seriously romantic: maybe it's you by candace calvert

the third book in candace calvert's crisis team series, maybe it's you, is a slow burn. a real slow burn. and it's not the christian romance angle that makes it so slow. i've accidentally picked up other christian romances before, and while i prefer things to be steamier, and less god talk in my romance novels, i still just love romance in any form, so those missing those two things is easy to get past.

it's just that at 40% of the novel i couldn't believe i still had 60% to go. and i think it's partly because there is so much going on here other than romance. this is a medical romance, so there is a lot of hospital scenes, and we get some extended patient care scenes. the author is a former trauma nurse, so clearly knows what happens in an e.r. and understands how hospitals work. but i wanted more interaction between the two leads and cared less about the different medical cases sloane, our heroine, would be handling.

unfortunately, it's not until about 40% in that micah, our hero, and sloane get any decent one-on-one time. once they finally start interacting, and having conversations that don't devolve into sloane ranting and raving at micah for things that aren't true, the novel gets less frustrating. sloane is kind of a mess of a human being: she was maybe sexually abused as a child (the book strongly insinuates this but refrains from spelling it out which is kind of frustrating), her mother was an alcoholic and addicted to prescription drugs and was "killed" by sloane's stepfather (though he claims he did not drown her, it was his negligence that caused her death), her ex-fiancé is connected to the russian mafia and they are after her in order to get to him and the money he stole from them, sloane herself is a recovering alcoholic. when she moves to los angeles from san diego to start over she changes her name from ronda sloane wilder to sloane ferrell.

it's no surprise that people eventually figure her out. but it takes so long for anything to get going on this. there's also a whole subplot about human trafficking perpetuated by the same russian mobsters out to get sloane's ex, and the two stories do eventually tie together. but when we start seeing things from the point of view of people in that story line, it's more intrusive than interesting.

the overall story is fine, i just wish we could have seen more of the characters interacting in a positive way earlier because by the time things really start to get going in the relationship department, you're almost halfway through the novel.

**maybe it's you will publish on february 3, 2017. i received an advance reader copy courtesy of netgalley/tynedale house publishers in exchange for my honest review.