Review of It Happened on Maple Street by Tara Taylor Quinn and Timothy Lee Barney

It Happened on Maple Street

Tara Taylor Quinn & Timothy Lee Barney

HCI Books – True Vows series

271 pages ISBN 13: 9780757315596

Once upon a time in a city in Ohio there was a princess who knew what she wanted to be when she grew up, a writer for Harlequin and knew that she had in her future her own Harlequin hero. Real life unfortunately sometimes mirrors romance novels especially the one’s where the heroine has to get through some tough times before she gets her Happy Ever After and go through several toads before she gets her prince. Once upon a time in a small town in Ohio there lived a prince who didn’t know he was a prince until he met the princess and he and the princess lived happily until life intervened and their youth got in the way of communicating their true feelings.
Meet Tara and Tim both totally in love with each other at the ripe old age of 18, an age that’s hard enough to figure out who you are without the added pressure of figuring out the supposed love of your life add that to complicated emotions and conflicting feelings and it doesn’t matter that “It Happened on Maple Street”.

Tara Taylor Quinn tells us her own heart wrenching story in It Happened on Maple Street, she tells it with an honesty that had to be frightening to let us into her sanctum and see inside her heart and soul. She and Tim tell the story in their own voices which makes the tale so much more personal for me and I know it will for you too. She tells us the painful truths about her past for the first time ever on the pages of this book and she does it with the grace we’ve come to expect from Tara Taylor Quinn mixed with the vulnerability and uncertainty of Tara Gumser. It’s a story of love, loss, pain and redemption, it’s a coming of age story that combines raging hormones and frenzied emotions with culpability and consequence. And finally and happily it’s a story about how true love is without bounds, without bonds and is limitless and timeless, it proves that true love does conquer all. The romance is real as real as the characters, it’s hard to read but when you consider that it was harder to live you’ll give in and read it from cover to cover. The love scenes are sometimes innocent and sometimes very sensual and will bring to mind our own confusion at that time of our lives. There are also scenes that are carnal without love and those are criminal and beastly and unfathomable but also imperative to the story and must be read.

I have been a fan of Tara Taylor Quinn for years, I recall her Ivory Nation and Chapman Files series and wondered how she got so in tuned with her characters, now I have my answer, you have to know pain to write it well and she does. But she also gets strength and hope and I get that too because she also lives that. This is an intense novel, should not be taken lightly and should be read by any aged woman from teenaged on. Yes I’ve been a fan of Tara Taylor Quinn for years and now I’m also a fan of Tara Gumser and a big fan of Tim Barney.
Ms. Taylor/Gumser, thank you from the bottom of my heart for putting your very soul into this amazing, frightening and very “True Vows” novel. Please visit Tara’s website here.

Now a word about True Vows brought to you by HCI books the publishers of The Chicken Soup books is a series of true love stories authored by some of our favorite authors, see their website here.