Ticket to Love

Jen Safrey has done it again! I love Ticket to Love. It is plot driven, suspenseful, and makes you think lightening is about to leap out of the sky with the charges building up in a delicious tension between Acey and our Texan hero. The cat and mouse game the cat plays with the lottery ticket is a riot, just one example of some much needed comedy to get you laughing while you grit your teeth wondering what is going to happen next. The book is a terrifically fun read and I'm hooked on romance novels because of Jen Safrey. I highly recommend the book and suggest you give a copy to your guy friends. That's what happed to me with Jen's previous book: A Perfect Pair. Don't be surprised if a few new ideas for fun are generated after you're done reading. Have fun with it!

Ticket To Love is a fun and fast-paced offering about a pizza girl, Acey, and the quiet, unassuming Texan who seems out of place in Acey's very Italian Long Island neighborhood. This is a delightful, modern-day Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending. Acey comes from a boisterously loud and loving New York Italian family, and Harry Wells is of quieter stock, a conservative, moneyed Texas family. Instead of the Montagues and Capulets, you have North and South. Instead of Friar Laurance, the Franciscan monk who facilitated Romeo and Juliet's meetings, Ticket to Love gives you Rosalia, the Colombian owner of the neighborhood convenience store, Bread and Milk. When Bread and Milk is named as the location where a winning $35 million lottery ticket was sold, Acey is led to believe that Harry is the owner of that ticket. She embarks on a quest to get him to claim his winnings. Acey has all the passion, noise, color, vibrancy and forcefulness of a true Long Island girl. Far from being a stereotype, she's just a regular girl from Valley Stream, which makes her actions that much more relatable and charming. And Harry. Ahhh, Harry! Harry Wells is a master construct of the tall, handsome, mysterious Texas cowboy. Jen Safrey has given us romance fans a new kind of cowboy, someone smart and calm and unbearably sexy. He's not the lasso-swinging, yee-haw barking, calloused-hand troglodyte one typically finds nose-kissing a swaddled baby on the covers of certain other romances. One of the things that first endeared me to Harry was his use of the word "Y'all." Harry's an intelligent, articulate man, so hearing him use a colloquialism I haven't heard since I moved North gave me such a warm feeling of home. Y'all isn't a word as much as it's a catch-all institution south of the Mason-Dixon line, and just like Acey, it was just one more little reason I couldn't help but fall for Harry. Acey is a delight, Harry's a cowboy with whom I could ride off into the sunset, and Ticket To Love is a winner, all the way around.

This book was interesting and I did like it. After saying that, I just had to write this review to let everyone know that people from Texas do know how to use correct grammar! Being born and raised a Texan, I know that you do not use the word "Ya'll" when speaking to ONE, I repeat, ONE person. You just say "You." The word "Ya'll" is Texan for "You All." That is more than one person, people! You can tell that this writer is from New York City and does not know the correct usage of this word because it is in nearly every other sentence that the hero says whether it should be there or not. This got on my nerves so bad that every time I saw the writer do this I had to grit my teeth. And also, if the hero had wanted to ride horses in the first place he would have done it on the horse ranch where he grew up, don't ya'll think?