Peruse Safe Harbor Created By Judith Arnold In Physical Edition

is a story about two kids turned teenagers, Kip and Shelley who meet every year when their families come for summers to Block island.
It is a beautiful exploration of their childhood friendship, which remains deep and abiding over theyears they meet during summers.
They do and share everything together from cycling around the island, swimming, discussing and reading books, spying on Kips older sister and her boyfriend, and even learning to kiss with tongue and without bumping their noses.

The first segment is, . , . about this coming of age, the physical and emotional adventures of the twoyrs, old protagonists and is so beautifully and richly portrayed that you are completely pulled into their lives and wish that their summer idyll would never end.
But of course as all good things come to an end, it does too, Some family problems make Shelley leave the island hurriedly and she is unable to even call Kip and tell him of their departing.
They dont meet againat least not with their innocence intactfor the nextyears,

The second part is from Kips pov when he returns to the island as ayearold widower, crushed by grief and memories.
Here these two meet again as she is now a year rounder as the local pharmacist, They bond instantaneously and start hanging out together as friends, They both dont want or wish for anything more from each other till the night before he is to depart back to his mainland life, reinvigorated and healed by her friendship.
So they end up having sex and he leaves next morning and gets busy with his life.
The section ends with her calling and telling him that she is pregnant, and at the same time absolving him of all responsibility if he so wishes.
The H offers marriage but she refuses as her family circumstances had made her unable to trust men in marriages.

My misgivings started towards the later part of this section because of his obsessive grief and nagging insistence to himself about them being friends and just friends.


The third/last section shockingly for me opens when their son is already two yrs.
old and Kip is on one of his weekly visits, From here it is a very bland and comfortable sort of sliding towards the inevitable, So it was a total letdown from the initial promise,
The fatherdaughter angle provided most of the real angst actually and that is what made me shed the few tears that I did! The H and his enduring love for his dead wife left me quite dissatisfied.
He professes to have gotten over her in his thoughts but she is still mentioned till the very last pages a major ick factor for me.
He met the h after more than a year after being widowed, then they had a baby and so they were together for almostyears and so the wife had been dead for more thanyears now, but he keeps resurrecting her every few pages.
His grief is understandable especially the way she died, in an accident right before his eyes but I would have liked an earlier resolution.
It took away so much from the h/H s love story, Friendship turning to romantic love does not have to be comfortable and unpassionate, There can be some space for things like flareups, excitement, possessiveness and jealousies,

The last summer the teenage h/H were together had some heart melting moments like when they kiss for the first time and then go to the library the next day and the young, newly aware Kip takes her arm.

“He had never taken her arm like that before, It was a curiously chivalrous gesture, not exactly romantic but not quite friendly, either, It was protective. Possessive. She liked it. ”

This younger h/H are so much more riveting and adorable,
It is a sensitive take on two teenagers transforming summerbysummer and coming of age emotionally and sexually while remaining each others anchor or Safe Harbor!
Highly recommended for that part certainly.


The adults' saga sadly lost me and only,for me.


This contemporary romance fromhasn't necessarily aged well, The first part that portrays two fifteen year old summer friends struggling with adolescent changes is charming.
The second part of their reunion years later also has its moments, But then well, let's just say that category romance cliches kick in and the rest is all downhill, Judith Arnold was one of my favorite category romance authors in thes ands, and I'll always be grateful that she contributed a Hanukkah story to the Harlequin American Romance line, but this book did not need to make a reappearanceyears later.
Touching romance with very little explicit content, fast and easy read love story I received this book as a giveaway by the author, and at first thought it was YA.
The story begins when the hero amp heroine are fifteen, friends who spend summers on Block Island with their parents.
Since it wasn't what I was expecting, and I'm not a huge fan of YA, I almost put it down.
But after a hilarious, touching, and skillfully crafted scene where the two decide to "practice kissing," I was hooked.


It is not a YA, but a classic romance with all the ups and downs, twist and turns, anguish and passion a romance reader desires.
Shelley and Kip's friendship ends abruptly when a family emergency takes Shelley off the island, not to return for many years.
The two friends' paths split them onto opposite coasts, Kip moves to California and marries the love of his life, Shelley decides to return to Block Island to fill a need for the islanders, opening a pharmacy.


But tragedy strikes Kip when his wife is hit by a car and killed, right before his eyes.
A year later, his heart broken and his life shattered, he returns to his family's home on Block Island to heal.
Neither he nor Kip can believe their eyes when the two meet again,

What follows is a deeply touching love story told from both the hero and heroine's viewpoints.
We struggle with them as they wrestle with their emotional scars and their changing feelings for each other.


Originally published over twenty years ago, this classic tale has not lost any of its appeal.
My first of Judith Arnold's titles, it will definitely not be my last,

meh deleted from library. It had its moments but now I remember why I quit reading Harlequin and Silhouette, There was something sweet and delightful about kip and shelley I had trouble putting this book down.
Besides I love happy endings First off, that page count must have included ads for various harlequin lines, copyright page, title, etc.
What I read waspages, Which brings me to this: someone on a forum asked a while back how many books werestar reads.
I replied, "most of them", They were astonished. There are a lot of reasons a book might be astar read characters, plot, failure to connect with THAT reader, or in this case, ambition coupled with limited page count and delusions of grandeur regarding skill of the writer.


Simply put, this book was too short for what the author ambitiously tried and failed obviously to do.


It's divided intoparts,. There's distant past, there's recent past, and there's present, And it needed aboutmore pages to work out the problems in present but was only given.


So past. H/h are summer friends, They spend every summer running around on the island their respective parents migrate to why isn't explained.
No communication during the school year, They've both hit puberty. In addition to this sudden awkwardness, the h's father didn't come to the island this year, and the h is distressed about that.
She and her mother abruptly leave one day we find out why in part,

Recent past: H is now widowed, and in addition, traumatized, His wife was struck by a car at a crosswalk, He saw it happen. He comes to the island to escape wellmeaning relatives' matchmaking attempts can't blame him for that, The h now lives on the island and is a pharmacist, They run into each other and eventually she tells him what happened, Her father was a having an affair and b committing a whitecollar crime known as embezzling, He got caught. Spent time in prison for not reporting his illgotten gains on his taxes, Who'dathunk She has issues regarding men and relationships. A week or two go by, he's called to go back to work, and they, . . have sex. He leaves the next day, Over the course of the nextweeks, he does date someone and apparently gets a boner lovely.
She calls and informs him the stick changed colors and she's keeping it, End of part.

Present. It's beenyears andmonths, He gets the kid for weekends, Their former friendship has devolved into awkward polite strangers, He decides he wants more so moves back to the island and into the house with her.
weeks pass. Still polite, strange awkwardness. She gets a note from her father, He's dying and wants to see his grandchild, She reluctantly invites him over, He arrives. She can't cope and is actively avoiding him,hours or so pass. H confronts her and tells her she's acting like a royal bitch, much angst, The next day, father leaves, and h asks H to sleep with her, He asks her to marry him again he's asked several times, she's given him an emphatic NO.
She says yes.

I believe nothing, They spent nearlyyears unable to communicate, the H didn't have the balls to ask her out, yet he calls her a bitch because she hasn't had enough time really to process her father's sudden reappearing, then everything is right in their world Right.


I can't imagine that ugly word ever disappearing once uttered, And there wasn't much of a relationship there to start with WITHOUT that, At the very least, there needed to be time for her and her father to come to an understanding.
Forcing it, with namecalling no less, was not the way to go, And her remembering the distant past when he'd been her summer friend was a copout, Because just as she's had time to come to grips with her father who, btw, blames it entirely on her mother, Asshole, she's also had time to move on past a childhood friendship.
Trying to use that as a crutch, when they were never that close to begin with really you didn't keep in touch during the school year and you expect one to believe you're besties just didn't work.
This was not what I was expecting, . . it was better. This was a freebie I've had for a couple of years, I forgot about it until I was flipping through some of my titles, The story takes place over a period ofyears, I really enjoyed the slow pace and the ability to really understand the characters, However, at times, the pace was too slow, which is why I gave itinstead ofstars.
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