Another Casual Sunday Read
I have picked up a habit of choosing Harlequin / Silhouette titles when I want to escape the mental drain and drama of other romance novels. As usual, this publishing brand offers what I definitely considered light reading. Although lots of dilemmas surface, I never really get the sense of urgency and conflict that another writer might have added to the mix.
Naomi, whose actual ethnicity is uncertain because she was given up at birth and raised in foster care, and Dave (David), blond heir and head of a multi-million dollar NYC business, cross paths at the local laundromat of a west coast hamlet. Throughout the story, I kept getting the impression that this story was a continuation of another title. This is mainly due to Dave’s constant self-nagging over how he and his half-brother basically conned said brother’s current wife into marriage so they could add a good image to their family name. In fact, this unsettled conflict regarding his hand in how that marriage came in to being and his masked jealousy that his brother found happiness outside of the boardroom, in addition to a not-so subtle nudge from their elderly patriarch, is what led Dave to wander so far away from the big city…Perhaps in pursuit of a life mate or perhaps he just wanted to change his stiff image..He never seems quite sure which is his true motive. The answers to his silent longings come in the pretty form of Naomi, who happens to be two months pregnant by a man she met in her old hometown that never wanted to have children (his reasons are revealed in the second half of the book, after he tracked Naomi to her new address). From there, Naomi and Dave do a sort of pre-adolescent courtship…which, at one point, turned quite sultry, to my surprise…but they continuously have a hard time coming to terms with what they each want and expect from the other.
Naomi is bland but likable, and Dave is nothing like the alpha hero I tend to have a fondness for. He’s kind and easygoing, but just like his inward conversations with himself reveal, the reader was never quite sure…not even at the end of the story…whether he fell in love with Naomi because she offered him a ready-made family or because he found a woman he could actually see himself growing old with…Hence the reason why this story is just *okay*…This was a leisurely read that left me unconvinced of the couple’s true love status.
Grade B-/C+
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