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The Big Dreams Beach Hotel
Lilly Bartlett, author
Three years after ditching her career in New York City, Rosie never thought she’d still be managing the quaint faded Victorian hotel in her seaside hometown.
What’s worse, the hotel’s new owners are turning it into a copy of their Florida properties. Flamingos and all. Cultures are clashing and the hotel’s residents stand in the way of the developers’ plans. The hotel is both their home and their family.
That’s going to make Rory’s job difficult when he arrives to enforce the changes. And Rosie isn’t exactly on his side, even though it’s the chance to finally restart her career. Rory might be charming, but he’s still there to evict her friends.
How can she follow her dreams if it means ending everyone else’s?
Reviews
There are plenty of sweet moments in this romantic comedy by Bartlett (aka Michele Gorman), author of the Carlton Square series. Twenty-eight-year-old Rosie MacDonald is a flawed and keenly likable protagonist who navigates her love life and big dreams for running a resort town hotel. The narrative moves smoothly between Rosie’s life working in a New York hotel three years earlier and her present life as the manager of a hotel in Scarborough, England. It’s unclear at first how the two stories will connect, and the switching between them adds tension and humor to the story. The descriptions of the hotel and its eccentric live-in guests are less satisfying; Bartlett never really captures the seaside town or the disruption caused by the transfer of the English hotel into American hands. That said, the simple and happy plot is charming, especially for those who swoon at the use of Britishisms, and the accounts of Rosie’s hapless romances with Americans are very entertaining. (BookLife)
