Title: Perfect Day
Series: New Milton: Book One
Author: Sally Malcolm
Publisher: Carina Press
Length: 187 Pages
Category: Contemporary
At a Glance: But for one admittedly personal niggle that jerked me clean out of the story for a moment, Perfect Day is just about the perfect read if you’re looking for a second chances romance that makes the characters work for their HEA.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: When Joshua Newton, son of Long Island’s elite, fell in love with ambitious young actor Finn Callaghan, his world finally made sense. With every stolen moment, soft touch and breathless kiss, they fell deeper in love.
Finn was his future…until Joshua made the worst mistake of his life and let his family’s disapproval tear them apart.
Eight years later, Finn has returned to the seaside town where it all began. He’s on the brink of stardom, a far cry from the poor mechanic who spent one gorgeous summer falling in love on the beach.
The last thing he wants is a second chance with the man who broke his heart. Finn has spent a long time forgetting Joshua Newton—he certainly doesn’t plan to forgive him.
Drawn together yet kept apart by their history, old feelings soon begin to stir. Back in the place where their romance began, Joshua and Finn finally come to realize the truth: love stays. Even when you don’t want it to, even when you try to deny it, love stays.
Review: Sally Malcolm’s Perfect Day is a story of second chances. It is the story of young love, big dreams, broken promises, hurting the one we love the most, and one man who takes the advice of someone he trusts and then makes a unilateral decision that strips the guy he’s in love with of the power and the right to make his own choices about their future together. It’s a situation of the wrong action, one that came from a place of love but still caused no small amount of damage in the end, and the aftermath of which Joshua Newton still suffers eight years later.
Finn Callaghan left for L.A. after Josh shattered his heart to smithereens. His dream of becoming an actor has come to fruition, has brought him wealth and fame and no shortage of female company, which he’s used as a means of forgetting that Josh ever existed. But Finn’s brother Sean and sister-in-law Tejana have just purchased the Newton family estate—where Finn was once employed to care for the Newton patriarch’s fleet of cars, where Finn and Josh (the black sheep of the family) fell in love, where Josh eventually broke Finn’s heart. As for Sean, he never knew Josh and Finn’s history, so his befriending Josh is the first step in forcing Finn to confront his past and the residual resentment he wasn’t aware still existed until he came face-to-face with it upon his return to New Milton.
The Newton property and the contents of the house are being sold off to pay the debts Charles Newton accumulated while breaking the law. Finn’s return to the scene of his heartbreak has forced him to recognize how much hurt and anger towards Josh he’s repressed, and if he feels some sense of satisfaction at how the financial tables have turned, well, it’s just another indication of how not over his trauma he really is. When he runs into Josh serving coffee at the town’s only shop—one of Josh’s several jobs—all the bitterness Finn thought he’d recovered from spills over. But, he also can’t help but begin to recall the tender feelings he’d once held for Josh, he can’t stop caring just a little, and it makes him all the angrier for it. So, he falls back on his usual practice and begins dating the first woman in town he can find, and in doing so, he doesn’t once stop to consider the consequences of his own actions, which I thought was a nice paradox. While it didn’t endear Finn to me in the moment, I also understand that doing stupid things out of anger is, inarguably, human.
Unearthing the memories are like scraping at an old wound for Finn, but it was also the spark that ignited his ability to examine what’d happened all those years before—that Josh was young, that his father was…is…a despicable human being, and that a year after their breakup, Josh was still disowned anyway, in spite of the choice he’d made to let Finn go. Malcolm doesn’t make the resolution to the conflict simple. Nothing is swept away for the sake of the romantic rekindling of young love or to ease the way for Josh and Finn to reunite, and I appreciated it. There wasn’t room for a plausible easy resolution to the hurt and remorse, so kudos to the author for making her characters suffer and work for it, and, by extension, her readers.
There wasn’t a single moment as this story unfolded that I didn’t feel the keen sting of conflict over what Finn and Josh had and then lost and watching them—Josh mostly—suffer, grabbed me by the heartstrings. The fallout from youthful choices resonates in this novel, proving not only that we can’t outrun our mistakes but that we, at some point, must confront and deal with them. This is also a factor in Sally Malcolm’s adeptness at reeling me in by the tender feels; her gift for creating relatable characters and placing them in realistic situations is a key motivation for my enjoyment of her writing. She is proficient at executing grand gestures and romantic apologies, and my heart settles happily into the sentimental mushiness of them every time. I also live for those moments in a romance when one person realizes it might be time to let go just as the other experiences a life-altering epiphany, realizing he wants to hold on. Malcolm captures those moments beautifully, and, of course, I love when those two wayward souls reunite.
Perfect Day was thisclose to being a perfect book for me but for one admittedly personal niggle, one why? dialogue choice that, of course, is the author’s prerogative, but that choice jerked me clean out of the story for a moment, and I’m not sure, as a reader, that’s ever a good thing. It didn’t wreck the book for me, but the offhanded nature of it landed with a resounding mental thud that took me a minute to quit dwelling on. I won’t, however, fault the entire book for a ‘me thing’; it’s more that I know there are some words I have no ownership over. I still loved Perfect Day and will keep Malcolm on my ‘watch list’ for future releases.
You can buy Perfect Day here:
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