Here is my hot take for the week: a small-town Fourth of July is the most romantic holiday on the calendar, and nobody talks about it enough. (Everyone is too busy fighting over who brings the potato salad.)

Think about it. The whole town shows up to one field. There is a parade that takes nine minutes because the route is two streets long. Somebody's grandpa is driving a tractor with crepe paper woven through the wheels. The high school band plays slightly off-key and everyone claps anyway. Then it gets dark, and a few hundred people lie back on quilts to watch the same sky together.

That is the exact magic I try to bottle in every book. Not the fireworks (though I do love a good firework). The togetherness. The way a small town turns an ordinary Tuesday into an event, and the way two people who have been circling each other all summer end up sharing a blanket because it was the only one left.

If you have read my stuff, you know I will absolutely strand my heroine at a town festival with the one man she swore she was over. It is a tradition at this point. The funnel cake is just set dressing for the longing.

Speaking of summer in a small town, if you want a place to disappear into this holiday week, let me point you toward Port Promise. Timber Ridge is where that series begins, up in small-town Alaska where the scenery is enormous, and the locals are nosier than the weather. (It is exactly the right kind of book to read with grass under you and a sky waiting to go gold and pink.)

Fair warning: you will want to be caught up, because the newest Port Promise novel, Misty Meadows, now lands July 30. (It got nudged back a few weeks, which I have decided just means more time to fall for those mountain men before the next one shows up.)

Grab your sparklers, claim your spot on the quilt, and if the conversation at the barbecue gets weird, you have a town to escape to. Start with Timber Ridge here, and keep an eye out for Misty Meadows here at the end of the month.

Happy Fourth, friends.