Review: "Meet Me Under the Northern Lights" by

Meet Me Under the Northern Lights by Emily Kerr
Published 2021 via One More Chapter
★★★

The third stop in my northern lights tour! In this one, Lucy has a job problem and a drinking problem (only one of which she acknowledges), and she's packed off to Finland to help out at a retreat and ride out the worst of her problems.

What worked well for me here: well, Finland, obviously. There are some nice specific small things that we get to see—for example, Lucy helps to pull snow down from cabin roofs, which is the sort of detail I love; not something I've ever had to do, and not something Lucy ever expected to do, and not something tourists in cold places generally have to think about. I also like how limited any misunderstandings are; Lucy and Tommi have a rocky start, but we're spared the done-to-death thing where the hero thinks the heroine is into someone else (or vice versa), or that she might actually be guilty of the thing she's been falsely accused of, and so on.

What didn't work so well for me: Lucy is—said gently—kind of a train wreck. Her intentions are always good, but I cringed every time she had a bright idea that she thought she'd surprise the hero (and other more Finland-competent people), because it was always immediately clear that something was going to go badly. Messy heroines are, through no fault of their own, not my jam, and Lucy definitely leans messy.

The northern lights books I've read so far have varied pretty widely—Alaska, Iceland, and now Finland; heroines who are a photographer, an event planner, and now a radio personality; heroines whose personal growth involves very little, building some confidence and self-worth, and now some substantial personal demons plus villains. What's interesting is that the heroes vary rather less: In Alaska, we had a floatplane pilot who runs a wilderness retreat; in Iceland, a bus driver and tour guide; and in Finland, another wilderness retreat operator. Also of note: in every book, it's the heroine who comes in from a better-known city and falls in love with the Alaskan/Icelandic/Finnish way of living; it's the heroine who uproots her life for romance.

This is not a comment on these books specifically; it says more to me about what is common in romance novels generally. I have one more northern lights book on my list (not out yet, so can't compare yet!), and it'll be interesting to see how much it adheres to—or deviates from—the norm here.