After their Italian adventure concludes (The Year of Luminous Love) and their close friend succumbs to cancer, two twenty-year-old friends return to Tennessee. Ciana falls in love with a cowboy while battling a predatory land developer; Eden falls in love with an Aussie while battling his jealous ex-girlfriend. Increasingly melodramatic twists drive the plot, but fans of over-the-top romances may not mind.

Gr 9 Up-Beginning a short time after The Year of Luminous Love (Delacorte, 2013) ends, this novel finds Ciana and Eden still reeling from the death of their close friend, Arie. Jon Mercer, Ciana's one-time love, offers her his heart, hoping for a fresh start. The months since Arie's death have been good to Eden, since she found a place and a family with Ciana and her mom, helping them with cooking and gardening. When Arie's mother invites the girls over to her house and gives them letters from their friend, they are stunned. For Eden, Arie offers her a possible way to contact Garret, the fun-loving Australian she met while the three friends were in Italy, and for Ciana, Arie gives her blessing to fully continue a relationship with Jon. While Eden finally connects with Garret and goes to visit him, Ciana continues working on her farm while also battling a local developer who wants to buy her property. Ciana's refusal leads to repercussions, and as she and Jon try to figure out how to deal with them, they grow closer together. This is a meandering, episodic book that relies too heavily on melodrama to be fully believable. The characters are less than fully developed and act more like young women in their early 20s rather than girls barely a year out of high school. The men are too perfect, and the plot flits from one crisis to the next. Fans of the previous book may leave satisfied, but others will be left wanting Necia Blundy, formerly at Marlborough Public Library, MA

Ciana Beauchamp is a proud farm girl, determined, like the rest of the Beauchamp women. So when a big-city developer makes an offer to buy her land, she turns it down outright. While Ciana believes she is doing the right thing, the townspeople of Windemere diagree. They watch her throw away a chance to save the dying town, and start terrorizing the farm and Ciana. Luckily, she has the help of her former love, Jon Mercer, and her best friend, Eden. After Eden leaves Tennessee to be with her own love in Australia, Ciana realizes her feelings for Jon. Their relationship has plenty of hiccups, though, the biggest of which comes from her grandmother's diary and a secret that scarred her family.Readers will enter this novel as though they are reading a sequel to which they did not read the previous booktrying to fill in the pieces of what happened "before." Eventually many of those pieces are supplied, but the reader is still left wondering about many of the characters and how they came to be. There is a lot going on in this novelevents, characters, issueswhich makes the storyline seem rushed and weighty. While much of the dialogue sounds too mature for young adults, this novel may interest teen readers of Lurlene McDaniel, romance, or southern tradition.Stacy Holbrook.Set in the south, The Year of Chasing Dreams is an easy-to-read romance mixed with family problems. áWith realistic characters leading realistic, modern-day lives, there is little suspense, to which the writing adds nothing. áComprised of basic vocabulary, the novel is readable, but has some sections with incomplete sentences. áYoung adults in grades seven through ten who enjoy easy romances may want to give this novel a try. 3Q, 2PûVictoria Quint, Teen Reviewer.