Book Club Review: Choosing Charleston

Title: Choosing Charleston
Author: Lynn T. Ocean
Publishing Date: 2014
Genre: Contemporary
Rating: B
Sensuality: Kisses
Book Disclosure: This was Colleen's pick for book club.  Lucky for us it was a free ebook.  Also, as an FYI, I am seriously behind in my reviews.  This girl has some catching up to do!

Carly Stone walks in to her house to find her husband and next door neighbor doing the horizontal mambo.  This leads quickly to a series of events in which Carly decides to move back home with her parents in Charleston to regroup and lick her wounds.  While at home, she discovers that some construction company is building a new shopping plaza right across their family's home improvement store, which is sure to put them out of business.  Not going to take things sitting down, Carly sets out to find a way to halt the construction of that new plaza.

Choosing Charleston was a light easy read.  For the most part I really enjoyed the story and thought it was a cute read.  Carly is a sensible girl and an easy heroine to like.  A series of bad things seemed to happen to her, but it doesn't get her down.  The aspect that I really liked about the story was the sense of community and family that Carly has when she returns to Charleston.  Carly has a very colorful Grandmother living with her parents who brings a lot of fun to the story.  There were a few laugh out loud moments for me in the book.  Also, there are a lot of references and sayings to Southern life, which really emphasized their lifestyle.

The only weakness that I really saw in the book, was her cheating husband.  I don't want to give too much away by going into detail.  However, he really annoyed me.  Not just his personality, but the direction his character went in the story.  I felt like he was portrayed as an evil villain.  The kind of character the would be over in the corner twirling his mustache.  It was really hard to swallow that Carly, as smart and clever as she is, could fall for someone like that and not have any clue.  It just seemed out of character for her.  Other than that one little issue I had, I really liked it.