Sit Stay Love by Dana Mentink

This is a delightful Christian romance that I thoroughly enjoyed.

I loved the character Gina. She is a young woman with a huge heart and wisdom beyond her years. And she's funny. Imagine losing your job because you “lost” a preschooler on a field trip to a bakery. (He was asleep on a stack of flour bags.) Desperate for a job, she agrees to do a celebrity pet sitting job for her cousin while she is out with surgery.

I love Tippy the dog. That dog has character and she becomes the healing factor in many relationships.

I came to like Tippy's owner, star pitcher Cal. He inherited Tippy when his mom died. He's a hunk, lean and muscular (according to Gina). All he cares about is pitching. He doesn't have a life outside of pitching. Even his home interior has no personality, having been professionally designed. But he never figured on being confronted by an honest to goodness real and genuine woman like Gina.

The dialog in the novel is great. There is some clever humor too. But the aspect of the novel I liked the best was how Cal was challenged to be the man God created him to be, on the mound and off. That meant facing some old hurts as well as learning that there was life outside of the baseball “arena.” (You've got to read the book.)

I recommend this delightful and well written novel to those who like a thoughtful Christian romance. Great characters, great plot, and great prose make this a wonderful novel. You just might want to have a box of tissues near by as you get to the end.

My rating: 5/5 stars.

Dana Mentink is an American Christian Fiction Writers Book of the Year finalist for romantic suspense and an award winner in the Pacific Northwest Writers Literary Contest. Her suspense novel, Betrayal in the Badlands, earned a Romantic Times Reviewer's Choice Award. She lives in California with her husband and their two daughters.

Harvest House, 224 pages.

I received a complimentary egalley of this book from the publisher for the purpose of an independent and honest review.