NIGHT & DAY

Author: Sherri Hansen ISBN: 9781935171287 3/2009 CONTEMPORARY Publisher: SECOND WIND PUBLISHING

It's midnight in Minnesota and Jensen Marie Christiansen is dreaming of a rosy future. It's daybreak in Denmark and Anders Westerlund is waking up to a world full of stark realities. When parchment paper and faded ink meet computer screens and fax machines, the old-fashioned magic of a great-grandmother's letters sets the stage for a steamy Internet romance... and the unraveling of a hundred year-old mystery. Night & Day... Will fantasy become reality, or will oceans and time keep a second pair of lovers apart?

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

Sherrie Hansen’s contemporary romance, NIGHT & DAY, is set in two times and places: the night of Denmark and the morning of Minnesota, or is it the other way around? Jensen Christiansen is a 39 year-old woman, single, but in a dying relationship with “salt of the Earth” Ed. She oozes creativity and earns a living by custom-making artistically designed quilts for display as art or as practical bedding. Ed is exceedingly responsible, traditional, and utterly predictable. There isn’t a spontaneous bone in his body. Jensen’s biological clock is ticking; Ed has been there and done that. When Jensen starts promoting the idea of marriage and babies, he breaks her heart by getting a vasectomy in secret. After deciding that she has come to the end of the road with Ed, Jensen strikes out on her own… in cyberspace, and meets the man of her dreams. But could this dream turn into a nightmare? As Jensen shares what she’s done with friends and family, they all rush to tell her horror stories of people not being their true selves online. Will Jensen and Anders be able to translate their relationship from an electronic cocoon to the harsh reality of life on Earth?

Hansen creates not only a cyber-relationship that will have to survive the bounds of time and space, but also a love story within a love story. Jensen’s ancestors came from Denmark in the not-too-distant past, and as her family’s only ardent historian, she seeks to understand her forebears and their possibly scandalous reason for immigrating to America by having Anders translate a series of letters sent by Jensen’s great grandmother back to a relation in Denmark. Jensen’s future is further complicated by having all the pieces of her life collapse around her. Her family members are each ready to move on in new and different ways, while she stubbornly clings to the soil of the family farm. Anders is a stabilizing factor, but how stable can he be thousands of miles away? He beats himself up for not being able to hold her in person when her life takes a turn for the worse. Anders also has to deal with his anti-America prejudice; when Jensen identifies herself as Danish, he has no idea she doesn't live in his country. His antipathy is rooted in American companies and culture descending on Denmark, threatening to replace his country’s heritage with a disposable one. Having a life with a Danish woman could be so much less complicated, and one such beauty actually wants him. He and Jensen will have to search their hearts in order to reach the place where they can peacefully co-exist.

I actually had to shake myself quite frequently and remind myself that Jensen and Anders are not real people because their emails, phone calls, chats and finally, in-person conversations, are entirely genuine. And in spite of what their heads and hearts want, their bodies have also re-awakened with needs and desires. This is a romance of the whole self.

NIGHT & DAY is crafted as beautifully as any quilt. Each piece connects to the others and adds beauty to the whole. The pieces also interlock in not only the smaller designs, but in the overall picture, with Jensen’s Danish family history reaching forward and tying to her present, and even ahead to her future. It’s a traditional quilt with an entirely modern design overlaying it, which truly enhances the character. Readers who relish in historical mysteries, artistic nuances, and some down and dirty—under the quilt—activity, will certainly enjoy NIGHT & DAY.

Susan Barton