Tart and Sweet by Amy Lane

In the Army, Robbie Chambers turned on his lover out of fear—and he hasn’t been able to live with himself since. Now he’s out of the Army but still trapped in the closet that brought on his most cowardly moment, and he starts to think he’ll never be able to fight his way free.

Until he sees Cy McVeigh. Beautiful and uninhibited, Cy is dancing on the boardwalk at Old Sac for no other reason than the moment called for it. Robbie not only joins in the dance but is smitten from the very beginning.

However, Robbie still has old business to clear up, and when he helps out a kid in need and comes face-to-face with the man he betrayed, he’s forced to come clean with himself. He can’t redeem his mistake if he’s still locked into his old patterns, and he won’t ever be worthy of Cy if he can’t earn Adam’s forgiveness. He’s going to need all the help he can get from the people at Candy Heaven in order to make things right with his past so he can have a future with Cy.

Book 4
Buy Links

Amazon US  ~  Amazon UK  ~  Amazon Au  ~  Amazon Ca
Dreamspinner Press

Reviews by the Wicked Reads Review Team

Sarah – ☆☆☆☆
The final book in this series is as sweet and redemptive as the ones before. As usual, past hurts and difficulties are overcome by the support of the loosely connected and tightly knit family the characters in this series have created for themselves.

Despite some initial angst, this is the happiness and sunshine side of Amy Lane – a healthy dose of comforting romance. The fourth book follows a very similar formula to the earlier ones. Robbie is seen by Darrin before he arrives in time to rescue Finn. He arrives with baggage, but like each of the new characters in each of the other stories in this series, Robbie is embraced by the Candy Man family as he comes to terms with the past and makes a new future for himself.

Family dramas aren’t quite as intense as they’ve been in earlier books, but it feels like we’ve seen Robbie’s homophobic parents before. Add Robbie’s search for romance and his need to find an adult purpose in life, and it starts to feel like a slightly formulaic repeat of various elements of the earlier books in the series.

Cy is wonderfully unique. We’ve seen glimpses of the beautiful dancer before, but this is finally his story and he makes a fantastically reluctant leading man. As always in an Amy Lane book, the connection between Cy and Robbie is emotional, tender, and sweet.

This feels like the last in this series and the recycled elements here suggest it might be time to put it to bed. But I loved catching up with the enormous cast of characters and the happy couples from previous books. I love the series – it is a romantic and hopeful and gloriously sentimental injection of sugary happiness.

AMY LANE is a mother of two college students, two grade-schoolers, and two small dogs. She is also a compulsive knitter who writes because she can’t silence the voices in her head. She adores fur-babies, knitting socks, and hawt menz, and she dislikes moths, cat boxes, and knuckle-headed macspazzmatrons. She is rarely found cooking, cleaning, or doing domestic chores, but she has been known to knit up an emergency hat/blanket/pair of socks for any occasion whatsoever, or sometimes for no reason at all. Her award-winning writing has three flavors: twisty-purple alternative universe, angsty-orange contemporary, and sunshine-yellow happy. By necessity, she has learned to type like the wind. She’s been married for twenty-plus years to her beloved Mate and still believes in Twu Wuv, with a capital Twu and a capital Wuv, and she doesn’t see any reason at all for that to change.

Connect with Amy

Facebook  ~  Twitter  ~  Google+  ~  Website  ~  Goodreads

Reviewers on the Wicked Reads Review Team were provided a free copy of Tart and Sweet (Candy Man #4) by Amy Lane to read and review.