Once Upon a Time in Dollywood by Ashley Jordan

TL;DR: Overall a really good romance, but two personal gripes kept it from being a five star.
Source: NetGalley, thank you so much to the publisher!

Plot: Eve runs to Gatlinburg to escape her troubles and meets a lovely man.
Characters: They had some very interesting depth and story to the. I really enjoyed the characters for the most part.
Setting: I do wish we’d gotten more of this as this is my stomping grounds, but I also understand it’s not the focus.
Romance: I did like the romance, I just wasn’t jumping up and down about it.

Summary:

Eve Ambroise may be a rising star playwright, but her personal life is falling part. Desperate for a fresh start, she breaks up with her fiancé, cuts off her parents, and heads to the Tennessee mountains. But keeping up the lie that she’s just on a writing retreat becomes near impossible when faced with the well-meaning townspeople and a neighbor who has just as much baggage as she has.

Coming off a contentious custody battle, Jamie Gallagher is restructuring what his life looks like as a single dad, and spending more days at his cabin makes his new “free time” a little less empty. Especially when he meets the beautiful—and prickly—woman next door. The last thing he needs is a new romance to shake up his family dynamics even more, but there’s something about Eve.

What starts out as a fling quickly becomes more serious, and it’s not long before Eve is running scared once again. She’s loved and lost in every possible way, and risking it one more time could finally break her. But like the fireflies that fill the mountains around them, Jamie’s and Eve’s lives keep falling into sync. A fairy-tale ending could be in the cards, but only if the new couple can get out of their heads and put their hearts first.

Thoughts:

I saw Dollywood on this one and picked it up immediately. I’m a native to the area and I’m always down to try something set in these hills. While I didn’t love everything about this I did enjoy parts of it, so I can see why the book got a lot of the recognition it did!

Eve runs to Gatlinburg (her grandmothers old cottage) to rest and recover after breaking it off with her fiancé. She’s suffered multiple miscarriages and is still dealing with the trauma of being forced to give up a child when she was a teen. There she meets Jamie who is dealing with his own struggles with custody of his son and his ex wife. This setup was working great for me, on the whole this book worked well!

I only have two gripes that keep it from being a winner. The first is entirely personal. I feel like for a book with Dollywood in the title we get so very, very little. They go once and it’s the shortest segment of the book it feels. The second is a much bigger issue to me. Every man, except our romantic lead, completely ignores or belittles Eve’s trauma and grief. Even her Father who up until that point had been shown as her ‘good’ parent, turns his back on her and straight up vanishes from the narrative when she brings it up (a very weird and inconsistent choice for his character). This is a HUGE red flag to me. With child loss and miscarriage in my history and many of my friends’ histories I know this is not the case. Even if a man is not grieving how a woman grieves many men do feel and struggle with these losses. I nearly lost my own husband to his grief over our losses, and a friend as well. This feels as if was born of toxic masculinity assumption and it really turned me off.

If that is perhaps not an issue with you, and I understand if it’s not, this is a generally good book. There is depth to the characters, their struggles are interesting and real. I just wish we’d taken more care with how we presented some of these characters.