Stephanie James (1)

Oh, boy. Books like this are why I thought I didn't like the romance genre for such a long time.

Argh. How to describe such a horribly insulting plot? Cowboy Garth Saxon allowed Devon Ellwood to trade her small town/country life for the city--but just for one year. After 365 days, he was coming to get her, bring her back to his ranch, and marry her.

And when he shows up at the club where Devon's relaxing with her friends, she meekly goes along.

She does manage to stick up for herself when he show more objects to her redecorating his house. Yeah, I'm cringing, too.

Icing on the cake: they have sex before she moves to the city; they have sex when he comes to pick her up. Then he moves her into his house, and refuses to have sex with her again until the wedding, "to protect her reputation"--despite the fact that she's living in his house, and everybody already thinks they're sleeping together, except for his ranch hands who know he's not getting any because he's exceedingly grumpy.

Presumably, we're supposed to believe that Devon really does love him and she doesn't mind being controlled like this, but I found it awfully hard to swallow.

I gave this 2 stars because Garth does change a wee bit during the story, and Krentz's prose is smooth and a pleasure to read. show less

The heroine is a very controlled reference librarian at a public library who's on vacation with her cat. (Say what you will, but she's self aware and a grown up, which is more than I can say for the heroine in the last UF novel I read.)

The hero is an ex-drifter who alternates between stalwart protector and crazy stalker dude. He mostly made me laugh, but sometime his alpha-douchecanoe tendencies got a bit tiresome.

In other words, fairly standard early JAK. Kind of reads like a test run for show more Gift of Gold in some ways. show less

Frequently goofy and had interesting characters, but the middle section kind of lost my attention a few times. Not sure if it was because the h/h spent so much time alone, without the family and friend interactions that characterize the best of JAK's work.

The sex scenes were also... a bit different and made me really curious about Harlequin's style manual for sex scenes in the 1980s.

[In the first one, Julian interrupts Emelina's fake orgasm to, ahem, show her that she's a true woman of show more passion. Another scene later on gets much closer to capture fantasy territory than I'd been expecting. show less

What I liked about this story is the hero Flynn has come back to redeem himself so rather than him constantly hurting the heroine, Heather as is often the case, he is trying to make things up to her after he left her months ago.
So he admits he loves her but he has to prove it and what he thinks is a good plan to show her, often backfires as he is still arrogant and hasn't really thought about how much he hurt her.