I'm a sucker for the fall-in-love-while-fixing-up-an-old-house genre, and since there's not a lot of those, I'm always excited to find a book that fits it. Especially if it's set in the South. So this one had lots of points in its favor going in. And it was a nice easy beach read. But if you have even medium-high standards, this one won't be for you. The characters are not well-drawn at all. There's just not much to them, and what there is tends to be stereotypical. There's a 21-year-old who reads like a midle schooler. There's a lot made about the main character being a Yankee, but I guess people can only tell because of her accent -- nothing else was standing out to me. And the love interest ... we know next to nothing about him. And what very few details we do have make me think he wouldn't be that great a guy if we did know him, despite how he's presented. I picked this up off of a table of buy-two-get-one-free books at Barnes and Noble, and it was grouped with several books of good reputation, many that I'd read and liked. I really can't imagine how it made it into such company.