Novel Review: Lone Star Cafe (Texas Hill Country, #2) by Lisa Wingate

Rating (Out of 5): ~3 (~3.5 for Graham)

Genre: Adult Contemporary Romance

Publisher: Onyx (Penguin)

Release Date: 2004

Spoilers?: No.

Buy it here: Amazon. Barnes and Noble.

Goodreads Synopsis:

The national bestselling author of Texas Cooking serves up another treat.

Laura Draper is having the worst day of her life. By noon, her career as a magazine editor, her relationship with a well-known photojournalist, and her very sanity are all in doubt. She finds herself marooned at a crossroads in Nowhere, Texas, wondering which way to turn.

What's a girl to do? Certainly not allow herself to be lured into the ramshackle Lone Star Cafe run by two crazy old ladies who claim their coffee has mystical secret ingredients. Definitely not return again and again. And under no circumstances fall for the laid-back moves, twinkling eyes, and slow grins of guitar-picking local guy Graham Keeton.

But Laura can't help herself. Suddenly her uptight professionalism is out the window. She's landing in the most amazing, undignified, hilarious situations with Graham, and she likes it. What in the world is happening to her? Where is she heading, and why does it feel as if she's finally come home.

The Cover:

This cover is all right. It doesn't really stand out to me, but it's nice to look at, simple, which is good. The colors work with the book, and I do appreciate that it's emphasizing the town and the cafe, not the romance, which works well for the book.

Quotes:

• "'Storms come and storms pass. Not a one of them lasts forever.’” (Mass Market Paperback, pg. 29)
• "Maybe I’d never thought about what love really meant. Maybe it wasn’t about fighting to preserve yourself, or your space, or you ‘me’ time. Maybe it was about wanting someone so much you fall in all the way. Headfirst. Every bit. About caring for someone else so much that you wanted that person’s happiness more than you wanted your own. About not being able to imagine how you would breathe in a world you didn’t inhabit together.” (Pg. 142)
• "'When you’re young, you don’t think of time as a limited currency. But it’s like the dimes in that old coffee tin my mama used to keep on top of the refrigerator. You reach up and take out a few, and you reach up and take out a few more. You spend them here and there—they’re only dimes, after all. They don’t mean much. You never take down the jar to see how much is left. One day you reach in and your fingers hit the bottom. The jar’s empty, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You realize they were only dimes, but altogether you’ve squandered a fortune.’” (Pg. 256)

Review:

This was a light-hearted, cute book. It doesn’t really stand out to me, though. I enjoyed it, although it was a little slow a few times.

I liked Laura enough, and Graham was really a sweetheart. Their attraction was nice, not bursting, but an obvious, sweet thing.

I liked the overall feeling of the book, I think. Of the small town that Graham lives in, the old ladies that own the Lone Star Café and push things along, Laura’s father and how he got better, all of the town (or cafe) get-togethers. It was very sweet and light-hearted, and fun to read. And I really liked Graham, he was a sweetheart, and I think he and Laura were good for each other.

This book doesn’t really stand out to me, and it was a little slow at times, but I did enjoy it. It was a cute, chick-lit-y, fun read.