Rating: ★★★★ | 285 pages | Self-published | Contemporary Romance | 6/1/2017
34-year-old tattoo artist Ginger Holtzman is intense, ambitious and a little rough around the edges–but she has to be to survive in the male-dominated tattoo culture. She’s the owner of the queer-friendly Philly tattoo shop Small Change. When she meets Christopher, the sunshine-y cinnamon-rolly owner of the neighborhood’s new sandwich shop it shouldn’t work. But then….it does.
Small Change really worked for me. I found Parrish’s characters and their relationship to each other engaging and interesting, particularly the messiness of Ginger and how Christopher interacts with that. One of my favorite shows is You’re The Worst and I’ve been looking for a romance that has similar “unlikeable characters” and I think Ginger is pretty close. The story is told mostly through Ginger’s first person with Christopher’s POV coming through via letters he writes to his brother who is in the hospital after an attempted suicide.
I did find some of my engagement with the story waning as the story went on. There are a lot of subplots that felt tacked on instead of meshing into the story naturally. There are a few conflicts that are built up but instead of seeing how it plays out we just hear how it went after the fact.
It also was not at all surprising to me that Parrish currently lives Philadelphia, there is a lot of regional detail and nuance about the city that comes through. I’m already loading up book 2 on Kindle Unlimited, I can’t wait to see how she writes a HEA for Christopher’s brother and the mysterious new tattoo artist Ginger hires.
