Title: Short Stack
Author: Lily Morton
Publisher: Amazon/Kindle Unlimited
Length: 330 Pages
Category: Contemporary Romance, Anthology
At a Glance: Short Stack is nothing short of a gift to readers who are fans of the Mixed Messages and Finding Home series. If you’re looking for something sweet and joyful to read to take your mind off the real world for a while, this book delivers the goods.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: What happens after the happy ending?
Drawn together for the first time, this is a collection of Lily’s short stories about the much-loved men from her Mixed Messages and Finding Home series. Follow them through awkward marriage proposals, birthdays, a fraught babysitting job, and a very drunken Eurovision Song Contest party.
It includes stories previously written for her website and readers’ group, along with deleted scenes and four brand new and exclusive short stories – Bad Valentine, Marrying Jude, Babysitting Billy, and House Hunting.
Review: What happens after the happily ever after isn’t a question I’m often left asking at the end of a Lily Morton novel, to be quite honest. She has always been generous with both the Epilogues and the subsequent vignettes that offer readers a further peek into her characters’ lives. This compilation of shorts includes some of those vignettes, but amongst them is also new material, including previously unreleased deleted scenes that didn’t work within their respective storylines but work beautifully here, allowing us to revisit her men and to recall our overwhelming affection for them.
From Dylan and Gabe, Jude and Asa, and Henry and Ivo in the Mixed Messages series, to Oz and Silas, Milo and Niall, and Gideon and Eli in the Finding Home series, we see each couple through various points in their relationship. There are anxieties and conflicts to work through for some of them, resolutions and, of course, the deeply heartfelt romance for all of them. Each of these stories and scenes serves as a reminder of the love between each couple and of the families they’ve built together.
The humor, as always, brings a smile and reflects the warmth and love between the characters, sometimes putting them in the middle of some truly farcical situations—looking directly at Oz and Silas here. But it’s not all sweetness and light, either. There are some fully realized tensions too, from the green-eyed monster to the anxiety of economic inequality in a relationship, and we get a quick scene with a crossover character from the Close Proximity series as well, which heightens the conflict in Henry and Ivo’s fledgling romance. Max Travers figures prominently in Ivo’s backstory and then goes on to find his one true love in After Felix.
I loved the time spent with each couple in Short Stack, but must say I was most reminded of how much I loved the writing in Gideon and Eli’s story. Morton shares a series of emails between them that didn’t make the cut in the final edits of their book, but which highlight Gideon’s gift for intonation and creating the ambient setting of his cottage at, and the fairy tale-like setting of, Chi an Mor, almost poetically, inarguably beautifully.
If you’re looking for something sweet and joyful to read to take your mind off the real world for a while, this book delivers the goods.
You can buy Short Stack here:
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