Escape to Coastal South Carolina in Reese Ryan’s ‘Second Chance on Cypress Lane’ [REVIEW]

They were high school sweethearts. Then he shattered her dreams and she built a life without him. When their paths finally cross again, can she learn to forgive the past or will old wounds keep them apart forever? Find out in Reese Ryan’s charming new romance, Second Chance on Cypress Lane.

Dakota Jones is a rising star on network news. But when she gets embroiled in a scandal, she loses her job and everything she has worked so hard to attain. Now, with her head hung low, she must return to her small hometown on South Carolina’s picturesque Holly Grove Island. There she hopes to reconnect with her father, old friends, and make her plans for the future. What she hopes to avoid is running into her old beau, Dexter Roberts, who was the first man to ever break her heart, something she has never quite been able to get over.

Dakota quickly discovers that we don’t always get what we want. Not only does she run into Dexter soon after arriving back on the island, but the people closest to her are determined to reunite the former couple every chance they get. To make matters worse, soon after Dakota takes a new job on the island, she learns that her new boss is Dexter himself. Thank goodness the company they work for frowns on interoffice relationships!

Still, company rules don’t keep Dexter’s heart from aching for the one woman he has always loved. He hopes that her return will provide him the chance to make amends. But to win her back, he has to figure out how to tell her the real reason he broke her heart all those years ago and his time is fast running out. Will he be able to win her heart before she takes another journalism job out of state?

This is my first encounter with Reese Ryan’s work, but hopefully it won’t be my last. She writes vibrant, flawed characters we quickly come to care for who come to vivid life in her readers’ minds. Dakota and Dexter are genuine, authentic, and truly likable people who have both been hurt by tough situations in their lives. Still, no matter their shared past, Ryan reminds us that it is impossible to always know everything about someone else unless we are willing to open our hearts (and our mouths) to talk things out.

While Ryan’s protagonists struggle to navigate through the maze of their collective emotional baggage to get to the happy ever after they both want, she also takes this opportunity to introduce us to other inhabitants of Holly Grove Island who we will surely get to know quite well in future books. There’s Dakota’s dad, a widower who wants to move on with his life if he can summon the courage to confide in his daughter; the BFF who has missed Dakota terribly, but who hasn’t exactly found her own Prince Charming yet either; and the mutual friend who becomes Dakota’s immediate manager, a sweet guy who is a dyed-in-the-wool ladies’ man and can’t for the life of him see that the woman of his dreams has been right in front of him all the time. Together, these characters’ lives intertwine on multiple levels and make this island a place we’ll love to return to time and again.

If you love small town romances set in beautiful coastal settings described so deftly you can smell the salty ocean air and feel the waves lap at your toes, you’re going to love this new series. Second Chance on Cypress Lane is original, charming, and filled with enough secrets to keep you turning pages late into the night.

Includes the bonus novella Kiss Me at Sweetwater Springs by Annie Rains.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Reese Ryan is an award-winning author of romantic fiction with captivating family drama, surprising secrets, all the feels, and a posse of complex, flawed characters. A panelist at the 2017 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books and recipient of the 2018 Donna Hill Breakout Author Award, Reese is an advocate for the romance genre and diversity in fiction.

A Midwesterner with deep Southern roots, Reese currently resides in semi-small-town North Carolina where she’s an avid reader, a music junkie, and a self-declared connoisseur of cheesy grits.

For more information, visit ReeseRyan.com, like her on Facebook, subscribe to her on YouTube, and follow her on Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest.

SECOND CHANCE ON CYPRESS LANE
By Reese Ryan
432 pp. Forever. $7.99

Purchase Second Chance on Cypress Lane direct from Jathan & Heather Books or from one of these other fine online retailers: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Half Price Books, Hudson Booksellers, IndieBound, Powell’s, Target, or Walmart.