Description

Jenni Williams is days away from her divorce and hiding out at the Two-and-a-Half Pine Resort, helping her old friend Emilia run a quiet September fishing lodge in the Ontario backwoods. Men are the last thing on her list. Then Matt Canning arrives with a rented canoe, takes one look at her, and does the strangest thing a smitten man can do – he flees into the wilderness to get away from the feeling.

When four young campers go missing after a violent thunderstorm, Jenni paddles out alone to find them, and the search throws her and Matt together at a remote campsite with a helicopter rescue, a crumpled love poem making the rounds of the lake, and a night of brutally honest campfire conversation between two people burned by bad marriages. Neither believes in love at first sight. Both are about to have the argument tested – and when Jenni’s soon-to-be-ex arrives by canoe with something worse than flowers, the stakes stop being theoretical.

It’s a gentle, funny, talky romance in the old cottage-country tradition: loons on the lake, tea-and-teasing dialogue, a meddling best friend, and a poem that finally gets its third stanza.