mzdeb 's review for:

All Grown Up by Vi Keeland

4.0

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I haven’t dived into Vi Keeland’s books in a while. I liked the story of a divorced woman getting back into the dating world (thanks to a very pushy best friend), only to find that the much younger man (his 25 years to her 37) she chats up on a dating app was (and kinda still is) her neighbor at her family’s summer beach house. The banter between them was funny and witty, and he was definitely mature for his age, having to take charge of his sister’s well-being after their parents died when he was a teenager, as well as handling the family business. Plus he just couldn’t tolerate what he saw as BS mind games from women his age. I could understand Valentina’s reluctance to give him a chance given she was a teen mom who married young, and her husband left her for a much younger woman. She also never had the chance to live her life they way she would’ve in her twenties if she hadn’t married so young, so it made her reluctant to dive into a brand new relationship. And when Ford discovered a family secret that crumbles everything he thought he knew about his parents, it definitely made him question a relationship with Val despite her coming around. There’s also the requisite epilogue that never makes one fail to squee.