Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Love Finds You in Poetry, Texas-Janice Hanna

Love Finds You in Poetry, Texas
Janice Hanna
Summerside, Aug 2009, $12.99
ISBN: 9781935416166

In 1904 Poetry, Texas has several German immigrant bachelors who are of marrying age. Seeing an opportunity, Belinda Bauer becomes a marriage broker. She works the personal ads across the country seeking perfect matches for all the eligible men in town.

Belinda proves quite good at matching up men with their ideal women and visa versa. However, she soon realizes she made one mistake when she found the perfect match several times for her best friend barber Georg Kaufman. Belinda wants to be his perfect match as she now realizes she loves her best friend forever.

The romance between Georg and Belinda is deftly handled so that it seems as if the matchmaker is unaware that her BFF is doing his own subtle matching without hurting the pretenders. The story is a lighthearted historical frolic that brings vividly to life the German immigrant wave of the beginning of the previous century in which advertising for wives was done in newspaper personal ads. With a nod to Hello Dolly except in Texas, fans will enjoy a trek back to the early twentieth century in aptly named Poetry, Texas as Belinda writes poems to find a match.

Harriet Klausner

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