Review: Potential for more...
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 11 4, 2013
Secret Seduction is the first Jill Sanders book I’ve ever read, and although I didn’t quite know what to expect, I was pleasantly surprised by what I did read. Secret Seduction is about young woman named Katie who has escaped her life in Boston, escaped the scandal currently rocking her family, to just get away and re-evaluate her life.What Katie doesn’t know is that her best friend, Jason, has been searching for her, following her across Europe (for an entire year) in the hopes of bringing her home once more. One night while walking back from the beach, Katie finds herself in trouble as two men try to kidnap her. Because Jason has been tailing her, he comes to rescue, convincing her to go on the run as he’s sure this won’t be the last time they see either of the two men. We follow them across Greece and finally into Italy where they believe they’ll be safe, but when they let their guard down is when they lose everything.Alright, so the things I liked about this book. Let’s start with the sex scenes in this book. They were sweet and tastefully written, but I was disappointed to see Katie was the clichéd virginal twenty-something-year- old woman though. There is one quite steamy one involving a strawberry and some cream that will leave you fanning yourself, though. I also enjoyed the descriptions of place, towns and the countryside they travel through on their way to Rome. I could really picture the narrow streets and small cafes that are talked about.Although I think the idea behind this book is good, I’m not so sure the writing style executed it. There were a number of plot inconsistencies that I found ranging from what clothing the characters are wearing, to the geography of the airports in relation to the rest of the city. The pacing of the book was also a little off, and the thought were disjointed with the jumps into the past as Katie and Jason remember different parts of their history together.I could see what Sanders was trying to do with some of the plot developments i.e. Jason’s big ‘secret’, but lack of story building/plot building meant that they just weren’t pulled off as successfully as they could have been. There were also some really implausible parts in this book including a Greek woman who was speaking in broken English an hour previously to being able to speak in perfect English using complex sentences. It is things like these that detract from the whole believability of the plot.Overall, it was an okay read. I liked elements of it, which meant that I wanted to keep reading it. I also think that if I read the books in the order they were written (there’s one before and one after in this series) I would have a better understanding of the overall plot and character histories.