BROKEN PETALS

A successful executive agonizes over whether to tell her boyfriend that she suffers from a deadly disease in this topical romance.

When marketing and events whiz Brooklyn Monti begins dating Kai Rahimi, a handsome, divorced stockbroker, she conceals a major part of her life. Brooklyn has Huntington’s disease, a neurodegenerative illness that killed her birth mother. Raised by loving parents after her birth father put her up for adoption, Brooklyn has additional emotional baggage. Shortly after she was diagnosed with Huntington’s, her college boyfriend, Adam Williamson, attacked her. Despite the fact that Adam, a star football player, never faced major consequences for his abuse, Brooklyn graduated and created a successful event planning company. But she never found love until Kai paid for her coffee at an airport. As her relationship with Kai intensifies, Brooklyn develops loving bonds with his mother and 5-year-old son. But she also faces challenges posed by Kai’s volatile former wife and Adam’s reappearance in her life. Adam threatens to tell Kai about Brooklyn’s diagnosis if she does not participate in a documentary about the athlete. As Brooklyn and Kai approach their one-year dating anniversary, he gives her a key to his house and implores her to be vulnerable with him. Yet Brooklyn remains silent about her illness, even when Adam appears at her workplace and tells her business partners that she has Huntington’s. Will Brooklyn continue to keep her secret from Kai, even if it costs her true happiness? Brooklyn’s struggles to build a romantic relationship while dealing with a life-threatening diagnosis are compelling. But Hutchison’s dialogue is stilted and sometimes cringeworthy. In Brooklyn and Kai’s meet-cute at the airport, Kai seems creepy, not charming, when he comments on her butt and “nice figure” minutes after meeting her. Later he says, without irony: “Give me a chance to show you how a man loves a woman.” The plot also veers into implausibility at several points. Although Adam put Brooklyn on life support with broken bones and nerve damage, it does not appear that he was ever arrested. Brooklyn somehow conceals her Huntington’s from her business partners—and close friends—for seven years even though they observe her slurred speech, facial tics, and twitching limbs. A main character’s body also vanishes without explanation.

True love does not run smooth in this intriguing but uneven romance.