This charming romance offered up by first-time novelist Alice Wisler simmers to a slow satisfying boil much like the heroine’s grandmother Ducee’s Southern recipe for pineapple chutney. The story centers around insecure, thirty-something English schoolteacher Nicole, who chews her nails to the quick and avoids airplanes, motorcycles and Japan—where she was born. Nicole is haunted by having no memory of her mother who died when she was two. Her father, shackled with depression, refuses to answer her most basic questions about her mother. One can almost understand her father’s painful reticence, but it is not clear why Ducee and other close relatives don’t seem to want to talk about her. In the midst of planning a family reunion, out of the blue, Nicole begins a correspondence with a fellow fish enthusiast in Japan named Harrison. The lazy development of their Internet relationship reveals to the reader two personalities that have somehow found each other and appear to be two parts of a whole. This budding romance and the subsequent disturbing answers to some of Nicole’s questions all drive toward a timid woman’s blossoming into self-assurance. Wisler paints her characters with sure, vivid brush strokes—we instantly recognize them even as we recognize their uniqueness. Wisler lets us believe that finding romance can be magical, if we only take the time to look and have the heart to experience that great adventure.