✍🏻 Professor Romance’s 4.5 ⭐️ Review: Helena Hunting’s Love on the Lake ✍🏻

Overall Grade: 4.5 ⭐️

From the second chapter of Helena Hunting’s Love on the Lake, I knew I was a goner for it. Early in the book, Teagan, the sister of Van, the hero in her Love Next Door romance, shows us clearly her people-pleasing ways. Interestingly, as she wins over almost everyone in Pearl Lake, she can’t seem to get a smile from Aaron, a local construction worker who works for the construction company of Teagan’s future sister-in-law, Dillion. Always the people pleaser this gets under Teagan’s skin. It is there where Helena Hunting tugged at my heart. From its outset, Teagan grabs you. As a fellow people pleaser, I saw parts of myself in Teagan. Her story is bigger than that, and I won’t divulge her story arc here, but the deft way that Hunting has crafted her makes her believable. Aaron is important too; however, Teagan burrowed under my skin from the beginning of the book. 

In a few ways, Aaron too is a people pleaser, namely with his mother. This causes him to live with a secret, one that is divulged eventually in the story. That seems to be Aaron’s big moment. Once his secret is revealed, he becomes more flat, simply a love interest. In my opinion, Love on the Lake is Teagan’s story, and it’s an important one. 

Helena Hunting has crafted a romance in her newest book that asks some of us to consider the lengths we go to to feel at peace. What happens when overwork and life challenges compound our inner turmoil? Teagan and Aaron’s story suggests that it takes loving yourself first before loving another. I liked Hunting’s Love Next Door, but I truly adore her Love on the Lake. I think I see myself reflected so keenly in Teagan’s story. 

In love and romance,

Professor A