Review: The Lights on Knockbridge Lane by Roan Parrish

Title: The Lights on Knockbridge Lane

Series: Garnet Run: Book Three

Author: Roan Parrish

Publisher: Harlequin

Length: 288 Pages

Category: Contemporary Romance, Holiday Romance

Rating: 5 Stars

At a Glance: The Lights on Knockbridge Lane believes in the miracle of good will and gives readers faith in its happily-ever-after every step of the way. It’s a story composed of promise and joy, and it held me under its spell from beginning to end.

Reviewed By: Lisa

Blurb: Can one man’s crowded, messy life fill another man’s empty heart?

Raising a family was always Adam Mills’ dream, although solo parenting and moving back to tiny Garnet Run certainly were not. After a messy breakup, Adam is doing his best to give his young daughter the life she deserves—including accepting help from their new, reclusive neighbor to fulfill her Christmas wish.

Though the little house may not have “the most lights ever,” the Mills home begins to brighten as handsome Wes Mobray spends more time there and slowly sheds his protective layers. But when the eye-catching house ends up in the news, Wes has to make a choice: hide from the darkness of his unusual past or embrace the light of a future—and a family—with Adam.

Review: If ever there was a book that deserved to be made into a Hallmark holiday movie, it’s Roan Parrish’s early Christmas gift to her readers, The Lights on Knockbridge Lane. This story is told with a heart full of so much love and pure and honest compassion that, for at least a little while, it just might make you believe the world itself is a much softer, kinder, more generous, and infinitely brighter place. It holds its arms wide open and embraces readers in its warmth and message of hope, the kind of hope that means taking a chance on loving someone will be worth the risk.

The romance in this story hinges upon the whims and wishes of a delightfully precocious eight-year-old, Adam Mills’ daughter, Gus. Small-town rumors have made themselves known to Adam, gossip which fancies their neighbor, Wes Mobray, as everything from a vampire to a witch. When Gus unintentionally draws out the virtually reclusive Wes, and Wes discovers not only that he and Gus share some unexpected interests but that Gus’s dad happens to be gay too, and really beautiful, it becomes impossible for Wes to even want to turn down the invitation to help fulfill Gus’s one true wish—to have the most Christmas lights of any house in the world—despite how much his anxieties push him to resist.

Adam and Wes are boundlessly remarkable people—gentle, charming, gracious, vulnerable, sincere, and everything immensely lovely—and the way Parrish builds their relationship around a series of unfussy, quiet moments takes nothing away from the effervescence of the story. The one thing they have in common is that they both know what it’s like to walk away from family that’s done nothing but hurt them and made them feel less-than. Adam also understands how important it is to give Gus what he didn’t have, and eventually Wes comes to recognize, after watching Adam be such an amazing father to Gus, what a terrible father he was burdened with. There is some emotional purging necessary to move forward that doesn’t come easily for Wes, which introduces a smidge of conflict to this otherwise serene romance.

There are a handful of supporting characters that do everything to make this story fuller and richer, some familiar to readers of the previous Garnet Run books. Adam’s sibling River plays an important supporting role in the story to their brother and niece, but they are also a fully interesting character in their own right, and I’d love to see them have their own book as the series continues. Of course, this book wouldn’t be quite as robust without Wes’s menagerie of pets, either; they served the unintentional role of matchmaker, which I couldn’t help but be charmed by.

The Lights on Knockbridge Lane believes in the miracle of good will and gives readers faith in its happily-ever-after every step of the way. It’s a story composed of promise and joy, and it held me under its spell from beginning to end.

You can buy The Lights on Knockbridge Lane here:
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