BOOK LOVERS by Emily Henry

Nora is a literary agent who agrees to accompany her younger sister, Libby, to Sunshine Falls, NC, for a month in August.  The town is the setting for a best-selling novel that one of Nora’s most successful clients has written.  Libby tries to break down Nora’s all-work-and-no-play image by creating a checklist of things to accomplish in Sunshine Falls—go skinny-dipping, ride a horse, sleep under the stars, and save a floundering local business, among other things.  One item is specifically for Nora—go on dates with two locals.  Libby herself is married with two young daughters but appears to be struggling with a personal issue that she refuses to share with Nora, who has tried to be both mother and father to Libby for most of their lives.  Charlie Lastra, the executive editor at a NY publishing house, passed on the Sunshine Falls novel, but Nora (literally) runs into him in a bar there.  Too convenient?  Too coincidental?  Who cares?  On the one hand I think of this novel as a guilty pleasure, but it has some of the best verbal sparring I have ever read.  Yes, it’s a rom-com, but I was hooked by the sparkling repartee as much as by the smoldering love story.  I must be a romantic at heart, because this is one of those books that I just cannot get out of my head.