Plenty of us have thought about it, right? What it would be like to live in a Hallmark movie—in a charming, quaint town where everyone’s friendly, the weather’s perfect and no one has a bad hair day. Where you’re guaranteed to find love and happiness, often wrapped up in a Christmas-red bow. But when career-driven lawyer Campbell Andrews falls asleep in Manhattan and wakes up in idyllic Heart Springs, she’s not pleased, she’s horrified. There’s some magic at work—wisely never explained by author Falon Ballard—that has stuck her in this self-contained world (with no phones or computers in sight), and she can’t escape until she learns some life lessons. Specifically, how to find a job she genuinely cares about, how to be part of a community and how to discover true love.
If you think Ballard’s Change of Heart sounds like Schmigadoon or Pleasantville, you wouldn’t be wrong. But Heart Springs has a distinctly Hallmark style, complete with various misadventures as Cam tries different jobs—and different men—to find the ones that fit just right. A self-aware heroine, Cam sharply picks apart the well-worn tropes she finds herself living. But as Cam learns to find the charm in them, we do as well. And there is quite a lot of charm, not just in our frank, snarky heroine but in her love interest, Ben. Another transplant from the real world, Ben proves to be an adept verbal sparring partner in his and Cam’s earlier, pricklier scenes . . . and then a genuinely good friend and lover as their relationship progresses. It would have been nice if Change of Heart pushed a little harder at the dated elements endemic to this kind of world—specifically the cringey gender stereotypes. Cam notices and dislikes them at the beginning, but doesn’t actually try to change them. And eventually, they stop bothering her, because she’s focusing on the real affection she feels for the town and the friends she makes there. They may be old-fashioned, but they’re sweet and endearing, and it’s impossible to blame her for falling in love with them all.
