"A funny contemporary romance"

In Alouette off of Lake Superior, librarian Tess Bucek lets her imagination run wild when enigmatic Connor Reed enters the library where she works. She pictures him as either the hero or villain in every detective book she ever read. When he looks at a book on Lighthouses, she assumes that the handsome stranger is a Canadian smuggler or a pirate. Tess sighs as she knows that growing up in limited environment with a single depressed mother led to her runaway imagination.

Connor is actually escaping the nasty taint of his role in a New York City media trial event. He selected Alouette as his haven because he spent summers as a child here with his grandfather and his elderly relative resides in a nearby nursing home. After watching her work with children, he shocks her when the thirty-nine year old visitor asks Tess to teach him to read, but he clears the mix-up as he wants her to actually help his grandfather learn to read. As Connor and Tess become acquainted they fall in love, but he is big city and she is small town making a relationship impossible except perhaps the impetus of a crusty matchmaking geriatric who loves both of them.

THREE LITTLE WORDS is a fun contemporary romance starring two wonderful lead characters and charming residents of a small Michigan town. The story line is relatively simplistic yet entertaining as neither Tess nor Connor expected love, but both relish and fear it as compromise seems impossible to find. The teaching to read to an adult adds depth to Carrie Alexander's fine tale that sub- genre readers will find quite pleasant.

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted January 25, 2004