The Tourist Attraction by Sarah Morgenthaler
When Graham Barnett named his diner The Tourist Trap, he meant it as a joke. Now he’s stuck slinging reindeer dogs to an endless string of resort visitors who couldn’t interest him less. Not even the sweet, enthusiastic tourist in the corner who blushes every time he looks her way…
Two weeks in Alaska isn’t just the top item on Zoey Caldwell’s bucket list. It’s the whole bucket. One look at the mountain town of Moose Springs and she’s smitten. But when an act of kindness brings Zoey into Graham’s world, she may just find there’s more to the man than meets the eye… and more to love in Moose Springs than just the Alaskan wilderness.
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This book made me cry three times (in the best way) and was the best vacation read. I like reading books that “set the tone” for my trips so I picked this one up for my long weekend excursion to the small mountain town of Banff and it was perfect. The town I was visiting was a lot like the town in the book so it felt so perfect although, unfortunately, no hot locals fell madly in love with me while I was there (-_-). This book, however, is definitely going into my feel-good read pile. It was cheesy for sure but it had so much good humour that had me cackling throughout, the best dream man, the cutest dog baby, and a good enough divergence from the typical “angst” midway through that I wasn’t left in heartache at all. I will definitely read this again (I’ll also be ordering it in hardcopy to tab my fav pages) and highly recommend this read if you’re looking for something happy. I will say, despite it having the cartoon cover trend of most romances today, it is a completely PG book so it should be safe to listen to on audio in the car with anyone who might be with you!
There were so many things to love about this book especially some of the more “canon” romance stuff that it smashed through. The main girl is a waitress at a truck stop and instead of making this a “lift her from her sad life” trope, she was happy where she was and any judgement of her job from the rich people around her didn’t phase her one bit. Our main guy was also a bit of a mess when it came to career goals but that just made him so much more loveable and realistic. They were two, young people who didn’t really know what they wanted out of life yet and got to stumble through some of that together and it was so heartwarming to see.
Also, for a trip in an idyllic town, everything that could go wrong did but our MC made the absolute most of it and it turned all these boring excursions to read about into something I may even want to try some day. Graham was the perfect travel companion for Zoey, he kept her having fun and not focusing on the dumpster fire that her trip was becoming. I also love how his fav thing to do was push her glasses back up her nose for her (is that only romantic to someone who has that same problem?). And, although every single romance has a 3/4 way break-up, this book did that tension moment so much better than so many books I’m used to and we actually got some pretty good action out of it (like actual action, not, you know, “action”. Get your mind out of the gutter).
The only thing I didn’t love is that Zoey and her friends were the “do no wrong” kind of characters. So even when her and Graham disagreed, he was always made to be the one in the wrong and there were a few situations where I definitely didn’t agree with that. We need a bit more balance in that relationship with Zoey admitting some faults of her own, maybe we’ll get that down the road as this novel is a series! I know, very exciting news to me when I found out.
Overall, highly recommend. It’s such a feel-good read, and had fantastic humour but it also deals with the topics of over-tourism and some of the bad blood between locals/tourists that is a real issue for a lot of tourist towns (I myself live in a tourist-y city and this book actually had me acknowledging some of the unfair mindsets I’ve had about that, especially considering Tourism is the reason our city thrives).
This book is highly underrated in my opinion as I never see anyone talking about it. So go read it, go love it, and then let’s create some buzz around it!! 5 stars all the way.