Author: N.D. Galland
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
Genre: Women’s Fiction
Source: Amelia at William Morrow

Goodreads:  A romantic comedy that tells the story of one journalist secretly juggling two bylines for competing newspapers on a small island.

Distorting the facts just a little can’t hurt—except when falling in love…

Martha’s Vineyard has two distinct “personalities”—one characterized by its tanned and polished summer people; the other represented by the small-town, salt-of-the-earth year-round residents. The island even has two newspapers, each appealing to its distinct readership. Over the years, an intense rivalry has grown between the two papers; in fact, neither paper will work with writers who have any relationship to the other paper.

Johanna Howes is a Vineyard girl who left the island at the age of eighteen and never looked back. She went to college on the mainland and moved to the Big City to start a career as a journalist. Now she’s returned to take care of her aging Uncle Hank. As neither paper can pay her enough to live on, she creates a false identity so that she can write for both papers at once. Often this means writing the same story twice, coming at it from opposite ends of the spectrum.

Before long, Johanna finds herself caught up in a messy Island political situation. A wealthy, seasonal resident is suing the town government for the right to land his private helicopter on his property. When Johanna agrees to go for a cup of coffee with the handsome man she meets at a zoning board meeting, she has no idea that she has just made a date with Orion Smith, the wealthy off-Islander who is causing all the ruckus. And what he doesn’t know is that Johanna has been assigned by both Island papers to cover the story.

Scrambling to keep her various identities straight and separate from each other, Johanna desperately tries to find a graceful way out of the mess she’s created. But doing so will likely get her into trouble or cause her to lose her writing gigs…not to mention jeopardize her chance at a budding romance with a man she’s doing her best not to fall for.

Ope’s Opinion:  I really like the setting ( Martha’s Vineyard ), I really like the cover, and I like that the main characters was focused on her job.  I did not like how the author did not put Martha’s Vineyard in a good light, Hank was not likeable, and it was really hard to read.

N.D. Galland writing style was difficult to read.  I felt like she was trying to make each description very detailed.  I think she opened the thesaurus and found the most obscure word to replace an ordinary word.  It made some of the joy go out of the story for me when I had to reread a sentence to figure out what she was trying to say.

I did like Johanna.  I really liked that her job was the focus of most of the book.  Her relationship came later and wasn’t the center of her whole world.