Title: Mending Lost Dreams at the Highland Repair Shop
Author: Kiley Dunbar
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Rating: ★★★★★
Source: Netgalley
Blurb: Welcome to the Highland Repair Shop, where mending broken things – be they clocks, compasses or hearts – is a way of life.
After a gruelling few years in city hospitals, trainee doctor Alice hopes a new, small-town post will bring quiet to her racing mind. Instead, she finds a place brimming with eccentricity and curiosity, and people who seem to see straight through her carefully controlled facade.
Murray has returned to his hometown with a broken heart and his tail between his legs. Volunteering at the family-run repair shop is meant to be temporary… until a chance encounter starts to crack his emotional armour.
Meanwhile, mountain ranger Finlay lives for solitude and the wild and rugged scenery. But when a broken compass draws him reluctantly into town life, he finds himself pulled not just into a community project, but into the kind of tangled feelings he’s spent a lifetime avoiding.
As a new garden is built and winter weather rages, lives will be patched, polished and set on entirely new courses. Can these lonely hearts be mended, and finally find happiness and love?
Review: Mending Lost Dreams is the second in Kiley’s Highland Repair Shop series, and I’m happy to say that it’s just as delightful as the first. In fact, it’s better.
While most of the characters were introduced in Fixing a Broken Heart, readers don’t have to read that book first as Mending Lost Dreams stands alone. The reading experience is heightened in my opinion, though.
The story starts with Alice, who’s suffering from burnout and extreme anxiety from medical school and what she believes to have been an almost fatal error. She meets the adorable Cary and the seeds of romance are sewn.
Meanwhile, Fixing A Broken Heart‘s heroine Ally’s brother Murray clashes with Finley, a grumpy loner determined to protect himself from the possibility of a hiker dying on the mountain. Murray is licking his wounds after realising that his boyfriend only wanted a, um, bed warmer, shall we say?
So we have two romances slowly bubbling away, against the backdrop of the lovely repair shed with its colourful cast, and the development of a community garden. It’s Alice’s job to make the referrals to the project which, after a wobbly start, she begins to love.
Of course there’s drama. Finley’s dread of a hiker getting lost in mountain fog proves to be with good reason, though I’m not saying who or what happens. You’ll have to read the book for that.
All in, Mending Lost Dreams is a lovely hug of a book that’s perfect for cold, dark nights sat in front of a fire with a hot cocoa to hand, and I highly recommend it!
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