A 2017 Readers’ Favorite Gold Award Winner & Kindle Book Review Award Semi-finalist. Escape to the beach and enjoy a laugh-out-loud, enemies to lovers clean romance.What happens when a free-spirited artist from big-city New York collides with an uptight business owner from small-town Ocracoke? Fireworks. The kind neither saw coming.A single call is all it takes to drive artist Ti Russo into … takes to drive artist Ti Russo into what she does best. Run. But hey, lying low in a beach town for a while isn’t so bad. Thanks to the distraction of playing consultant to a guy she’s determined to crack, she can almost forget about the past stalking her back home. But she never counted on the real danger being a picket-fenced life she has no business falling for.
Focus and self-preservation have gotten single dad Drew Anderson through the last nine years. With the threat of his shop’s foreclosure jeopardizing his daughter’s health care, the last thing he needs is a distracting hippie chick swooping in to shake up what he’s fought to protect. Including himself. The bank’s deadline adds enough pressure without re-risking feelings better left buried.
But as sparks flare and secrets escalate, the race against time propels Ti and Drew into a choice neither’s ready to make: Find the faith to surrender their past or forfeit their only chance to begin again.
Download Begin Again and escape into a sparks-flying, opposites-attract contemporary clean romance full of small-town charm, broken characters, and deep undertones of grace that’ll win your heart.
For fans of Gilmore Girls, you’ll love Drew and Ti’s sparring relationship, along with Begin Again’s small-town setting, quirky characters, and family bonds.
Categories/Themes:
Second Chance Romance
Sweet Clean Romance
Small Town Romance
Beach Romance
Each book in the Home In You Series is a standalone and can be read separately. But I recommend reading the books in order if you want to follow the overall timeline:
Still Falling – A Prequel
Write Me Home – Book One
Begin Again – Book Two
Just Maybe – Book Three
Chasing Someday – Book Four
more
I loved it, hard to put down!!
Crystal Walton has a talent for writing realistic and broken characters with hurts and hangups that are so like the ones that real people face that you can’t help but be drawn into her books. Begin Again shows that talent clearly with both Ti and Drew having painful histories that affect how they live now. Thankfully, Ms. Walton doesn’t leave her characters broken and fragmented, but rather offers them a chance at beginning again, of finding home, hope, and redemption. AND I love the journey she takes you on with them as they find it, in discovering who they are, what makes them tick, why they are the way they are. You hurt for them as the unhealed aches from their pasts are slowly revealed.
Drew and Ti both are living trapped in lives that are significantly affected by their pasts and not in a good way. They’re viewpoints are skewed by what’s happened in their lives and they seem to clash when they first meet. Little by little, interaction by interaction, the walls they’ve built start to come down and they begin to discover that there’s a whole lot more to each other than they first thought. I loved the anticipation in waiting for those junctures where they start to see that there’s more to the other than just their differences and the things that seem to frustrate them about each other. There are many deep, meaningful moments as they let each other in and as they come face to face with their pasts. One is a heart grabbing scene where Ti nestles back into Drew’s arms and it’s like she’s coming home. With that one scene alone, Ms. Walton conveys that Drew is Ti’s home before she ever uses the words to say it.
Ti’s been running restlessly from her past for a long time, traveling to many places and doing a lot of different things in her life when in reality she doesn’t need all the world she’s seen. She needs peace, peace with her past that she will only find when she stops running, peace that she just might find with Drew. Drew has his own situation that he needs to make peace with. They’ve both tried soothing their wounds with balms that only work temporarily, that only push the pain back for a season. There’s only One who can truly heal those wounds, but they have to come to a place of facing the hurts instead of running from them. Through facing them, He offers freedom from the things that hold them back and hope to move forward. Begin Again is just that—a story of two people finding that freedom and hope and finding home in each other.
I have to take a quick second to mention that on this journey with Drew and Ti, I met several other characters that I loved just as much as them. Grandma Jo is so wonderfully filled with love, compassion, and wisdom. Maddie is an insightful and precious little girl. Not to mention Cooper and Livy. I only hope that we get to meet up with them again in some future books of Ms. Walton’s.
**I received a free ARC from the author. All opinions are my own.
4.5 Stars
Growing up, Ti had the worst imaginable childhood. Her first opportunity she had to run away, she took it… running as fast and as far away as possible. But when her best friend needs her, she returns to do anything she can to help her out. In the process she realizes that enough is enough. She is going to face her past and show them that she is no longer afraid. But one phone call is all it takes to bring her nightmare of a past back and make her run again. This time to Ocracoke Island.
Ti is in desperate need of a distraction. If she has something other than her own life to focus on she might just be able to keep the nightmares at bay. The distraction comes in the form of Drew, a single father who is struggling to keep his family souvenir shop open, his daughter’s health under control, medical bills paid and keep his own demons from consuming him. But one look at Ti has him fighting every step of the way. She reminds him too much of his past and he cannot afford to be hurt again.
But somewhere along the way these two lonely, broken individuals learn to rely on each other, fight for each other, help each other, and love each other. That doesn’t mean their journey is all sunshine and roses. No.. far from it. It was an uphill battle the entire way. They had to learn to overcome past hurts, learn to forgive, learn to let go, learn to be selfless, learn to have faith, learn to love all over again. This book is full of emotion and heartache. But you will find yourself cheering Ti and Drew on as they strive to achieve their HEA.
Ms. Walton has a way weaving a tale full of emotions. She has this way of taking you on the journey with her characters, as if you’re living their lives right along side them. I can’t wait to see where she takes us next!