Cowboy Brave is a sweet city girl / cowboy romance. Emily Baker is the Programs Director at a seniors centre, and books a week at Justin Maguire’s ranch for a group of residents who call themselves “The Fab Five.” Justin is attracted to Emily pretty much from the get-go, but his mother is less enthusiastic about the relationship. And while Emily is attracted to Justin, she has also chosen to leave the ranching life behind for city living, and is reluctant to start anything serious with a cowboy.

The romance is really sweet. One of my favourite moments involves a Hallmark Valentine’s card with a heart-shaped lollipop attached. Basically, in each box of Hallmark cards, one card has a heart-shaped lollipop and is meant to be given to the most special person on your list, and boys in Emily’s and Justin’s respective schools would give that to the one girl they really liked. As a tall, curvy woman, Emily is used to being overlooked by men, and remembers how she’d never received the heart-shaped lollipop as a child. Justin has no idea about Emily’s history with heart-shaped lollipops, but when he buys a box of cards for Valentine’s Day at Emily’s seniors centre, he makes Emily’s Valentine’s Day extra special. Personally, because the significance of his gesture was unintentional, it lost a bit of its impact for me, but I love the effect on Emily.

While Emily and Justin’s relationship was nice, I found that the best parts of the novel were with all the stuff going on beyond the romance. The Fab Five were fantastic — I can totally imagine them having their own sitcom, and I’d love to see them have their own romances. I also love Emily’s best friend Nikki, who is pursuing her nursing degree and is dealing with some heartache of her own. I found her a compelling character, and I’m excited to see she has a romance of her own coming up. I also really loved the family dynamics, with both Justin and Emily’s families. While there are various sources of friction with both families, there’s also a very clear bond, and I love seeing such strong relationships amongst the siblings and with their parents.

Emily and Justin’s romance didn’t quite hit the mark for me. I think because it wasn’t quite angsty enough to be a dramatic romance, nor was it heartwarming enough to give me all the feels like a Hallmark Channel type movie. And while the book itself was funny, most of the comedy came from the side characters, and the romance itself was pretty straightforward.

I also didn’t quite understand Emily’s reluctance to re-enter the ranching life with Justin. She had initially left it because, as the only daughter in her family, she was expected to do the paperwork and not the physical jobs that she actually enjoys. But when she spoke about it with Justin, he was pretty chill about her doing the tasks she actually enjoys, and this was made clear pretty early on.

Still, overall, I enjoyed Cowboy Brave. The romance was solid, the main characters likeable, and the supporting characters fantastic.

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Thank you to Forever for an egalley of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Imagine It Forward by Beth Comstock, GE’s former Vice Chair and Head of Marketing and Innovation, is an inspiring read for current and aspiring change-makers. Comstock talks about her career, and how she uses her various roles to disrupt the status quo and create customer-driven change. She talks directly about coming up against old school thinking, slow-moving bureaucracies, and the profit- and numbers-driven measures of success in the corporate world.

This book will clearly resonate with business people, but as someone who works in the non-profit sector, I found a lot of parallels with my own work. I think that bureaucracy and deeply entrenched work cultures are a reality no matter what industry you’re in, and I love Comstock’s approach to putting the customer’s voice first when deciding what innovations to push through.

Some things that resonated with me are:

• Comstock’s admission early in the book that she’s a naturally shy person. As a shy person myself, it helped me to read about how she managed to make herself speak up even when her comfort zone was in the background. More importantly, as the book went on, her shyness no longer seemed as big a barrier, and she was able to go head to head with powerful executives who tried to shut her down.
• The stories about how GE’s engineers and scientists were so focused on innovating for the sake of innovation, but failed to consider what exactly they were innovating for. Their usual question was “What is possible?” when they should have been more concerned with “What do our users need?” Comstock took the completely opposite approach to marketing, and thereby shifted company culture. I love that because it shifts GE from a lab in an ivory tower to one that actually meets real-world needs.
• I was also struck by a story about focusing on small and quick innovations at a time rather than waiting for a large-scale change. Basically, GE engineers were looking to develop an update that’ll take a couple of years to finalize, but when they focused on solving a problem for one particular customer’s needs, they were able to cut down the development time to six months. I love that because we’re often so focused on making a big splash that we neglect to consider all the little steps we can be making along the way.
• And finally, Comstock talks about how there was a lot of push back from GE executives on customer-centred marketing, because they were a business-to-business company. But as Comstock rightly points out, the businesses they deal with are also trying to please their customers, so it makes sense to appeal to the customers directly. It reminds me of a business school project I worked on once where my group made the same mistake the GE executives did, and ended up with a project that would have worked well operationally, but didn’t at all push boundaries. I love how simply shifting your notions of what your company is can totally change your approach to business.

Comstock has a very readable writing style, and helpfully places significant points in large font sidebars that makes them easier to find.

Imagine it Forward is an informative and useful book that will give you ideas for how you can create change in your own workplaces. And if you’ve ever tried to create change or innovate in the past, chances are that you’ll find sections from this book familiar, and will get ideas that you can implement in the future.

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Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

When Cara, an antiques dealer, discovers an old diary in an estate she’s working on, she gets drawn into the story of the diary’s writer: Louise, who falls in love with a RAF pilot during WWII and, tired of small-town life, joins the army. Louise’s intelligence gets her a job as a gunner girl, one of the team of five women who do all the math and calculations to aim guns at German planes and support the (always male) soldiers who load the guns and do the actual shooting. Louise’s romance with Paul isn’t super smooth — he’s never available to meet up and he isn’t happy about her being a soldier — but her work is very rewarding and there’s a strong camaraderie within her team.

I found Louise’s story very compelling. I knew a bit about women code breakers, medics and ambulance drivers during WWII, but I don’t think I’ve ever read before about gunner girls. I love how kickass brave and intelligent these women are. I also love that while they meet some initial sexism from commanding officers who are unsure of women’s capacity to fight, the men in their unit quickly show them respect. After a sexist remark from someone else, one of Louise’s male colleagues tells her she and the other women will easily prove that jerk wrong, and I liked that the story did include men who saw these women soldiers as equals.

I also really like how Louise’s romance was handled. Too often, we see stories of women pitting themselves against each other over a man, and I like how mature the women in this story were in how they handled a difficult situation.

The present-day story was pretty good as well. I found Cara’s romance with her neighbour Liam to be sweet, and I like how supportive he was of her interest in the diary. I also really like the backstory about Cara’s ex-husband. He was a fascinating character — a weak man with grandiose ambitions who couldn’t quite handle failure — and I like that the reason they broke up was because of this kind of weakness rather than the usual cheating trope.

I did find Cara a bit annoying in how persistent she was in demanding her grandmother share her experiences during the war. The big secret turned out not to be as horrific as I thought, but I can imagine how traumatic people’s war-time experiences can be, and I don’t at all blame Cara’s grandmother for not wanting to relive that part of her past. I recognize Cara’s interest about her past and her family, but I thought it was pretty selfish to demand her grandmother relive a potentially painful past just to satisfy her own curiosity.

Overall, The Light over London is an entertaining WWII novel. Dual narrative novels are often touch-and-go for me, but I thought it worked nicely here.

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Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for an egalley of this book in exchange for an honest review.