BRAIDED ROSES: Closed Door Romance (Sensibility Romance Series Book 2) uses dual first-person perspectives to pull the reader into a budding relationship built against the backdrop of Paris. Minor characters from Book 1, both Megan and Noah have to relocate to the city of light for work. Though the story does work as a standalone, some of the nuances in the relationships won’t be as rewarding without reading Mimika Cooney's Mind Reader first.
The setting is a highlight of the novel, and Cooney utilizes more than just a tourist’s view of Paris. Either through research or personal experience, Cooney really does make it feel like Megan grew up there and that she's revisiting old ghosts while trying to make new memories. She isn’t quite a grump, and Noah isn’t quite a ray of sunshine, but the couple does share some aspects with that trope. The differences help their two perspectives feel unique. An underlying element, one of many text threads, unfortunately doesn’t always seem as interesting.
Megan also sometimes appears absent from her own story. Getting asked by a complete stranger about their first love story minutes after meeting is invasive; yet a character who's supposed to be careful, play her cards close to the chest, and disappear when confronted about things that matter doesn’t show any reaction at all (internally or externally). Megan is a deeply thoughtful and reactive character the rest of the time, but with both that first-meeting scene and a very important one late in the novel, she is inexplicably not present. So much is missing from her point of view in those situations, especially given that both those chapters are told from her perspective.
Typographically, BRAIDED ROSES has much more polish than Mind Reader did. The punctuation errors, in particular, are nearly nonexistent in this second book. Despite a summary still being present in the reading matter, it’s at least stylized as an introduction instead of a prologue this time. However, the same underlying issues with repetition exist. Within a few pages, “the word lands” will happen multiple times. If every scene has one epiphany or more described as “locking,” “clicking,” or “sliding” into place, the notion starts to lose its efficacy. This overuse of specific phrases and rhetorical devices detracts from what is otherwise a very sweet story that's full of meaning.
Since the main couple from Mind Reader takes up quite a bit of space in BRAIDED ROSES, hopefully Noah and Megan will show up in future installments of the series (maybe even with a dog or cat named Yoda).
While it tells a satisfying story and has a little more polish than Mimika Cooney's first book, BRAIDED ROSES: Closed Door Romance (Sensibility Romance Series Book 2) still has some of the same underlying issues as its predecessor.
~ Lisbeth Ivies for IndieReader