Title: The Challenge: A Single Dad Romance
Author: Penelope Ward
Genre: Standalone Contemporary Romance
Release Date: August 30, 2026
💙Single Dad
🩷Second Chance
💙Forced Proximity
🩷Friends to Lovers
💙Small Town
🩷Found Family
Nothing says welcome home like accidentally moving in with your first heartbreak…and his little girl.
Coming back to my small Wyoming hometown was supposed to be temporary. I only planned to stay long enough to help my ailing mother and sort through the mess of my family’s old belongings.
Instead, I somehow ended up living in Evan Ricci’s house. The single dad now owned a bunch of properties and one of them was the place I’d rented. He’d taken it off the market and moved in before I got there. I just never got the memo. Unfortunately, there was no other place in town available, so Evan let me stay.
Evan—the guy my parents took in years ago after his mother died.
The same Evan who used to dare me into ridiculous challenges that somehow always made me stronger—a game we’d dubbed The Challenge.
The same guy who ultimately rejected me before I left for college after I’d finally garnered the courage to shoot my shot.
Now Evan was a rugged single dad with an eight-year-old daughter, a cocky attitude, and a dangerous ability to make me forget every reason I should still hate him.
Sharing a house with him should’ve been unbearable. Instead, it felt dangerously familiar, nearly making me forget that I had a life and a job to get back to in Chicago. I realized the biggest challenge wasn’t surviving living with Evan Ricci.
It was not falling in love with him all over again.
GOODREADS TBR LINK: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/255464908-the-challenge
BOOKBUB LINK: https://www.bookbub.com/books/the-challenge-a-single-dad-romance-by-penelope-ward
PURCHASE LINKS – Special release price of $3.99 for a limited time only! Available in Kindle Unlimited!
Amazon US: https://a.co/d/0fHCrUkV
Amazon UK: https://amzn.eu/d/0ifzve22
Amazon CA: https://a.co/d/0ebTpmgl
Amazon AU: https://amzn.asia/d/0dTpVF1N
Duet Audio: https://adbl.co/4gwRwfU
Narrated by Desireé Ketchum & Connor Crais
Special Edition Paperback: https://a.co/d/0gyOQgHR
Model Paperback: https://amzn.to/4x3Ujnf
The Challenge by Penelope Ward
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
ALC REVIEW
4.5 stars round up to 5 because this is not a 4 star story!
As far as narration goes, Connor Crais and Desireé Ketchum made a really great team. This is a duet narration and while I don’t mind either dual or duet, meaning I love them both lol, I’m super glad this story was in duet because it really makes me twitchy when children don’t sound the same throughout a story. It’s just takes me out of the “audio zone” and I dislike it, a lot. No worries here because it’s in duet so Effie was Effie all the time! YAY :) I can’t think of a single instance in this story that the audiobook made me twitchy. I have listened to countless audiobooks narrated by Connor and Desireé since I began my audio era and they have always deserved a round of applause for their performances and this time is no different.👏👏👏👏
The story of Evan & Chloe is one of those stories that could easily have run off the rails in dramatics, but Penelope made a choice not to write that way, and I want to give her a hug for it. There’s a lot of individual circumstances/history that both Evan & Chloe have to navigate and grow from alongside their journey to a HEA and every single step felt organic and realistic. I really like my fiction to be realistic and while I know that no one gets out of life without “drama”, “dramatics” is another beast and I don’t like it. LOL So, it’s a good thing for me that Penelope didn’t stray into that lane too far!
I loved how Penelope took their younger selves’ “challenge game” and used it as a tool for Chloe & Evan to navigate and grow their feelings and become closer and intimate. It was rather genius actually and it’s nice to read a story with some fresh ideas.
The story didn’t feel angsty to me, but it was full of emotion at every turn. That’s another #win for me. While I don’t mind crying my eyes out over a story, I prefer stories that have emotional impact in all forms, from laughing to crying to just gool old satisfaction. I felt “some kind of way” at every turn with this story and it was always positive!
Mt experience with this story is only via audio so I can’t definitively say one is best over another (that’s my challenge game I like to play with myself), but something tells me either way this story is going to hit right for you!
MEET THE AUTHOR:
Penelope Ward is a New York Times, USA Today and #1 Wall Street Journal bestselling author of contemporary romance.
She grew up in Boston with five older brothers and spent most of her twenties as a television news anchor. Penelope resides in Rhode Island with her husband, son, and beautiful daughter with autism.
With millions of books sold, she is a 21-time New York Times bestseller and the author of over forty books. Her novels have been translated into over a dozen languages and can be found in bookstores around the world.
CONNECT WITH PENELOPE WARD: https://linktr.ee/penelopewardauthor
OTHER BOOKS BY PENELOPE WARD: http://www.penelopewardauthor.com/books
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