Review: Bittersweet by Sarina Bowen

Title: Bittersweet
By: Sarina Bowen
Series: True North #1
My Copy: Ebook from Publisher
The BookWhisperer's Rating: 

If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the orchard.

The last person Griffin Shipley expects to find stuck in a ditch on his Vermont country road is his ex-hookup. Five years ago they’d shared a couple of steamy nights together. But that was a lifetime ago.

At twenty-seven, Griff is now the accidental patriarch of his family farm. Even his enormous shoulders feel the strain of supporting his mother, three siblings and a dotty grandfather. He doesn’t have time for the sorority girl who’s shown up expecting to buy his harvest at half price.

Vermont was never in Audrey Kidder’s travel plans. Neither was Griff Shipley. But she needs a second chance with the restaurant conglomerate employing her. Okay—a fifth chance. And no self-righteous lumbersexual farmer will stand in her way.

They’re adversaries. They want entirely different things from life. Too bad their sexual chemistry is as hot as Audrey’s top secret enchilada sauce, and then some.

Bowen wrote a wonderful romantic story that involves a sassy female lead and a burly but lovable male lead that left me sighing multiple times throughout the book.  Something about her writing allowed me to picture every scene described in the book.  I knew what the Shipley’s farm looked like, their house and occupants, and the beloved apple orchard.  And not only did I picture everything but I felt everything.  I felt the growing love between Griffin and Audrey, I felt the love that Griff had for his family and the want to provide for them, and I also felt the intense worry and burden that Griff carried on his shoulder to support his family and workers.  This book really was written and laid out to engulf into the Shipley’s life and make you want to stay there.

I want to say that Griff felt like 100% to me and I mean this in the sense of I could see him being a real man, living on the east coast, working on his family’s farm, and trying his hardest not to fall in love with a girl who has big dreams.  Plus, he is insanely hot.  However. Audrey felt a little forced for me.  I love a girl with big dreams and the sass and will to back it up but every once and a while I wanted her to really stand up for herself in many different aspects of her life, basically her job and her mother.  It just seemed like she came in the Shipley’s lives and left the destruction of a tornado at times.  But in the end…wait, I can’t tell you that part.

I am excited to read the rest of the Shipley’s’ crew’s stories.  I just know that Zach’s story is going to blow my socks off and hopefully Jude’s story will as well.