Review: The Hero You'll Enjoy Hating & the Heroine That Deserves Him
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 29, 2014
The hero's best friend says: "Being a rake requires a lot of work and is entirely too fashionable right now. Mothers have taken it into their heads that a reformed rake makes the best husband." If you substitute Writers/Readrs for Mothers - you have the theme of this book. It isn't handed to you on a lace doily surrounded by china figurines either.You can read the popcorn & iced tea version of this review at Page Traveler dot blogspot dot comI do not read Romance Books for the political correctness.  Colloquialisms can be ignored up to a point.  Bending the proprieties for the sake of plot is tolerable.  Historical accuracy - ok, there are some things I can't handle without exceptionally well drawn characters to compensate. I'm all for a good abduction and whisking away to the dark and stormy castle with disturbing relatives.  Secrets in the cupboards [not in a teddy bear] and villains that are convenient and easily disposed of roll off my radar.  The Big Misunderstanding is only a small peeve of mine that I often hand wave. Hero and heroine come in many fashions, they appeal to some, trigger others and somewhere in between is generally what they might really have been in the author's mind before crazed readers got hold of them. I read romance for FUN, for laughter, to distract myself from Real Life as it IS [you know, bills, laundry, work, blah blah blah]. Even, or especially the lovely angsty ones - my precious chocolate without calories!I read this book while storms and tornadoes were raging through our state. I read parts out loud to my daughters. We had a BLAST acting out scenes, making commentary, re-writing things in our front room instead of fretting about living in a mobile home during a tornado warning with no place to go.I am sure the author never intended her book to be used in this manner but like Dominic, I won't apologize. It would be a lie. I thoroughly enjoyed despising Dominic. He never transformed for me, all he did was lose villainous dimensions and become a cut-out of the "new earl" that I didn't believe. Lilly became the most pathetic heroine I've encountered in years despite a pretty decent start because she didn't have the common damn sense to ask her friends for a loan to get to her obscure aunt. And she *had* friends, obviously, that didn't give beans about The Rules. Her martyrdom was as false as her willingness to resist a good kisser.Strangely enough, I enjoyed every minute of this. Letting go of my general devotion to Look Only for the Good in any book, I could embrace my inner Realist and just wallow in the fact that as soon as Lilly gets pregnant, she's going to worry herself in to a nagging harpy imagining Dominic chasing kitchen maids and parlor maids and nursery maids. He's going to spend about fifteen minutes putting up with that before proving her right and then - then the real fun begins because there's no divorce for another what ... fifty, sixty years?:::mwaaaa haaaa haaaa::: Get the book, it's worth the read, seriously! I intend to read ALL of the Fated for Love Series just to see if my predictions come true.