Review: good; a slow burn rather than lots of dramatic twists and turns
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 6, 2011
THE RELUCTANT NUDE is a quiet book, but it's well-done.Fallon has been blackmailed into posing nude for Max (of course for a ridiculously virtuous reason - why do romance heroines always have to have motivations as pure as the driven snow?  I'd be fine if they were only as pure as snow like, a day or two after it's fallen, when it's still whitish but half-melted and mostly grey).  Max, lucky him, doesn't need a ridiculously virtuous reason to sculpt Fallon; he's doing it for the money.So Fallon shows up at the studio.  Max sculpts her.  They don't get along at first, but Fallon's there every day and Max has a vested interest in making her comfortable for the sake of his sculpture.  They slowly develop a rapport, the sexual tension simmers and then boils over, and soon enough a simple working relationship has developed into a romance.And that's the book, pretty much.  Not a whole lot of drama, but the characters are fully realized and the story never turns away from the two of them.  Max is soooooo French, damaged and sexy and fundamentally at peace with himself.  Fallon is soooooo repressed, and Max draws her out of her shell.  The book offers a slow burn rather than dramatic twists and turns; things between the two of them never seem too certain or lost beyond repair, either.It's hard to gush about a book like this because it didn't have those roller-coaster highs or lows, but it was good and I enjoyed reading it.