Book Description:
Dear Reader, My name is Isabelle Louisa Edgewood—Izzy, for short. I live by blue-tinted mountains, where I find contentment in fresh air and books. Oh, and coffee and tea, of course. And occasionally in being accosted by the love of my family. (You’ll understand my verb choice in the phrase later.) I dream of opening my own bookstore, but my life, particularly my romantic history, has not been the stuff of fairy tales. Which is probably why my pregnant, misled, matchmaking cousin—who, really, is more like my sister—signed me up for an online dating community.
The trouble is . . . it worked. I’ve met my book-quoting Mr. Right, and our correspondence has been almost too good to be true. But Brodie lives across an ocean. And just the other day, a perfectly nice author and professor named Eli came into the library where I work and asked me out for a coffee. I feel a rom-com movie with a foreboding disaster nipping at my heels.
But I’ve played it safe for a long time. Maybe it’s time for me to be as brave as my favorite literary heroines. Maybe it’s time to take the adventures from the page to real life. Wish me luck.
Authentically,
Izzy
Narelle’s Thoughts:
I enjoyed reading Authentically Izzy, an epistolary contemporary romance set in North Carolina and a fictional island nation in the North Sea. Izzy’s parents perished in a plane crash when she was twelve, and she was raised by her aunt and uncle. Izzy’s three cousins, Josephine, Luke and Penelope are close siblings who have claimed Izzy as one of their own. Izzy is a librarian who adores books. She’s painfully shy, socially awkward, and puts everyone else’s needs ahead of her own.
The story is revealed via emails, text messages etc. and follows Izzy’s journey to love and authenticity via her charming and often hilarious online dating experiences. Can she trust Brodie, the bookish guy she met online who lives on an island in the North Sea, to be the real deal?
I loved seeing the banter between Izzy’s family members. Brodie is an adorable hero who has his own quirks that make him the perfect guy for Izzy. I recommend Authentically Izzy to contemporary romance readers who like epistolary novels with bookish main characters and a relevant faith element in the story.
