Up to the Challenge by Terri Osburn: book review

Up to the Challenge (2013) is set in America on remote Anchor Island, reliant on the tourism industry.

Twenty-year-old Sidney Ann Navarro is a female foul-mouthed mechanic who has been in love with Lucas Dempsey for the past ten years, except that he doesn’t know it. Sid and Joe, Lucas’s older brother, have been working on the Dempsey’s boat for over five years, so she was more like a family member than a prospective lover. Besides, Lucas worked as a lawyer in Richmond, so he didn’t visit the island often.

With their father, Tom, recovering from a heart attack, the matriarch of the Dempsey family, Patty, needed to rearrange staff for their restaurant and charter boat business for the next six weeks. Lucas will get away from the law firm to help run the restaurant with Joe. Joe’s girlfrend, Beth, previously Lucas’s fiancee, will run the art store, and Sid offered to help in the restaurant too.

On the first day Sid and Lucas argued about her inappropriate clothing and bad language when she was in the restaurant. It was going to be six weeks in hell for both of them. Sid could confide in her girlfriend Willow, who had been living on the island for about a year. Lucas found retired lawyer, Artie, easy to talk to while he couldn’t wait to get off the island in six weeks.

But is Sid’s brother Randy, who runs Island Fitness, going to put a spanner in the works? Or Manuel Sullivan who works with Sid’s brother?

I like Sid’s cat, Drillbit, and there are some likeable characters in this island family drama. While this romance novel is light, easy to read, and predictable, with little action, twists or a thought-provoking ending, the author is popular with a loyal following.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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