"Their hearts had let the laughter soften them into reckless intimacies."  (Kindle Location 258)

Laugh  is the second of Mary Ann Rivers’  The Burnside Series novels, that focus on a set of four orphaned adult siblings, Sam, Destiny, Sarah and PJ Burnside  from Lakefield, Ohio. I reviewed Live in January. Many locations and supporting characters in Laugh also appeared in Live. While you will have a fuller experience if you have read Live it is not necessary to do so in order to read and love Laugh.

Laugh is Dr. Sam Burnside's story. In Live, Sam is Destiny’s older over-bearing asshole doctor brother and I absolutely hated him. I was actually hoping Ms. Rivers would write PJ or Sarah’s story first and leave Sam to the end because even though Des still loved the grump, I wasn't looking forward to spending time especially if was going to continue to unintentionally upset everyone in his life with his nagging and micro-managing.

Sam and his childhood friend Lacey are about to open a community clinic in their neighborhood. The opening is weeks away and Sam’s intense yet unfocused energy has become more and more of a distraction as they struggle to jump through the remaining bureaucratic hoops. Lacey sends Sam to Nina, an urban farmer and cafe owner in the neighborhood,  under the guise of cultivating community connections and collaboration. Sam stomps into one of Nina’s urban plots, angry and out-of-sorts and he is quickly disarmed by Nina’s humor and distracted by her beauty.

“Her eyebrow arched up again, waiting for him to get his thumb out of his ass, he supposed.

So was he.

He briefly considered a conciliatory measure and polite reintroduction of himself and his mission there, and then quickly settled on fuck that.” (Kindle Loc 118-119)

The Sam Burnside in Laugh is very recognizably the Sam Burnside from Live. He has not received a personality transplant making him nicer, less over-bearing or easier to get along with. He might in fact be even more flawed in Laugh.  Yet by the second chapter I found myself rooting for him in a way I never expected to. Simply having Sam’s POV was not what made me start caring for him, it was seeing him through Nina’s eyes. Nina saw something in him worth paying attention to.

“How he let her work, and let her lead, and let her show him things, even while he ogled and bragged and postured.

The contrast between what he performed for her and what he meant told her something that made her think about more than Sam’s shoulders.

 Something made her wonder about why a man would try to distract her from noticing the best parts of himself. Maybe he hadn’t noticed the best parts of himself."  (Kindle Loc 226)

Nina Paz is the daughter of Mexican migrant workers and a transplant from Washington State. She is a vibrant, hard-working entrepreneur who with the help of her friends Tay and Rachel, run a successful  farm, cafe and catering business.  Nina has made a place for herself in  Lakefield, Ohio after the death of Russ, her husband and childhood sweetheart, in Afghanistan. In Sam, Nina recognizes same sense of loss, underneath his bluster, and posturing as she feels in her own heart.

"He lowered his eyes from hers, shy, suddenly, of her seeing either his crass and tender thoughts." (Kindle Location  183)

Nina and Sam have incredibly chemistry, they can't keep their eyes, hands or thoughts off each other. They sizzle: 

"She lifted her hand from the knob of the gearshift and trailed it over his thigh, and it was a relief to touch him after talking to him all morning, after watching him, after watching him watch her.

She pushed under the hem of his shorts to dig her fingers in the hard muscle above his knee.

He inhaled, fast and deep, against her ear. "Harder."" (Kindle Loc 287)

But they both know that physical connection is not enough. Nina has taken many casual lovers since the death of her husband to escape her feelings in feeling but she doesnt' want to use Sam this way. Sam is not a moderate man, he doesn't do casual, all passion, impulsivity and need.  It takes real effort for them to work past each others emotional defenses and baggage to trust each other.

Ms. Rivers’ puts Nina and Sam through the wringer. Their relationship has multiple-false starts, faux-pas, and interruptions, some light-hearted (their disastrous first date) and other heart-wrenching (Tay's cancer diagnosis). Sam and Nina have both been formed in distinct ways by grief and loss and their is a story how two people can build intimacy and trust after years of taking short-cuts or avoiding it all together.

"It was rare to find friends anymore. Not because she wasn’t surrounded by people, but because if she wanted to be close to someone new, she would need to share her life, tell her stories, reveal her healing grief."  (Kindle Loc 253)

In Live, Destiny and Hefin need to find the thread of their own lives again, to do things for themselves before they can reach for each other. In Laugh, Sam and Nina both need to tend to emotional bruises they have ignored and find their way back to the family and loved ones they have hurt, disappointed and pushed away as they reach for each other.

"She was here, far from her original home because everything that came after losing Russ salted the fields they had planted."  (Kindle Loc 745)

 I love how Ms. Rivers writes, and I often find myself stopping to admire her beautifully written sentences. Every single one of her stores has been a joy to read, but what really makes her novels work for me is the attention she gives to characterization, and that she doesn’t just develop the main characters and surround them with cardboard stand-ins. While I hope to eventually read PJ, Lacey and Sarah’s stories even secondary supporting characters like Mike, DeeDee, Tay and Adam feel as real as Nina and Sam. They all have substance and weight and are not simply plot devices.

"He’d wanted to tell Mike more about her, but he knew as much as he joked about matchmaking, about couples, about the happiness he found, that he also had been the voice of caution way too many times before when Sam had fallen headlong into what he thought was love, only to find out again that it was all just him, his heart overspilling until he thought that was he felt was what the woman felt, too, when what he was was just the hope he had for his own heart. "(Kindle Loc 524)

I am very appreciative of how Ms. Rivers described and developed Nina and Sam. Nina is undeniably a first-generation Mexican-American,  but it is not the only or even most important part of her identity. She is not white-washed or fetishized and I am happy to add her to my personal list of non-stereotypical Latina heroines. I also really loved how Sam’s ADHD was portrayed. One of my daughter’s has an ADD diagnosis, and there were points in the book where Sam’s anxieties, reactions and actions felt incredibly familiar and I can only thank Ms.Rivers for taking such care in her writing.

Ms. Rivers did not have any information on her website beyond the titles for the next two books in the series so I asked her on twitter whose story was whose.  

@anacoqui LOVE is next and PJ and Lacey's story. ALWAYS is last and Sarah's story.

— Mary Ann Rivers (@MaryAnn_Rivers) May 3, 2014

 I will be eagerly awaiting them.

A copy of Laugh was provided by Random House: Loveswept via NetGalley for review purposes.

Publication Date May 6, 2014