Rosemary Hammond

Random pick out of the box o' vintage HPs. I really enjoyed this one. Can't really explain why. The heroine was a very sheltered naive girl. The hero was not an ass but he was pretty mysterious. He wasn't incredibly alpha but he wasn't beta either. You could tell immediately that he had fallen for her and was playing by her rules in order to sneak up on her emotionally. The writing was well done and the emotions mostly seemed believable. Bit of a spoiler here about the ending.

However she did do something very bad to him before she broke up with him. When they got back together, I didn't feel that she apologized enough. Also even though he had looked up her address after she left him, he hadn't tried to get in touch with her. She made a point of noticing that but it was never spoken of between them. It kind of made me feel that he wasn't as sincere in his wish to be back with her as he could have been. Not that he didn't have every reason to never want to see her again. But given what she had said to him and the way she treated him over basically nothing, I felt that more should have been said. Weirdly I could see where he might be setting up some kind of a revenge thing to get her to admit she still loved him then he could walk out on her. If it were me I'd have been begging his forgiveness over and over. But she never did and so the reader was kind of left wondering.

So, have I over thought this enough? :-P If you read that spoiler you might think I didn't like this but I really did. I found it quite a satisfying HP.… (més)

Usually, I don't have any trouble at all separating fiction from reality when I read traditional romance novels, but lately I've been having a hard time with that because of current events. Throughout the book, I kept thinking about Harvey Weinstein and anyone in high positions abusing their power. As a result I cannot consent to John as the hero.

John, a big shot of some financial company in Manhattan, was written almost like a character from a gothic novel. Was he the good guy or the bad guy? He was a very brooding and mysterious character. For the past year he's been "low-key" stalking Chris. She noticed and it creeped her out. John used a commercial job for his company as an excuse to get closer to Chris and propositioned her. When she refused, John doesn't give up and changed tactics to slowly woo her.

I also hated the way all the male business associates treated Chris. As a successful model, the poor thing had to put up with lots of unprofessionalism with the leers, disrespect, inappropriate touching, etc. It became a norm for her and she was used to handling it, but it says a lot about our patriarchal society and why we have so much real world problems with sexual harassment and assault.

Had I read this at another time, I might have enjoyed it a tiny bit more, but the way the author wrote it, John was a very creepy dude since the beginning.… (més)