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I’m not a reader of romance books, but I found my way here by happenstance. I was in Orlando for work, and Lacey was having an author signing a few blocks from the hotel, so I thought I’d go show support. She’s a fantastic person, and I wish her well in the future.

That said, I did not like By the Way of the River.

It’s not a horrible book, by any stretch. Lacey has talent as a writer. Her characters are likeable and sentences flow with a cadence that carries you through the book. However, I found myself too often trapped in mundane occurrences of the characters’ lives, or confused by why they suddenly seemed like different characters altogether.

Joshua, a local psychiatrist in the town of Laurel Cove, meets Belle, a newly transplanted southern belle with anxiety issues. She has severe panic attacks when driving over bridges, which obviously hinders her everyday life. A coworker suggests seeing a psychiatrist, which leads her to Joshua, and it’s love at first sight. And the beginning of their problems.

It’s against a psychiatrist’s ethical code to date any of his patients, but he is so drawn to her he will ignore this, thinking he can have his cake and eat it too. Spoiler: he can’t.

I had a few issues with this novel. There’s so much going on, but there’s nothing going on. The main characters get trapped in the rubble of a building for three days after an earthquake, which is a serious event, but it’s not mentioned again except in passing in two paragraphs later in the book. Apparently, it traumatized Belle so much that she has nightmares, but this is the first we hear about this—two-thirds into the book!

Instead of dealing with that trauma with her love interest, we are gifted a chapter on Belle’s cat having kittens. Yes, there’s an entire chapter that started off with Joshua seeing other women, but then gets sidelined at the birth of kittens. Multiple friends and family members come over to watch this miraculous event.

Lacey clearly did her homework on careers and places. Belle has a job doing something in nature. She goes into so much detail in the first few chapters that you think the author is going to weave Belle’s career path into the main story, but it goes nowhere. She’s just a girl who loves nature.

I think the biggest thing that bothered me was how rudderless it was. Everybody was written so cute or nonconfrontational, I didn’t feel any certain way about them. The situations weren’t defined well enough. I wasn’t given enough information to make an informed decision, and our main characters weren’t choosing a side until late in the game, so we all were just passengers along for the ride.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find the scenery as beautiful as the Pacific Northwest it was described to be.

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