Let's Pretend This Will Work

Mimi Perkins is in her thirties, still single, and tired of it. So when Ren Yardley, a divorced fellow drama teacher and devoted father, proposes, she takes it as the good news she has been promised. Then Ren's ex-wife is badly injured in a car accident, and he moves back into his former home to look after her and their daughters.

Ren wants Mimi close, so Mimi leaves New York City for New Haven and waits. What she finds instead of a wedding is a job at an eccentric local daycare, a community she never went looking for, a small charge named Alice, and Alice's widowed father, Jamie.

As Ren's old family knits itself quietly back together, Mimi has to decide what she is willing to fight for and what she should have let go of long ago. Maddie Dawson writes warm, funny, second-chance women's fiction, and this is one of her best-natured books.