Fin­ished Just One of the Guys by Kris­tan Hig­gins. This is one of her con­tem­po­rary romances.

In this one, jour­nal­ist Chastity O’Neill moves back to her home­town and takes a job with the local news­pa­per. Chastity also wants to find Mr. Right, get mar­ried, and have sev­eral babies. Too bad she’s still hung up on her ex, hunky fire­fighter Trevor Meade. Chastity’s fam­ily prac­ti­cally adopted Trevor years ago, and he’s like a son to her par­ents. But the two of them spent a steamy week­end together in col­lege — a week­end that Chastity can’t quite forget …

Hig­gins has a fun, breezy, first-person style that’s easy to read, and Chastity is a lik­able char­ac­ter for the most part. One of the things that I really enjoy about Hig­gins’ books is that she gives her hero­ines inter­est­ing hob­bies. In this one, Chastity likes to row, which was some­thing dif­fer­ent to read about. I also thought that the jour­nal­ism stuff was fairly well done, although Chastity is far hap­pier and more excited about her job than most real-life jour­nal­ists that I know. (Most of us are sar­cas­tic, jaded cynics.)

But I had some prob­lems with this book. Mainly, that Trevor wasn’t a big­ger part of the story. Chastity spends a lot of time think­ing about Trevor, but we never really see how he feels about her until the very end. I would have liked to have known if he was as hung up on their week­end together as she was — or at least got­ten some more hints about it as the story went along.

Now, I write first-person books myself, so I know that it’s hard to get the hero’s point of view, along with what he’s thinking/feeling, in the story. But I still wish that Hig­gins had found a way to do just a lit­tle more of it. (I had this same prob­lem with another one of her books, Catch of the Day.) It just made it hard for me to really believe in Chastity and Trevor’s hap­pily ever after in the end.

Some­thing else that both­ered me a bit was Chastity her­self. She comes from a large fam­ily, and she wants to get mar­ried and have kids like every­one else in her fam­ily does. I can under­stand that, but Chastity came off as a lit­tle obsessed about the whole thing — like her life wouldn’t be com­plete if she didn’t marry Mr. Right and have babies. That’s just not a char­ac­ter quirk that appeals to me as a reader.

On the other hand, I did like Chastity’s mom and how she decided that she wanted to travel in her golden years — instead of sit­ting at home wait­ing for her ex-husband to finally retire from firefighting. At some points in the book, I actu­ally found the suplot involv­ing Chastity’s par­ents and their divorce more inter­est­ing than Chastity and Trevor.

Over­all, though, this is a fun con­tem­po­rary romance with lots of fam­ily drama. So thumbs up.

Up next: Hard to Hold by Stephanie Tyler.

Books in my TBR pile: About 20.