In her January 26th newsletter, the Poisoned Pen Bookstore’s Barbara Peters wrote, “For 2024, eschewing politics and agendas, our focus is on books and experiences that are entertaining and informative — stories that will be a respite and a refuge from cultural and political wars.”

To that agenda may I add a hearty “Hear, hear!” I’m going to try to adopt it for the books I review here. I’ve already started — see my reviews of Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ Simply the Best, Ariel Lawhon’s The Frozen River, and Michiko Aoyama’s What you are looking for is in the library.

Recently I’ve been hop, skip and jumping through Robyn Carr’s Virgin River series. Set in the present day in a small town in northern California, they are marketed as romance novels, and there is always a couple (or two, or three) at the heart of every narrative. But it’s really not about them, it’s about all of them, and Carr’s community is a natural way into keeping up with the characters old and new. (Is there a genre called community fiction? Maybe there should be.)

In Temptation Ridge, the sixth in the series, Luke Riordon buys a house and cabins along the river thinking he’ll remodel all of them and flip them for a profit, and then move on, which is pretty much the way he treats women, too. Young, beautiful, inexperienced Shelby McIntyre has other ideas.

Yes, it’s all about Luke and Shelby, but one day Luke finds Art, who has Down syndrome, squatting in one of his cabins. Art is on the run from an abusive group home and Luke essentially adopts him, to the point that Art becomes a recurring character in the series. That scene in a later book when Art nearly dies trying to save Sean and Franci’s daughter Rose is heart-wrenching, and it isn’t forgotten by Carr in later books, either.

The second book, Shelter Mountain, is a realistic look at wife and child abuse without sending you running. Paradise Valley, book 7, is about what it takes to love a soldier who loses a leg in Iraq and comes home having lost his own ability to love, at least temporarily, and how his girlfriend and Jack, his surrogate father, and the entire community of Virgin River help him regain his lost self.

Carr skillfully merges romance with real life issues and is a positive genius with continuity (I’d love to see the spreadsheet she must use to keep track of all the characters and their doings). None of her stories, no matter how incidental to the main plot of each book, leave us hanging. I’m reading the 14th in the series now.

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