For much of the beginning, we’re uncovering secrets about Aurora’s past: her marriage, her mother, her life before Colorado. So Aurora starts building up stamina and gathering materials to go on these hikes and along the way reconnects with an old friend, gets a job and tries to keep her head down.įor the most part, “All Rhodes Leads Here” reads as women’s fiction. It’s something she never took the time to emotionally unpack until arriving back in Colorado, which easily becomes her new home. It’s been a burden she’s always carried with her, and her mother’s mental health weighs on her brain as she thinks about how her mother could have died on a difficult trail despite being an expert hiker.

Aurora agrees because she has no plans to form connections and instead is looking forward to hiking the same trails her mother once did before she went missing some years ago during Aurora’s childhood.

Rhodes relents and gives her a month before she has to find somewhere else to go but until then, she has to stay out of his and his son’s way.

The father, Tobias Rhodes, is of course furious and Aurora and his son Amos do their best to convince him to let her stay. That is until she finds out that a 15-year-old minor rented the apartment to her behind his father’s back in order to get money for a guitar he wants to buy. “All Rhodes Leads Here” is about recently divorced Aurora leaving her hometown to go back to a place she grew up in Colorado to escape her ex-husband and a past life she no longer fits into.Īurora has no plans on where she’s going to settle down, for how long or even how she’s going to execute this not-so-carefully thought-of plan of hers, but when she ends up at a garage apartment she rented online, she’s hoping to start there. Spoiler alert, there’s a reference to the international soccer player Kulti in this book, but otherwise, there are no characters that cross over to her other novels. And “All Rhodes Lead Here” doesn’t disappoint. The Bookįrom “Kulti” to “Wait for It” to “Wall of Winnipeg and Me,” readers already know to expect that Mariana Zapata’s books will be contemporary romances at least 500 pages long with at least one character connected to another character from one of her other books. Mariana Zapata’s new book shows that the recipe for the perfect romance book shows signs that “All Rhodes Lead Here.” And given that indie authors tend to have surprise releases, maybe we should be more on the lookout for the spontaneous gems that come our way. What could possibly go wrong? Or better yet, let’s talk about all the things that went right. This time set in small-town Colorado with a silver-haired fox (direct quote), a 15-year-old music lover, a famous songwriter divorcee and hiking. The queen of slow-burn romances is back at it again and better than ever.

All Rhodes Lead Here by Mariana Zapata