Kissing Games of the World Book

If there’s one point that Jamie McClintock and Nate Goddard can agree upon, it’s that love is overrated. Jamie doesn’t have time for it. Nate doesn’t need it. And they certainly don’t want it from each other.

Jamie, a struggling free-spirited artist, is a devoted single mother who hasn’t been in a serious relationship since her boyfriend abandoned her after their son was born. Nate, a charismatic jet-setting salesman, is widowed and estranged from his father and five-year-old son, Christopher. Jamie would rather glue glitter to pinecones than go out on a date. Nate spends most of his nights wooing his clients. Then one afternoon Nate’s father drops dead of a heart attack. In that moment, their highly guarded worlds collide.

When Nate shows up at his childhood home to settle the estate and reclaim his son, he discovers that Jamie has been living in the Connecticut farmhouse as his father’s roommate. Mistrustful of each other’s motives, Nate and Jamie bicker about everything from children’s nicknames to Jamie’s fashion choices to Nate’s home renovation methods. It doesn’t help that Christopher prefers Jamie to his absentee father.

But after the funeral, Nate and Jamie begin to see each other in a more forgiving light. Nate, traveling to sales conferences all over the country with a sullen Christopher in tow, learns he can’t breeze his way through single parenthood. Jamie, who has moved back in with her sister, wonders at the wisdom of her unconventional choices as a woman with a child to support. And both begin to realize they don’t know as much about love as they thought. Still wounded by past heartbreak and sorrow, can they learn to trust each other and open their hearts?

Publishers Weekly

Journalist Shelton's poignant third novel (after What Comes After Crazy) elevates the oft-told stories of opposites attracting and sons struggling against their fathers. The residents of Chester, Conn., assumed that 60-something Harris Goddard was up to his old womanizing ways when single mother Jamie McClintock and her five-year-old son, Arley, moved in with him and his five-year-old grandson, Christopher. Though Harris and Jamie's affections are purely platonic, the rumor mill begins to churn when Harris dies and is discovered naked in Jamie's bed. Everyone is suspicious of her, including Nate Goddard, Christopher's father, who shows up to finally claim his son with plans to sell Harris's house and take his grieving son on the road with him. As Nate tries to put his plan into play, the surprising Goddard family backstory unwinds and Jamie, also wracked with pain, finds herself attracted to Nate and vice versa. An absolute treat, Shelton's work rarely falters and is filled with realistic twists, complex characters and a moving conclusion. (Nov.)

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