Love in Tandem by Becca Kinzer: Book Review

 *Book received for consideration. All thoughts are my own.

She’s perfectly content leading a quiet life in her small hometown. He’s an adventurer with unquenchable wanderlust. The two couldn’t be any more opposite if they tried. But a tandem bicycle and a 500-mile road trip just might change all that.

After a failed engagement and her mother’s battle with cancer, Charlotte Carter’s life is finally turning around now that she’s landed a dream job teaching music. What she didn’t see coming was the imminent closure of the school’s music program. She’s determined to save it, even if it means getting creative. There’s no way she’s chalking this up as just another failure in her book of recent embarrassments.

Zach Bryant is back in town just long enough to see his brother Ben get married and then he’s off traveling the world again. He never imagined he’d run into Charlotte Carter, his brother’s ex-fiancé, or that everyone would believe he and Charlotte are an item. He certainly didn’t dream he’d end up riding a tandem bicycle hundreds of miles with her in an attempt to raise funds for a defunct music program, but how can he say no when the prize money would help him out of his financial predicament too?

Charlotte is sure she can set aside her differences with Zach long enough to cross the finish line and win the giant cash prize . . . can’t she? A few hundred miles in, she’s questioning her deeply held assumptions about Zach and wondering if maybe tandem biking is only the start of their biggest adventure yet.

Becca Kinzer lives in Springfield, Illinois where she works as a critical care nurse. When she’s not taking care of sick patients or reminding her husband and two kids that frozen chicken nuggets is a gourmet meal, she enjoys making up lighthearted stories with serious laughs. She is a 2018 ACFW First Impressions Contest winner, a 2019 Genesis Contest winner, 2021 Cascade Award winner, and all-around champion coffee drinker. Dear Henry, Love Edith is her debut novel.

What an absolutely charming story this was! I love a good fake dating story, and while this one had moments of that... I loved the unique spin on that. Charlotte and Zach never set out to fake anything... but a series of events lead to some wrong conclusions and they kind of just fall into it... and I absolutely loved it. I found myself laughing out loud right from the very start and those laugh out loud moments continued on throughout the story as they're forced into a tandem bike ride to save her music program. This was definitely an adventure in which everything that could go wrong, DID go wrong--- but in a perfectly hilarious, romcom-y sort of way! There were so many great laugh out loud moments... blended perfectly with more heartfelt ones too. The romance was a bit of a slower burn, but I absolutely adored these two together. 

The faith content is perhaps a bit on the lighter end but felt very genuine to the characters. I loved that they both had their struggles and had to work things out. Seeing their faith change throughout the story was just as enjoyable to me as the romance and laughs! This was a great romance and one that fans of romcoms are sure to want to check out. 

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