A RAINBOW ABOVE US

A construction company owner returns home and finds love with a
hurricane refugee.

The Boone and James families of Blessings, Georgia, have been
feuding for generations. As a teenager, Bowie James and his mother were forced
to flee town, and he vowed never to return. Years later, a hurricane destroys
his grandmother’s home, and his family begs him to help rebuild. Bowie is
surprised to find Rowan Harper, a young woman who lost her father in the storm,
living with his aunt and grandmother in an emergency shelter. Refusing to leave
any of “his girls” behind, he takes all three to live in his mobile home while
his crew restores the destroyed house. When Bowie’s return unveils years of
shameful Boone family secrets, he prepares himself for their inevitable
retaliation, which starts with physical assault and escalates to gunplay. Sala
(Forever My Hero, 2019, etc.) gives extensive narrative time to everyone
in the Boone family, including the angry patriarch, the duped wives, the
incompetent middle-aged sons, and the confused teenage grandson. This is
notable only because Rowan, Bowie’s love interest and the heroine of the book,
is a complete cipher. Rowan graduated from high school, but there is no hint of
her life in the intervening seven years. She lived on a farm with her
controlling father and didn’t go to school, have a job, or dream of her future.
Every morning Bowie heads into Blessings, and readers follow his day and the
machinations of the Boone family, but there is nothing of Rowan. Rarely are
modern romance heroines so passively underdeveloped; Rowan does little more
than prepare dinner and wait for Bowie to return home and make her a character
again.

Overwrought small-town drama relegates the romance to an
unsatisfying subplot.