✍🏻 Professor Romance’s 4.5 ⭐️ Review: Karla Sorensen’s Worth the Wait, a SmartyPants Romance book ✍🏻

Overall Grade: 4.5 ⭐️

Tropes: second chance romance; older sister single parent; small-town romance; love at first sight

About a week ago, a friend of mine who received an ARC for Karla Sorensen’s Worth the Wait, her final story in her A Love at First Sight series, messaged me while reading it. She said, “I always forget how much I love Karla’s romances.” I responded: “I know.” There is a quietude, a simplicity in Sorensen’s writing. Her romance creeps up on you like silent whispers, and before you know it, you’ve fallen deeply in love with her characters because they are people you want to know in real life. Yes, it’s fiction, but it doesn’t read as such. And yes, even though it reads like real life, you still find yourself lost in her stories. At least, that’s my estimation as to why book after book, Sorensen steals the hearts of her readers. 

And Worth the Wait, her newest story in the SmartyPants Romance universe, is more of the same. In fact, of the four books of this series, Hunter and Iris seem to take up the least amount of story space in the series. It’s hard to explain that to readers who I want to read this book. Let’s see if I can do that here:

It’s a given that Hunter and Iris love each other. From the start of this story, there is no doubt. However, there is an uneasiness in their love because Iris’s fatal flaw is her inability to trust and believe that she can be loved fully. When you are a character such as Hunter who loves deeply, who is quietly charming, who is willing to do anything to make Iris’s life easy, you would think it would be a given that Iris would reach out the hand he extends. But no. Sorensen makes us work for their happy ending. The struggle of Worth the Wait is Iris growing the capacity to accept she can be loved and cherished and Hunter learning to do that with stipulations if Iris requires them. 

That’s it. Yes, you can add her younger brother’s issues, Hunter’s return to Green Valley, and Iris’s mother to the mix of this story, but the basis of Worth the Wait is this idea of acceptance. Hunter and Iris reside in that small space, falling in love again with each other and throwing up complication after complication to keep you involved in their story. It doesn’t feel grand or over the top. It, again, feels real. Like I said at the beginning of this review, it whispers over you, and you realize that romances don’t need to scream love loudly. Instead, under the deft hand of a beloved author, love can take up a place in the small spaces too. 

Honestly, I was sad at the end of Worth the Wait because I loved Hunter and Iris and their sweet happy ending. But I also loved Joss and Levi, Grady and Magnolia, and Grace and Tucker. I hate leaving them behind. And yes, I know they are forever immortalized in my Kindle. But saying goodbye this time is difficult because Karla Sorensen has written them so well that it feels like saying goodbye to old friends. If you love the small-town romance, sweet love, and community of Penny Reid, you should be reading Karla Sorensen’s A Love at First Sight series. Now.

In love and romance, 

Professor A