I love straight contemporary romances, and wanted to like Lori Wilde’s The Sweethearts’ Knitting Club. While it has an interesting hero and some complex secondary characters, I disliked the heroine so much that I cannot recommend it.

Membership in the Sweethearts’ Knitting Club of Twilight, Texas has two requirements: Members must be married to (or involved with) the man they first gave their heart to and they must be able to knit. Flynn MacGregor doesn’t meet either requirement, but is the center of the group. That’s because no one knows her secrets.

Flynn has lived most of her life for other people. She pretended to be able to knit to please her dying mother, and made a deathbed promise that she would open a knitting shop in Twilight and marry Beau, now the town sheriff.

While Flynn hasn’t yet married Beau, she’s dated him off and on for the ten years since she was 16. Flynn’s turned down so many proposals, that Beau has given her an ultimatum. Either marry him, or he’ll drop her once and for all. Everyone in town wants Flynn to marry Beau. What they don’t know, is that Flynn gave her heart years ago to bad boy Jesse Calloway, and just can’t get him out of her mind, despite the fact that he’s spent the last 10 years in prison.

Jesse hasn’t been able to get Flynn out of his mind either, and, fresh out of prison, he’s heading to Twilight to get her back and get vengeance on the man who framed him for a crime he didn’t commit. And yes, I could see the villain coming a mile away.

This isn’t a bad book. It held my attention throughout and I was genuinely curious to see what happened with a few of the characters. Most of the secondary characters were fairly complex and I particularly enjoyed Flynn’s younger sister and would look forward to a book featuring her.

For the most part, I liked Jesse, and could understand why he wanted to get revenge. He’s still a bad boy, just not as bad as everyone in town thinks he is.

My major problems with the book lie with Flynn. I can understand many of her actions. She was just 13 when her mother became seriously ill, forcing her to raise her younger siblings when her father began drinking. I understand that she made promises to her mother, but it’s been years. Ultimately I found her to be spineless and too eager to please everyone else. I really despised Beau. He was completely controlling, and treated Flynn like a child. The more I knew about Beau, the less I liked Flynn. After all, she stayed with him for 10 years.

Even worse, I thought that Flynn was too willing to believe everyone else about Jesse and showed no trust in him. I really disliked how long she was ashamed to let anyone know she was interested in Jesse.

I get that Jesse dreamed of Flynn for the 10 years he was in prison, but honestly, I hoped he would dump her early on and take up with Flynn’s sister. That might be a book that I could recommend.