✍🏻 Professor Romance’s 5 ⭐️ Review: Heidi Hutchinson’s Lost Track, book 5 of the SmartyPants Romance Common Threads world ✍🏻

Overall Grade: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Tropes: insta-attraction; rock star hero (MMC); sunshine heroine (FMC); opposites attract; found family

“All people were just walking wounds trying to find home and happiness.”

Heidi Hutchinson’s Lost Track is another revelation in the SmartyPants Romance world. It’s one of those reads whose brilliance creeps up on you as the story progresses. You should know something about me to understand why I love this book. I discovered a few years ago that my husband is on the spectrum. For decades, I’ve lived with someone who processes the world in ways different than me. It has been both a revelation, but also heart-breaking as I am working on accepting some aspects about him that don’t make my life easy. When people such as Penny Reid, Stacy Travis (authors whom I’ve read who have written characters like this), and now Heidi Hutchinson craft characters so indelibly different that you can’t help but fall in love with them, it elevates your reading experience. Hutchinson gifts us with Sunshine Capone aka Dave, which challenges us to reformulate our expectations about MMCs. It asks us to consider that people are different, that the typical idea of a romantic hero is reductive, and accepting and falling in love with a character such as Dave, one who can be messy, but lovely, who can have fraught boundaries that complicate his relationship with his FMC, who isn’t easy to pin a label on (in doing so, you can’t fully capture the power of his representation in the book), broadens our world. Reading a character such as Dave challenged me. Each time I encounter someone who is neuro-divergent, honestly, it gives me hope that I can one day reach acceptance about my husband’s own neurodivergence. 

Even more, Hutchinson’s heroine, Sabine, is special. From her and Sunshine’s meet-cute to the found family of her life, she espouses the qualities that all of us strive to have around people who are different from ourselves. She is wholly accepting of Dave in all of his differences. She recognizes them as superpowers, not foibles. She redefines neurotypical in how she falls for him. 

Add to all of this the beauty of Hutchinson’s prose. There are beautifully crafted sentences that belie the simplicity of her story. Even more, I love the moments when Hutchinson uses the lyrics of songs to evoke the strongest emotions of a character like Dave. 

I became lost in Heidi Hutchinson’s Lost Track. Honestly, I didn’t want it to end. It’s an apt reminder to “see” people and love them just as they are. In doing so, “someone who chooses love is the best kind of person. Every time.” There is something incredibly special about Sabine and Dave, Hutchinson’s Sunshine Capone. 

In love and romance,

Professor A