New Lease of LifeRating: 3.75 stars
Buy Link:
Amazon | All Romance | Amazon UK
Length: Novel


Phillip’s life took a drastic turn when being a Good Samaritan crippled him for life. Forced to rely on a crutch to move around, Phillip has spent the last year perfecting his self-loathing as he’s locked himself away from everyone and everything in his life that could remind him of who he was before the accident. Phillip’s final act of separating himself from his past is contacting a local charity shop about donating his collection of vintage clothing. What he wasn’t expecting was for the owner of the charity shop to barge into his life and begin breaking down the walls that he’s worked so hard to carefully construct around himself.

Colby made a fortune motivating people to live healthier and exercise. Now, he devotes his time to running a charity shop. When Phillip calls about donating some clothing, Colby isn’t expecting to find that he was less interested in the donation and more interested in figuring out how to make Phillip smile again.

In this slow burn romance story, Phillip used to be the life of the party. Known as “Pip” to his friends, he was a connoisseur of vintage clothing. He has a room devoted to storing these treasures and photo albums depicting himself wearing these items. Then a good deed went horribly wrong and Phillip finds himself struggling just to walk. As the story unfolds, readers are introduced to the self-loathing man who would rather shut himself away in his upscale home and focus on everything he lost because of the accident. I should warn readers, it will take a while to warm up to Phillip, but once you do, you will find yourself understanding why he initially comes off as being a miserable person.

Colby, on the other hand, is someone readers will immediately be drawn to. Trained as a physiotherapist, Colby made millions with his fitness ideas. Nowadays, he spends his time running a charity shop called “New Lease of Life.” When he receives a call to pick up some vintage style clothing, he expects to find a much older gentleman answering the door…instead, he finds himself staring into the eyes of a man not much older than himself. With his training as a healer, Colby finds himself wanting to fix Phillip…if he can only get Phillip to open up to the idea. Knowing Phillip has an affinity for vintage clothing, Colby decides to use this as a means of breaking through the walls Phillip has erected around himself.

I will admit, I really didn’t like Phillip all that much at the beginning and for the life of me, I couldn’t understand what it was about him that Colby thought was worthy of his attention. Yet, as the story begins to unfold, I found myself enjoying the banter between these two. It was humorous, especially with Phillip’s dry sense of humor laced with a heavy dose of sarcasm.

What I liked best about this story was that it was a slow burn romance with a lot of angst, mainly in the form of miscommunication and misunderstandings. I also liked that the two characters didn’t immediately jump into a physical relationship. In fact, readers don’t begin to see any heat until almost the end of the book. Therefore, instead of sexy scenes, readers are treated to a an extended period of getting to know each other before things heat up…and heat up they do!

I did have a few issues with this story. The first is that at the beginning of the book there is a glossary of terms. As the book is set in England, I initially thought this was a wonderful addition to the story as it would save me time trying to figure out what the heck they were talking about. Unfortunately, I thought that it was a bit misleading as it had quite a few rugby terms, so I would have thought that the sport may have played some role in the story, but it did not. In fact, some of these definitions seemed longer than the topic played in the storyline.

My second issue was much more problematic for me in that the ending was quite abrupt and left me wondering where the rest of it was. Literally, I turned the page expecting the next chapter and there was nothing. I actually went back and reread the chapter to see if I missed a few pages or something. For me, the ending actually ruined the entire story for me because I felt as if I read this whole book and was expecting a conclusion and I didn’t feel as if I got that conclusion.

Overall, I found myself enjoying this book once Phillip began to grow on me – though, it took a while. While I was disappointed in the ending, readers are left with a HFN. If you are a fan of a good hurt-comfort storyline, one with a lot of angst and short on sexy scenes, you are going to love this book.

A review copy of this book was provided by Dreamspinner Press.

Wendy sig