Peaches in the Rain by Aurelia L Imeri

Peaches in the Rain by Aurelia L Imeri
Publisher: Self-Published
Genre: Romance, Poetry, Contemporary
Rating: 4 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

What if the person you ruined is the only person who ever felt like home?

Dear reader, Orion did what people do when regret becomes too loud to ignore.

He went looking for the ghost he had spent a decade pretending not to love.

At Glasgow Airport, shaken by seven impossible weeks and a heart he can no longer control, Orion boards a flight back to London. Beside him sits Ava: anxious, wounded, funny, and far too perceptive for a stranger. As the plane claws through turbulence, their conversation becomes a confession.

There is L.

The woman he loved before he knew how to keep love safe. The woman he hurt. The woman whose voice still lives in the quiet rooms of his mind. The woman who may not be a fantasy after all.

Through airport fog, borrowed cars, rain-slicked A-roads and the brutal intimacy of things left unsaid, Peaches in the Rain asks whether love can return after the damage is done.

Is it delusion to still feel someone after ten years?

Or is it only delusion if they do not feel it too?

Raw, lyrical and painfully intimate, Peaches in the Rain is a novel about longing, guilt, second chances, and the dangerous hope that some love does not die.

It waits.

Regret is a heavy load to carry.

Orion and L both struggled to form and maintain emotionally healthy relationships. This isn’t something I typically find in romance novels, so I was eager to find out if one or both of them would develop the emotional and communication tools necessary to change this by either seeking professional help or finding the right workbook to help them figure out why they reacted the way that they did.

It would have been helpful to have more information about why these two characters should try to be romantically involved with each other for a second time. The stories Orion shared about the way he treated L disturbed me, and when I finished those scenes I hoped they’d both do quite a bit more healing before deciding whether to get back together. This is something I’m saying as a reader who virtually always roots for the main characters to live happily ever after, but in this particular case I didn’t have enough evidence that these two were good for each other at this precise moment in their lives.

I applaud the author for not wrapping up all of the loose ends of this romance the way such a thing would generally be written for this genre. There’s something to be said for playing around with the audience’s expectations of what should happen next and allowing the characters to develop naturally instead, even if it was in a direction that wasn’t particularly common. This was my first experience reading their work, and it has piqued my curiosity about what else they have already published or will publish in the near future.

Peaches in the Rain was a creative take on a difficult relationship.