For the Mixing It Up challenge, one of the categories that I picked was romance. It’s something that I only read occasionally so I surprised myself by reading something in the genre so early in the year:
The Secret Mistress – Mary Balogh
This one was listed on Publisher’s Weekly’s top 100 of 2011 in the romance category. I’m only an occasional romance reader because so many of them can be formulaic, but this one sounded like it would be that little bit more interesting. And it was! The jacket tries to make it sound much more salacious than it really is, so don’t take that too seriously. The heroine is bright, vivid and fun, the hero is kind and conflicted, and there are other threads running through the book in addition to the main romance. What I appreciated most is that the misunderstandings that keep our couple apart are not ones that could have been resolved if they’d just communicated better. They both needed to grow and mature before they were able to be together and that added a nice dimension to it. This is still definitely a light, fun romance but there is enough character growth and fun dialogue to make it stand out from the rest. Lots of fun.
I’ve got a couple of other potentials on my book goals list that could have qualified for this, but I think that I’ll count this one 🙂
Of Books and Cats 