MORE THAN WORDS is the perfect curl-up and snuggle-in read. You won’t want to un-snuggle until you’ve read the whole book through. The story is sweet and romantic, astute and tender.

From hotel mavens to political campaigns, Jill Santopolo brushes against our real world yet never touches it --- never bringing the disagreement and angst of politics into this love story. It’s instead a respite.

MORE THAN WORDS is about breaking out of the familiar and taking risks to discover your authentic self. When the world Nina Gregory knows is stripped away to reveal gut-wrenching secrets, she must reconcile the expectations as the Gregory heiress with what is really in her heart. Will she do what she’s been groomed to do her whole life and lead the family business, marrying the man everyone expects her to marry? Nina peels away the assumptions and predictions of her life to discover who she truly is and what she wants for her life.

"...the perfect curl-up and snuggle-in read. You won’t want to un-snuggle until you’ve read the whole book through. The story is sweet and romantic, astute and tender."

There’s a tool Nina uses to keep herself from crying and to control her emotions. She thinks of ordinary items to distract herself from whatever feelings are roiling. One of the first things that comes to her mind is a fork. Of course, I have an unusual obsession with forks, and I found a deeper meaning in it, which gave me a good chuckle.

MORE THAN WORDS is a tribute to poetry. New York City mayoral candidate Rafael O’Connor-Ruiz tells Nina, to whom he is clearly attracted from the start, his theory of people as poems:  “…I think of people like poems. Maybe someone’s a haiku, or a villanelle, or a cinquain, a sonnet --- our length and form are predestined, but our content isn’t. And each form has its own challenges, its own difficulties, and its own beauty.” Poetry helps connect Rafael and Nina. She grew up with her father’s love of “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll.

Santopolo shares this beautiful thumbnail about MORE THAN WORDS, which is the perfect quote to leave you with: “…the mixture of love and loss, of despair and hope, and, ultimately, of peace and self-discovery and the knowledge that sorrow and joy can coexist in our hearts, that we can live and love even as we mourn.”