for Bangkok in two weeks—and she won’t be back anytime soon. Time is running out for them to come to terms with the past and embrace their wanderlust.
Review
I usually have a hard time reading second chance romances. I think it’s because of the murky in between years where our two leads are separated leading different lives. Wanderlust starts by taking us back to when Jason and Monica initially meet, becoming friends and progressing into that beautiful first love phase, where it’s all consuming and brand new. Thea perfects this segment of Wanderlust by capturing the naivety, innocence and realism of meeting your first love. The dialogue is sweet and often times funny with Frat boy Jason coming across as an intelligent and thoughtful man rather than the lewd and obnoxious quintessential pledge. Monica too is delightful; she’s quite quirky and kind with a deep sense of where she wants to go in her career which ultimately leads to the cataclysmic downfall of their epic romance. Action and consequence comes in to play, bad decisions and bad behaviour inevitably leading to the second part of Wanderlust where several years have passed and Jason and Monica reconnect.
“I couldn’t look away from those beautiful eyes. Still the same deep brown, bright and clear and fringed with thick, dark lashes that stood out against her creamy skin, now flushed and rosy from the cold. A wisp of chestnut brown hair had escaped from beneath her wooly winter hat, but I couldn’t tell if it was still as long as it had been in college…”
The second half delves into the reconnecting portion of this love story. How do you forgive and forget a past that led to your first heartbreak and how do you find redemption from the one person who has had your heart from the beginning but you wronged so thoroughly? Again Thea navigates the complexities of the human mind and heart with her two characters, dissecting how they think and why they do the things they do. A series of misunderstandings and miscommunications break up the rekindling sparks of the old lovers leading to more problems before they reach a happily ever after. It’s a slow burning romance but it was so beautiful to watch both Jason and Monica gravitate towards one another again and discover things that had changed over time and things that still remained the same. Wanderlust felt like a bit of a nostalgic read, it inadvertently takes you back in memories to your own first love and how things could have turned out differently or maybe how things turned out exactly how you dreamed they would. It’s very well written, you connect with all the characters and the storyline pulls you in mercilessly but only gripe about the whole thing is I would have liked one of those miscommunications to have been remedied quite a bit sooner.
Nicole
