Title: The Sunny Side
Series: The Model Agency: Book One
Author: Lily Morton
Publisher: Amazon/Kindle Unlimited
Length: 374 Pages
Category: Contemporary Romance
Rating: 4 Stars
At a Glance: At its core, The Sunny Side is about kindness and empathy and compassion, and there is heaps of hurt/comfort in its pages. If you like Lily Morton’s work, if you like your characters cheeky, if you like them soft in their flawed places and strong in their fragile places, and if you like the warm feelings of family and friends and friends who are family, mixed with a dash of sweetness and comfort, pencil this one onto your TBR list.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: Jonas Durand is successful, rich, and controlled. He owns a prestigious modelling agency and has the world at his fingertips, but a turbulent childhood has taught him to be focused and never deviate from a plan.
Dean Jacobs threatens that stance. He’s one of the world’s most sought-after supermodels, but he’s also laidback and lighthearted and free in a way that Jonas has never quite managed.
Dean has always been interested in Jonas and has never made any secret of his admiration, but from the beginning, Jonas put him in a neat little box labelled, “Don’t touch,” turned the key, and never looked back.
However, the universe seems determined to thwart Jonas’s plans. Over the course of one hot summer, the two men come together, and Jonas’s well-ordered life becomes something a whole lot wilder.
Moving from the glamorous worlds of London and Paris Fashion Weeks to the sleepy South of France, Jonas finds himself liberating partridges, chasing his supermodel, and falling in love.
Review: Dean Jacobs made an . . . interesting, not to mention comical, first impression when he was introduced in Lily Morton’s Deal Maker. I found him absurdly endearing back then, but getting to know him in The Sunny Side has had the welcome effect of my cheerfully loving him now. Dean is more than just a pretty face; he’s the inarguable ray of sunshine in this story. And if the owner of the modeling agency, and Dean’s boss, Jonas Durand, is a little cold and standoffish on the outside, it’s okay because he’s wholly soft-centered for and smitten with Dean on the inside. He simply resists showing it in what could be obvious and meaningful ways.
Or, at least he thinks he does. It would seem everyone but Jonas can see how deeply he cares for Dean.
At its core, this book is about kindness and empathy and compassion, and there is heaps of hurt/comfort in its pages. Dean is composed of generosity and gentleness for everyone and everything. Except himself. Morton introduces a side to Dean’s character, via his past and the experiences that served to shape him and his opinion of himself, that was sharp and touching while still infusing all the warmth and humor readers expect in her romances. The language Dean uses to describe himself has been absorbed over the years, learned rather than self-taught, and I loved how fiercely Jonas redirected Dean’s attention to all the ways in which he was brilliant and creative and valued for his integrity and the sort of wisdom and insight you can’t glean from a book or in a classroom.
Watching Jonas soften and learn, albeit uneasily, to let go of his strict self-control under Dean’s attention was never more evident than when Ruby, Jonas’s daughter, came into the picture. There was a family building spontaneously right under Jonas’s roof, and with that came consequences borne on fear and rash words and jumping to conclusions, which created the customary eleventh-hour drama that left Jonas scrambling to make amends and humbling himself for Dean’s forgiveness before the happily ever after.
There is a robust cast of characters to help tell this story, some familiar—Asa, Jude, and Billy from Deal Maker, and Mal and Cadan from Spring Strings—and if you’ve read those books, you’ll see the blueprint for the remainder of this series laid out for you. Some new characters are introduced, who are now familiar, and they will take on the mantle of carrying the romance forward into the coming books. If you like Lily Morton’s work, if you like your characters cheeky, if you like them soft in their flawed places and strong in their fragile places, and if you like the warm feelings of family and friends and friends who are family, mixed with a dash of sweetness and comfort, pencil this one onto your TBR list.
You can buy The Sunny Side here:
[zilla_button url=”https://books2read.com/The-Sunny-Side” style=”black” size=”large” type=”round” target=”_blank”] Amazon/Kindle Unlimited [/zilla_button]