February 6, 2017
This uninspired romance, the introduction to Alers’s Innkeepers series, lacks the sizzle and excitement promised by its present-day New Orleans setting. Attorney Hannah DuPont-Lowell returns to New Orleans to attend her 40th high school reunion. She’s just been laid off and decides to stay in New Orleans and turn her family’s home into an inn. She and professor St. John McNair were close in high school. Now both released (one by widowhood, one by divorce) from what had been unhappy marriages, neither is looking for anything serious, so they agree to see each other while he’s on break for the summer. Alers (Cavanaugh Island) sets up an interesting interracial relationship between white Hannah and African-American St. John, but then relentlessly justifies it (though it needs no justification) by emphasizing that one of Hannah’s ancestors married a Haitian woman and some of St. John’s ancestors were white. No one actually objects to Hannah and St. John’s union, so the constant harping on decades-past transgression is pointless and disruptive, especially when Alers drops it into the middle of the first love scene. Hannah also rails against racism to a degree that interrupts the story and rings false for her character. Hannah’s spirited friends revitalize a tale that would otherwise read more like a curmudgeonly history lesson with a touch of romance.