A Midnight Kiss on Ever After Street - Jaimie Admans - ★★★★

AUTHOR: Jaimie Admans

SERIES: The Ever After Street, #1

GENRE: Romance.

RATING: 4 stars.

In a Nutshell: Just what you would expect from a romance novel, plus a gorgeous, fairy-tale-like setting.

Story Synopsis:

Thirty-five year old Sadie has spent most of her life following the wishes of her aunt Ebony, who has raised her after her parents’ death. ‘The Cinderella Shop’, run by Ebony and where Sadie works as a seamstress, is on Ever After Street, a cosy locations where all shops are made around fairy-tale themes, and there’s even an old castle nearby. When her aunt forbids her to go to a special farewell ball at the castle before it is sold to a supermarket, Sadie sneaks her way there in secret, never expecting to meet a charming man who blows her off her feet.

The next day, she discovers that the man is none other than a real estate agent named Witt, who is in charge of selling the castle. Even worse, he doesn’t recognise her at all as the belle at the ball. However, he has come to their shop in the hopes of finding the girl who ran away at midnight, little knowing that he is speaking to her.

Can Sadie use this opportunity to turn around the fortunes of her beloved shop, and maybe, change her own life too?

The story comes to us in the first person perspective of Sadie.

I am not much of a romance reader nowadays. In my teen/young adult years, I would have sighed and swooned over such a story and given it a wholehearted 5 stars. But with middle age comes a sense of fatigue, where almost every romance novel looks the same in plot and approach. As such, I have become very selective in picking up books from this genre. One of the few romance authors whose works I will pick without many questions is Jaimie Admans.

Admans has an amazing ability of creating magical settings for her plots. When I had read ‘The Post Box at the North Pole’, I was astounded at how well she has crafted the Christmas-themed holiday village. This time around too, she has blown me away with her beautiful fairy-tale themed nook with a lovely name of ‘Ever After Street’. Yeah yeah, fairy tales are regressive and misogynistic and what not – I get it. After all, princes didn’t bother with consent and princesses had only one task - finding their ‘one true love’ to rescue themselves. But I can’t deny how these very stories transported me into a dreamlike world in my childhood. Keeping aside the outdated elements, fairy tales sparked wonder and awe (and also some ‘awwws’.) This book recreates the same old magic.

It’s not just the presence of the castle and the idea of shops themed around fairy tales that makes a difference here. It’s how the author makes everything sound realistic without being farfetched, and in how she describes the location so well that you can picture the whole scene clearly in your head. The book is full of Easter egg references to various fairy tales (let’s be clear: the Disney version of the stories and not the original darker tales), so if you are a fairy tale movie fan, you will have a lot of fun along the way discovering the references scattered here and there.

The author also has a great ability of creating vulnerable male characters. Witt isn’t presented as the perfect Prince Charming who can’t do anything wrong. On the contrary, he stammers, he jokes, and he even helps around a dress shop without any threat to his masculinity. In other words, Witt is loveable rather than just admirable, and this makes a big difference. Though I must add one thing: he never sounded like someone who was almost forty.

I liked Sadie’s character as well. Usually, I would not buy the idea of a woman in her mid-thirties being such a pushover and so dominated by her aunt, but the plot explains well the reason for her shyness and blind conformity to Ebony’s rules, and also how she finally builds up the courage to stand up for herself. Ebony is a decent character, almost like a typical fairy-tale villain though somewhat flat in portrayal. But her daughter Scarlett is a wonderful and well-sketched secondary character. I loved how she was not sketched as a clichéd ‘evil stepsister’ kind of character. I wish she had an even greater role to play.

In terms of plot, the story is pretty straightforward and mostly predictable, though it does have a couple of surprises. I could guess these much before they popped up on the page, but I was still invested enough in the proceedings. After all, no one reads romances for surprise twists – the couple will obviously have a HEA ending. What we read romances for is the journey to that ending, and in this book, the journey is stunning. The romance being steam-free was a huge added positive for me.

Through Sadie’s and Ebony’s interactions, we also have a nice conflict about how a business is supposed to be run. Considering how much I hate the word ‘influencer’, I obviously was against Ebony’s method of buttering insta celebrities in high hopes of name and fame. Sadie’s ideas were more conservative, but they spoke better to my heart. I like how she understood her business’s core competencies and wanted to build a brand around that, rather than running behind something that may be elusive and transient. Happy customers can lead to positive word-of-mouth publicity, and that automatically generates more revenue. There! A practical business lesson from a romance book – how often do you get to say that?

Of course, the book isn’t perfect. It is a bit slow-going and gets a bit repetitive in between. The only major thing that bugged me was the number of times physical gestures and touches are brought up in the couple’s scenes – blushing, hugging, putting head on shoulders, handholding, touching noses, fingers on elbow, hand around waist…. OMG! In all fairness, it seemed like both Sadie and Witt had touch as their love language, and mine isn’t touch, so that could be one reason for my irritation with the overload. So I guess this is more of a ME problem than a BOOK problem.

All in all, if you love romances of the Hallmark kind, and would want a story with a wondrous setting and relatable characters, this book has a strong chance of providing you with satisfaction.

This is the first of a planned series of standalone stories set on Ever After Street. Count this fairy tale lover in for all subsequent books!

A shoutout to that scrumptilicious cover art – so perfect for the story and for this genre!

My thanks to Boldwood Books and NetGalley for the DRC of “A Midnight Kiss on Ever After Street”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.

The book is available for free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.