Book 64, 2022

[chez_jae]

Pick Me by May Archer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



Stayed up to the wee hours this morning to finish reading Pick Me by May Archer. It's the first book in her "Sunday Brothers" series. Main characters are grumpy, reserved Knox Sunday and charming, gregarious Gage Goodman.

Bright, brilliant, and ambitious, Gage is going places. He dreams of landing a tech job in a big city like Boston or NY, but in the meantime, he needs some work experience. For that reason, he jumps at the chance to relocate temporarily from Florida to Little Pippin Hollow, VT, to automate ALL THE THINGS for Sunday Orchards. Gage didn't expect to be instantly attracted to his new roomie, Knox, the oldest of the Sunday brothers.

Knox has his own issues. He's had to take a sabbatical from his stressful job in Boston, due to panic attacks, and coming home seemed like the right thing to do. Knox plans to stick around long enough to make sure the family business is on solid footing and get a handle on his mental health before returning to the career that defines him. Everything is turned on its head, however, when Gage careens into his life, bringing his intense joie de vivre, his inexplicable fear of cows, and his big brown eyes.

The more time the two of them spend together, the more they realize that maybe, just maybe, they've found all they need right here in Little Pippin Hollow.

What a fun and charming story. It was delightful to sit back and see Knox and Gage bumble around one another, with Knox trying so hard to keep Gage at arm's length, while Gage did his evil best to crack Knox's tough outer shell. Characters are fully-formed, including the secondary characters, and the setting is richly described. It made me want to visit Little Pippin Hollow!

Favorite lines:
♦ I hadn't known that the orchard, a place that grew apples, would also inexplicably have cows--loud, menacing, territorial, possibly violent cows--loitering like a group of thugs near the edge of the orchard's pea gravel parking area so they could taunt me with their bellows and rolling eyes as I exited my Prius.
♦ Then that...that...kid had come to the orchard two weeks ago, all sunshine-smiley and messy-haired and smelling like the ocean, taking over every single one of my spaces with his sly smile and his hilariously awful T-shirts and his dark eyes that showed his every emotion, and suddenly my life was a chaotic shitshow run by rabid twin monkeys called lust and frustration that made me do stupid things like re-download the Grindr app in the dead of night just to check out who might be located twenty feet away from me.
♦ "Did he eat paste with a Popsicle stick? He has the shifty-eyed look of a paste eater about him."
♦ "Stella got stompy and Sunday Orchard has to adjust their OSHA sign for 'days since your last incidence of cow-related violence in the workplace' back down to zero."
♦ "Yeah? You want me to start ignoring you again? 'Cause I can do that for you." And I meant it. I was so fucking annoyed at the big lummox for denying us what we both wanted that if he'd said yes, I vowed I'd ignore him so powerfully he'd fucking glow like nuclear waste from the force of it. I would ignore him so loudly his ears would ring, and he'd get no rest by night or by day. Legends would be told about the magnificence of my ignoring.
♦ "The poor man's pearls have probably never been clutched so hard."

A sheer delight, start to finish! Five stars

Comments

[wpadmirer]

I accidentally read the second book first, so I'm just getting to this one. I enjoyed the hell out of the second one, so I highly recommend continuing with the series!

[chez_jae]

Ha ha! I read the second one first, too. I gotta say, I enjoyed that one more so than this, I think because of that absurd hand-fasting rigamarole. It was a hoot!