Book Review - Cloudy With a Chance of Marriage by Kieran Kramer

Kieran Kramer's Cloudy With a Chance of Marriage is the third in her Impossible Bachelors series.  In this installment of the series we get the story of Captain Stephen Arrow and Miss Jilly Jones.  Arrow is recently retired from the English Navy and has inherited a ramshackled house on the oft-expressed dreary Dreare Street in London.  Jilly is his much-annoyed neighbor.  He seems to only be interested in partying with his single male friends while she is trying to make a profit with her bookstore.  It seems unlikely that the two opposites will ever find common ground.  And yet, it appears that they both protest just a bit too much about the other.

We learn very early on in the book that Jilly is actually the runaway wife of a nasty and brutal man named Hector.  She sold off her jewelry and fancy clothing in order to leave him and make a new and safe life for herself in London.  She is therefore very dismayed when Arrow starts paying her a lot of attention.  While she is also attracted to him - she knows nothing can ever come of it.  Arrow sees Jilly as a challenge, of course.  I have to say that the chemistry between these two was somewhat lackluster and slightly unbelievable.  I'm not certain exactly why but their relationship felt like a secondary - almost forced - part of the book.

The more enjoyable aspect of the book is with the interactions between Arrow, Jilly and the friendships they make with their other neightbors on Dreare Street.  Together, the residents of Dreare Street band together to help their little community flourish in the face of a crisis.  There are a couple of twists that are well done in this book.  Overall, I did enjoy the book; just not as much as the first two in the series.  The final book in the Impossible Bachelors series is called If You Give a Girl a Viscount and will be released on November 1, 2011.