Gabriella Langdon is a successful attorney in Angel Falls, Ohio. By successful, she means that she chose law school to please her family, worked hard, never saw daylight, and has just been made a partner in the town law firm. But this success came with a price, as we see in the romantic tale THE WAY YOU LOVE ME. Gabby's engagement broke up, she misses time with her loving family, and she feels constantly pressured. And she's now thirtysomething and single.

As someone running her own business, I know exactly what it's like to have to put work first. Meeting the right person is difficult when you don't have time or a wide social circle. Gabby decides she needs another outlet for her interests. Caden Marshall has been a bestselling author, but his career was shadowed by an accusation of plagiarism and he now teaches creative writing in the town where he grew up. His mom still runs the local bookshop. Gabby thinks this class would help train her latent creativity.

Caden turns out to be something of a martinet demanding fifteen hundred words per day. I like that Gabby, busy though she is, turns out to be the one to encourage the other ladies to keep going. Caden has brought his four-year-old daughter Ava back with him, to raise her among family. I haven't yet read the first book in the Angel Falls series, called THEN THERE WAS YOU, but we quickly get the picture that small towns have less privacy and families are interconnected. Caden's dad was a literary critic and became estranged from the family, so an old resentment is still in the air, nicely portrayed by making this man a standard customer in the bookshop. Still, the fact that Mr. Marshall senior goes to the bookshop, instead of just ordering books online, tends to show that at some level he wants family contact and acceptance again.

While the romance angle of the tale is similar to other small-town stories, with a wedding party and a student-professor reason not to get involved, I found the writing angle different and absorbing. Just enough is woven in about college tenure and politics, literary criticism, polishing stories, originality, and hope. I noticed that nobody mentions independent publishing. For readers less literary, the major themes are the cycle of generations, separation, and redemption, as well as new starts. This is an adult romance. Miranda Liasson is a new author to me, but she has other romance series available and her writing is packed with character, details, and emotions. I'll be looking out for more Angel Falls books because THE WAY YOU LOVE ME hits all the right notes -- a professional woman, a demanding career, family feuds, a cute kid and creativity. Anyone looking for a positive thinking springtime read could do no better.

Book Summary

Gabby Langdon has always tried to make people happy. She even went to law school to please her father, and now she's a highly successful-albeit bored-attorney. But Gabby secretly dreams of being a writer, so for once she does something for herself-she signs up for a writing class taught by best-selling novelist Caden Marshall. There's only one problem: her brooding, sexy professor is a distraction she can't afford if she's finally going to get the life she truly wants.   Recently divorced and suffering from the world's worst case of writer's block, Caden is in Angel Falls to get his life back on track. He's focused on teaching and providing a stable and loving home for his young daughter, Ava. The last thing he needs is to jeopardize his new job, which means keeping plenty of distance between himself and his talented new student-no matter how tempted he is by Gabby's beauty, kind heart, or the sparks that fly whenever they're together.

  Includes the bonus novella Meant to Be by Alison Bliss!

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