The Big 5-0h by Sandra D. Bricker

This book was a light and funny story about Liv, a cancer survivor who’s dreading her 50th birthday. Liv is downtrodden, she’s survived cancer and now she needs a spark of…something to rejuvenate her depressive state of mind. Her friend Hallie suggests that Liv do a home swap – use Hallie’s mother’s Florida home since Hallie’s mother will be vacationing with Hallie and her family and her house will be empty. Liv agrees and once she sets foot into the beautiful tropical state of Florida, things take a turn for the better. She meets an eclectic assortment of people, the most important person being Jared, a hunky doctor who lives nearby. Jared is smitten with Liv and Liv is attracted to Jared too. But, both people are cautious, perhaps too cautious, to take a leap of love. Both of them need to learn to rely on God and to trust their instincts about their feelings for one another.

Liv also wonders if this Florida trip is just what she needs to break her birthday curse. Every year, a tumultuous event happens that marks Liv’s birthday. She doesn’t want to see what’ll happen on the day that she turns fifty.

I enjoyed this novel because of the light-hearted humor, and I also enjoyed the fact that the characters were older. Seldom do I see a romance novel with the main characters who are around fifty years old.

I got this book as a free Kindle download awhile ago, and I’m glad that I did. Nice, heartwarming story and I encourage you to purchase the book and give this story a try.

Why do you think that publishers fail to release more romance novels with older characters? Is romance a subject that is usually linked to a younger crowd?
~Cecelia Dowdy~

Product Description
Olivia Wallace has a birthday curse . . . or so she thinks. It was a broken heart on her 16th, a car accident on her 21st, pneumonia on her 30th, and a fall down a flight of stairs on her 35th. There were Ohio blizzards on her 38th, 39th, and 40th; and six days before her 45th, she lost the love of her life to a heart attack. Numbing grief stole that birthday and a couple more to follow and, on the morning of her 48th birthday, she received the call she’d dreaded ever since losing her mom so many years ago…she was diagnosed with stage-3 ovarian cancer. The doctors didn’t hold out a lot of hope, but Liv survived and maintained her faith. Months of surgeries and chemotherapy and radiation treatments followed.

Her best friend Hallie knows just the thing to break Liv out of the winter doldrums, while providing a safe haven of warmth, sunshine, and a time to regroup: a holiday in the Florida sunshine!