5 Smooches!
Synopsis
I married the right brother.
At least that’s what I tell myself at night, when I stare at the ceiling and listen to the rhythm of the grandfather clock down the hall. It never feels like the mere passage of time, but a countdown towards something inevitable.
Bobby Lightly is selfish, irresponsible, and careless. I haven’t seen him since the day I married his brother. He slipped out during the wedding reception without a word.
A year later, I heard Bobby was drafted to Korea. He never said goodbye. Never sent a letter. We had all come to terms with the fact that he was probably dead somewhere, either a victim of the war or its aftermath.
That is, until in the midst of an unrelenting heatwave, he showed up at the doorstep of the house I lived in with his brother.
Everyone thinks I’m cruel. Everyone thinks I should be easy on him. They think I don’t understand him. They all think I hate him.
But what no one understands is that it was Bobby who broke my heart.
And I think he’s back to do it again.
Review
There is literally nothing I love more than delving into an entirely epic and sweeping romance saga, one that takes us through the hero and heroine’s complicated and entwined pasts and lands us right into the shaky and unpredictable present and with Swelter that is exactly what I got. Set in a period of American history where the Vietnam war was a controversial and heartbreaking topic and where a woman was little more than a maid and cook and china doll placed carefully on her shelf until her husband returned from work; Swelter deals with some incredible issues from the fall out of survivor’s guilt from a prisoner of war, resentment, misery, forbidden love and the ultimate loss. I can’t go into too much detail on what happens because you need to live it, breathe in each and every chapter like it was your last book, feel the words and comprehend the intensity and overwhelming emotion that Nina has obviously poured into her characters, or maybe it was the other way around? These characters take on a life all of their own, they command the page, in every scene they’re in and steal your heart before pumping it up so full of love and feeling and devastation.
Lilly is the aforementioned trapped and underwhelmed housewife. As a young girl she strived for travel and breaking free of her constraints but a very lonely and complicated marriage to a man who seems to love the bottle more than her has left her as bitter and broken as the man she wed seven years previous. It’s only with the surprise re-entry of a formidable character from both her husband’s past and hers that she begins to feel really alive again and it’s then that we are treated to one stunning tangled love story that takes us to that first moment they met and leads us to the last time they saw one another.
‘“You said I never wrote anyone, but that’s not true. I wrote you on days where I was so wet and cold and tired, that I hoped I would go to sleep and never wake up. I wrote you when I saw my friends blown to pieces. I wrote you when I missed home. Every single time. But I couldn’t send those letters. You know I couldn’t.”
I hugged my things as a tear escaped.
“And I left the wedding because I had to get away from you. And ever since then, I’ve been running.”
“But you’re here now.”’
Nina G. Jones is a goddess to me. This is my first time reading any of her books but my god will it stay with me for a while. It manages to tear you down, build you back up before pulverising you…but in a good way. The ending just about had me a snivelling, blubbering mess, like full on hiccup sobbing into my duvet quietly (difficult to do with hubby snoring beside you). This novel needs to be optioned for film. For real. And soon.
~Nicole
