Review: The first half of this book is the sultriest thing ever.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 17, 2014
Really 4.5 stars. I have slightly mixed feelings about this book, but my overall feeling is a strong "awesome". I'd give the first half approximately four hundred stars, and the second half 4 stars.Premise: Annie, a librarian, is the new one-day-a-week librarian/resources person at a local prison. There she meets super-duper-hot prison Eric Collier, who writes extremely sexy love letters to her on the sly. Sometimes she watches him take off his shirt and do pushups. They have a forbidden, no-touching sexual fantasy thing going on for a while, but then Eric's circumstances change, and things suddenly get all too real.The first half of this, where Annie meets Eric Collier in prison, and he woos her through forbidden tiny flirtations and hot looks and then secret love letters, is so well-written and so, so sexy. I didn't know that what I longed to read was a forbidden-love epistolary romance between a bad-boy prisoner and a librarian with a past that makes her wary of bad boys, but dear heaven, I did. And it was great. It was so great the second half seemed less good by comparison - even though the second half is better than 99% of all romances.Cara McKenna is an excellent writer - and I am stingy in handing out that compliment. Her prose is outstanding, her insights ring true, the sex scenes are often very human, very real, and not the same six interactions we've all read about a million times. McKenna also seems interested in exploring the intersection of masculinity and blue-collar America and the modern economy, which is something she does achingly well (frankly, I think part of why I had a harder time with the second half than the first half is that the prison seems a relatively hopeful place, compared to the future possible in a dying rustbelt town to a man with criminal record.) And how often do you read a romance novel and think "This person is really saying interesting things about the role of masculinity in modern-day America?"Like I've said, the second half was not as wonderful as the first half. But it's still very good, and I loved the book as a whole.