Montgomery Ink Box Set 1 (Books 0.5, 0.6, and 1‪)‬

Really enjoyed the whole set of books. Great story lines without too much emphasis on the sex.

Melissa Foster writes books with strong messages wrapped up in romance. This series surrounds the six siblings of the Braden family and their bevy of friends and relatives. The first book (Lovers at Heart, Reimagined) features Treat and Max and is about confronting brokenness from the past in order for it to not impact your relationships in the future. The second (Destined for Love) features Treat’s brother, Rex, and his feuding-to-friendship lover and neighbour, Jade, and illustrates the importance of family and forgiveness. The third (Friendship on Fire) features Treat and Rex’s brother, Josh, and Jade’s friend Riley Banks. Here the message is of proactively letting go of outside stressors so that they don’t influence or dominate your relationships with the people and family in your life, which are the only things that really matter. And about taking leaps of faith and doing hard work because no one ever really knows a person, including themselves in the future, because you’ve never been that person yet.

Generally, I like the messages she writes about and think that a sweet, almost idyllic quick-read romance is what every dreamer’s heart needs for a jump start. Underlying the stories, however, is a message about past loved ones speaking to us, through animals they loved and as a constant almost physical presence. If this theme is not for you, then these stories likely aren’t for you.

Melissa Foster captures the dream-like quality of romance where men easily identify their feelings and put their hearts on their sleeves quickly and eloquently. She writes about men of honour, diligence and firm character. She makes you want to get to know each of the primary characters who are strong and decisive, demonstrating an admirable way to directly approach issues, resolve conflict and move forward in relationships. What I like most about her writing is that the stories seem like they are about to wind down and be wrapped in a tidy bow and then a crisis comes that you didn’t know you needed; a crisis which needs to be resolved and in so doing it teaches the reader a lesson of importance that one would have missed had the story closed quickly and easily. It makes the writing an entirely new degree of layering.

Having read her more recent writings, the Whiskeys series, and seen the progression of these three novels I must say that her writing continues to improve. These, her earlier writings reimagined are idealistic and poeticize everything about love with a goal of describing heart-pounding, breath-stealing, earth-moving, forever and beyond kind of love. As her writing progresses so do her characters and responses in that they become more rounded and their reactions and behaviours more realistic. The earth may not move but your heart is warmed with the dream she writes about.