Small Town Romance Series #3 The Malone Sisters
Kindle e-book
Author: Tasha L. Harrison
Agostina Malone doesn’t want anything to do with love. She thinks it’s beautiful, she’s happy her sisters found it, but she’s sure it’ll only bring her heartache and steer her away from her path to mental health.
Julian Webster is a renowned painter from Jamaica. He teaches at a local school and he shares a wall with Agostina at Art Crush Studios. He’s big, broody and he’s in need of inspiration. The problem is that his sad boy funk is throwing Agostina out of whack. She’s an empath and all that sadness emanating from him is going to drive her nuts sooner or later. It doesn’t help that he consistently steals her favorite spot at yoga class. So, when all of a sudden, the so very interesting Agostina, plops a crystal on his forehead while he’s in shavasana, he thinks it’s time they “officially” meet!
I wanted to read Aggie’s story since book 1. I was curious to see how the author was going to deal with the fact that she is an empath and bipolar in a community with well known difficulty in dealing with mental health. I don’t know if it’s good representation, but it was interesting to be in Aggie’s head. (It’s dual POV but we see a lot more of Aggie, or at least it seems so.) I wish, though, that the mother’s mental health issue and her relationship with Aggie were addressed more deeply. Aggie really needed to resolve her relationship with Mama Malone.
It’s definitely different in tone from the other books, but it’s a great story nonetheless. The romance is beautiful and I adored Julian and how supportive and accepting he was of Aggie as a person – as bipolar and as an empath.
(side note – typos and bad grammar still abound. I quit tracking…)
Rep and possible triggers: FMC is bipolar and an empath, MMC is Jamaican, black love, black author. Discussions on mental health and on self-harm, depression, hypomania, creative block
