THE SECOND COMING OF LUCY HATCH

A heartwarming (or “heartwarming”) first novel about an apparently intelligent young woman who makes a dumb first choice at love but gets a second chance.

In Mooney, Texas, everyone knows as much about your past as they do about what you did last Saturday night—and this is where young widow Lucy Hatch, 33, comes back home, still trying to adjust to the sudden death of her husband Mitchell. Until the freak accident on their farm that killed him, she’d been married to Mitchell for 14 not unhappy but not exactly ecstatic years. Mitchell was a good man, but their sex life had not set Lucy on fire and she’d resigned herself to a quiet but safe life. Her family also lives in Mooney: her religion-obsessed mother, abandoned by their father; her wise aunt Dove, living happily alone; her older brother Bailey and his wife, free spirit Geneva. When Geneva finds a house for Lucy to rent and learns that Lucy is hardly beside herself with grief for Mitchell, she insists that Lucy accompany her and Bailey to the Round Up, the place where everyone goes to dance and hear handsome Ash Farrell, a local carpenter, songwriter, and singer. Lucy is smitten, but Ash has a reputation, and Lucy, not wanting to be one of his women, resists. Ash inevitably prevails, though first he’ll have to survive a night in jail, and Lucy, despite the gossip and her mother’s objections, is soon enjoying the kind of lovemaking and intimacy she never had with Mitchell. When she goes back to the farm to pick up family keepsakes, though, she’s confronted by her contradictory feelings, and guilt—and breaks down. Is what she’s shared with Ash too good to renounce? Can she reconcile her past with the present?

Small-town life nicely detailed. As a love story, though, sweet but unsubstantial: a romance snack.