Check It Out:

Valentine’s Day is celebrated with greeting cards, flowers, chocolates, romantic dinners and other gifts — all in the name of love. Legend has it that St. Valentine actually sent the first valentine while in jail. It is said that he fell in love with the jailer’s daughter and, before his execution Feb. 14, he left a letter to his beloved signed, “from your Valentine.” Not all tales of love are as sad as this. Check out some of love’s many highlights and lowlights in the following entertaining reads.

 “The Importance of Being Married” by Gemma Townley is a humorous tale where Jessica Wild rolls out “Project Marriage” with a little help from her friends. The task is a 50-day assignment where Jessica needs to get her boss, Anthony Milton, to fall in love and marry her by the project’s end. She stands to lose a small fortune, which she is set to inherit not as Jessica Wild, but as Mrs. Jessica Milton. There’s only one small problem: Anthony hardly even acknowledges that Jessica exists. This is the first adventure in Townley’s Wild trilogy.

 Anna, an interior designer, has bought a fixer-upper. She’s renovating her newly acquired cottage and hoping to turn a profit. As an added bonus the cottage is near the mother of Anna’s crush, Max Gordon. They are reunited after attending a school reunion and Anna is swept off her feet. Predictably love isn’t that easy. Find out how Katie Forde’s heroine stumbles into love in “Practically Perfect.”

 Melissa Romney-Jones is unemployed yet again. Rather than look for a new position at another office, she branches out to start her own etiquette business for bachelors. Melissa reinvents herself as Honey Blennerhesket, donning a blonde wig while running the Little Lady Agency. Melissa’s alter-ego brings out a new self-confidence. Honey hires out her organizational expertise to be a personal shopper, attend parties as a bachelor’s “date,” and even helps a client leave his girlfriend. Enter Jonathan Riley, who employs Honey on a regular basis, and Melissa soon discovers she’s falling for Jonathan. Find out how long she can continue to juggle and hide behind Honey’s assertive facade in Hester Browne’s “The Little Lady Agency.”

 For a more serious escapade, newspaper reporter Lacey Brennan leaves her life in New York, follows her heart, and moves to Los Angeles to live with her boyfriend, Toby, in “Love or Something Like It” by Deirdre Shaw. Lacey believes she finally has a shot at her own happily-ever-after when Toby proposes to her on her 30th birthday. She dreams of the happily-ever-after her parents never had. Their divorce played a tremendous role in her and her brother’s lives, and Lacey doesn’t want to go down that same road. Unfortunately, early in her marriage, Lacey realizes that she and Toby are headed toward divorce. She is forced to reexamine the choices she has made and determine what path she needs to take in life and love.

While these women may be looking for love in all the wrong places, the Newport Beach Public Library is the perfect place to discover these escapades of love and many more. Celebrate this Valentine’s Day with a good love story.

CHECK IT OUT is written by the staff of the Newport Beach Public Library. All titles may be reserved by accessing the catalog at www.newportbeachlibrary.org. For more information on the Central Library or any of the branches, please contact the library at (949) 717-3800, option 2.