An Everyday Hero by Laura Trentham
Published: February 2020 – St. Martin’s Griffin
Book courtesy of the publisher and NetGalley
Description: At thirty, Greer Hadley never expected to be forced home to Madison, Tennessee with her life and dreams of being a songwriter up in flames. To make matters worse, a series of bad decisions and even crappier luck lands her community service hours at a nonprofit organization that aids veterans and their families. Greer cannot fathom how she’s supposed to use music to help anyone deal with their trauma and loss when the one thing that brought her joy has failed her.
When Greer meets fifteen-year-old Ally Martinez, her plans to stay detached and do as little as possible get thrown away. New to town and dealing with the death of her father in action, she hides her emotions behind a mask of bitterness and sarcasm, but Greer is able to see past it and recognizes pieces of who she once was in Ally. The raw and obvious talent she possesses could take her to the top and Greer vows to make sure life’s negativities don’t derail Ally’s potential.
After Greer is assigned a veteran to help, she’s not surprised Emmett Lawson, the town’s golden boy, followed his family’s legacy. What leaves her shocked is the shell of a man who believes he doesn’t deserve anyone’s help. A breakthrough with Ally reminds Greer that no one is worth giving up on. So she shows up one day with his old guitar, and meets Emmett’s rage head on with her stubbornness. When a situation with Ally becomes dire, the two of them must become a team to save her—and along the way they might just save themselves too. (publisher)
My take: Thirty year old Greer Hadley tried to make it as a singer/songwriter in Nashville but when her dream didn’t take hold she came home to Madison, TN. To make matters worse she gets in a bar fight which gets her arrested. She ends up doing community service at a non-profit that uses songwriting and music as therapy for veterans or family members of vets.
Greer gets the most challenging clients. First is Ally, a surly teenager who has no interest in a stranger teaching her how to write songs. Second is Emmett, a newly discharged vet who is dealing with the loss of a leg and the reasons behind it. He’s also a former classmate of Greer’s. She has her hands full with these two but is determined to put her time in and then move on with her life.
An Everyday Hero is about learning to live a new normal after you think life is through with you. I liked the realistic and upbeat tone of the book. This is the second of Laura Trentham’s books I’ve read and I look forward to reading more.
About the author:
An award-winning author, Laura Trentham was born and raised in a small town in Tennessee. Although, she loved English and reading in high school, she was convinced an English degree equated to starvation. She chose the next most logical major—Chemical Engineering—and worked in a hard hat and steel toed boots for several years.
She writes sexy, small town contemporaries and smoking hot Regency historicals. The first two books of her Falcon Football series were named Top Picks by RT Book Reviews magazine. Then He Kissed Me, a Cottonbloom novel, was named as one of Amazon’s best romances of 2016. When not lost in a cozy Southern town or Regency England, she’s shuttling kids to soccer, helping with homework, and avoiding the Mt. Everest-sized pile of laundry that is almost as big as the to-be-read pile of books on her nightstand.
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