Review: Surprised by how great this is.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 22, 2013
Okay, I have to admit, I was expecting this to be one of those romance novels about a guy in the military that's just not that great. And instead, this book is a little gem. I was very impressed. (If you're wondering why it's four stars instead of five, it's just because I reserve five stars for the greatest books in the world, not because there's something wrong with this one.)What I especially liked about this book was that so much of it was really about the emotional journey of the female lead, about her growing into her own adulthood, even if it didn't look exactly the way she had expected it to look. I really liked the way she had to deal with realizing that maybe she wasn't going to be an ace real estate agent for the rest of her life, and that her interests would continue to grow and change as she did. That's a really uncommon element in romance novels, and I liked it a lot.I also liked her relationships with her female friends, and the way her relationship with her sister was more complicated than just "main character perfect, all over women evil", and how it spoke to the ways family can be loving and still difficult to deal with.The SEALness of the male main character is actually a pretty minor element in the story - this story is more about two people who've expected their lives to go a certain way learning to make room for this surprising new person they've fallen in love with than it is about hot SEALs standing around shirtless and using lingo the author looked up on wikipedia (I have read a lot of these books, you see...)I really recommend this. I'm a very picky reader, and I thought this was absolutely charming.