Some Kind of Wonderful by Sarah Morgan

Some Kind of Wonderful is book two in the Puffin Island series. I read the first book, First Time in Forever, this summer so of course I wanted to read this one too.

Here's the summary, from Amazon:

Her whole life, Brittany Forrest has dreamed of adventure. And at the age of eighteen, she thought she'd found it when she married bad boy Zachary Flynn. But after just ten days, their whirlwind marriage went up in smoke. Now, the daredevil pilot is back on Puffin Island. The sparks between them are as powerful as ever, but can Brittany risk the life she's built for a second chance with Zach?

First of all, my copy from NetGalley did not include the Susan Mallery title, but the Sarah Morgan is a full length novel and not a novella tacked onto the end.

Alright, so what did I think of Brittany and Zach? Individually they are both fairly well done, tho I thought Brittany might have some tendencies toward being sheltered, despite her globe trotting career and history.  After her 10 day marriage to Zach as a teenager, Brittany runs away from Puffin Island to become an archaeologist. She travels the world and absolutely loves her job. She's more or less forced back to Puffin Island for the summer and has to spend the summer mostly idle. She finds work to occupy her time at a local camp, the same one that Zach first came to Puffin Island to attend as a teen. She seems pretty ok with stepping away from her career for the summer, despite not expressing any dislike of it prior to this.

Zach first came to the island as a troubled teen. He has a giant chip on his shoulder, for good reason, and the camp is more something he has to do than wants to do. He comes back home off and on over the years, and subconsciously considers it his home. He doesn't want to admit to his relationship with the camp director as his adopted family, and he doesn't want to admit how much the camp means to him. He wants to think of himself as this outsider, this troublemaker that the island can't trust. And, to some extent, this is true. The island doesn't trust him. I found this completely ridiculous that they would hold this crazy grudge for a decade.

So did the romance work for me?  It's not great. While I did ultimately believe they were right for each other, it felt really unbalanced. Brittany was almost a non-entity in the romance, as she tried incredibly hard to put no pressure on Zach at all. She didn't want to spook him or scare him, even as she realized she still loved him, and so she completely rolled over and let him call the shots. I didn't really like that. I wanted her to tell him what she wanted and needed and how she felt, and that really didn't happen. I suppose Morgan had reasons for writing it this way (reasons that she clearly explains within the novel, but that I didn't buy) but I wish she'd gone a different direction with it. I still enjoyed the book a good bit, and have to admit that I'm REALLY interested in the final book in the series, whenever it comes out.