Review: Miramar Bay by Davis Bunn
Putting his acting career on hold, he escapes to a seaside town to soul search.
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Contemporary Fiction | Small-Town Fiction
Description
Putting his acting career on hold, Connor Larkin escapes to the seaside town of Miramar Bay—where Sylvie Cassick, the owner of Castaways restaurant, inspires Connor to start making different choices for his life.
My Thoughts
I started this series (of standalone novels?) six years ago when I read Book Two, Firefly Cove. Although I understand the marketing standpoint, I never cared for the promotional comparisons of Davis Bunn’s work in this series with the work of Nicholas Sparks. Despite, oh, the love story vein and the Miramar Bay book covers that could be appropriate for Sparks’s work, Bunn is his own kind of writer.
Now two books into this contemporary fiction series, I can tell it was written by someone who also writes suspense and speculative fiction. This novel in particular has a significant suspense thread.
As for the love story, this isn’t a genre romance novel where the romantic couple would spend many to most of the scenes together, and their relationship would develop on-page with a lot of interaction and dialogue and what have you. Instead, the love story here is more implicit. I felt like the greater part of it lives in the plot almost from the background—in the way that a film camera may not spend much time on direct shots of the sun, but its light is there in many of the film’s scenes. If that makes sense.
Now, there were a couple of moments when I got frustrated with Connor and Sylvie. Sometimes, after characters in a novel have spent however many somber scenes wrapped up in their regrets, I wish they would, well, start to get over themselves faster.
But my frustration was little in comparison with the ease of reading and the unfolding beauty of this story. I doubt it’ll be another six years before I get to the third book in the series.
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