Part of Your World by Abby Jimenez

One of my kids is a bit of a modern romance novel reader and he got me a little bit hooked on the Emily Henry style books. Those are the gold standard for me, but the Abby Jimenez books are pretty good. Then came Project 2025, barreling through America at lightning speed and destroying everything decent in its path with a head of state who cannot tell the truth even for a minute of the day. They lying, the cruelty and the graft are so staggering. So in contrast to that are these formulaic novels which have competent women, men who respect them and do not try to control them, and voila, it is a pleasant, if brief break from the white racist misogynists who want to break everything. Although in this case, not completely. Alexis has broken up with her boyfriend who is a decade older than her and wanted her weak and under his control. She finally breaks up with him because he cheats on her--but she does not get clean away, because her father is cut from the same cloth. A chance meeting with Daniel can change all that--he is everything her father looks down on--or is he? Alexis is trapped in a maze that she sees no exit from until all of a sudden, she does--wildly unrealistic in many ways but entirely likable. I will take a break but eventually read the second book in this series. The thing about these sorts of books is that people are a bit two dimensional and you have to be up for a bit of that when you read them.