MY WAY TO YOU

A young woman trying to keep her siblings together in their California home contends with a series of natural disasters and is thankful for help from a chivalrous Public Works supervisor who tempts her to relinquish some of her control.

Two years after her parents died in an accident, Parker Sinclair is fighting to keep her family’s home and make sure her younger sister stays in college and her brother finishes high school. She's not prepared to deal with a Santa Clarita Valley wildfire in her backyard. While the house barely survives, the forest around them is destroyed, leaving them vulnerable to mudslides. Enter Colin Hudson, a recently promoted supervisor in the LA County Public Works Department, who oversees an enormous, monthslong project engineered to channel water around existing homes. Colin and his crew create a command post on Parker’s property, and he comes to admire her tenacity and intelligence. The two inch into a relationship, but his protective nature clashes with her independence and need to control her environment as much as possible. Yet when the Sinclair home is threatened again by unrelenting rain, Colin and his family offer Parker and her siblings a circle of people they can trust and lean on. Author Bybee (Faking Forever, 2019, etc.) draws on her own dramatic experience with fires and mudslides to create a satisfying love story between two people who would never have met if not for disaster. The personal romantic conflicts are slightly weak, but the sheer force of Mother Nature’s meddling makes for fascinating reading, and the gradual weaving together of Colin’s and Parker’s families, along with an emotionally wounded tenant—whose attraction to Colin’s brother sets up a second book in the series, presumably—gives additional emotional weight and texture to the story.

A fascinating novel that aptly balances disastrous circumstances and healing romance.