Review: 2.5 - Just Missed The Mark Stars.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 05 27, 2014
Love for Beginners is the second novella in the under The Hood Series. Although I enjoyed this one, I have to admit it took me a while to warm up to Melody Swan, mainly because her nervousness around men just seemed a little too exaggerated. But then you don't get the nickname ‘Ice Queen’ for jumping in their laps as an introduction now do you!”My mom fell in love with a man who couldn’t commit, who didn’t want to stay around and be a part of a family. She chose him with her heart, not her head, and lived to regret it. That won’t happen to me.”So essentially Mel is looking for a life-companion, a man to share her life with, minus the sex and emotional entanglements that usually come with it....Heath Starr aka ‘Ladyslayer’, can you guess.... Yes he has a reputation with the ladies that precedes his arrival in town to help out his sister Alice (book one, Under The Hood), at the garage that Mel co-owns with her. I really liked Heath, the man has been hurt by a situation that wasn’t really of his own making and is looking to move on and make a massive change in his life all at the same time. In strolls Mel with her ‘sex & touching men’ leaves me cold statement, and he feels the need to help her out of her predicament by offering to be her practice Guinea Pig, on a No Commitments basis..I am glad I stuck with Love For beginners; and I did warm up to Mel marginally as the story progressed. I have to admit I found all of the drama with her mother and her ”men are dangerous” mantra, additions that I felt the story could have done without. Heath literally needs a saint-hood for managing to keep his hands to himself at points, especially when Mel turns into a brat about things on more than one occasion, but I also found it endearing that he did.“I just want to know”—she trailed a finger over his lips—“if what I felt before was a onetime thing. I want to find out if things really have changed for me. If the ice really is in the process of melting.”Sally Clements really does have a special skill when it comes to the way she adds description to her stories, I found it just as enchanting in Under The Hood, and she did it again in Love for Beginners!If life were a painting, this would be its ultimate masterpiece, the blending of color too magnificent, too unreal to be believed in an artist’s imagining. In a perfect world, a world inaccessible and unachievable, he’d live out here, feast his eyes and his soul with the beauty of this vista every night. Instead, he was just a traveller passing through. Capturing the memory would be a pale shade of perfection.A light, quick and easy read, I hope we get Betty’s story at some point in the future.ARC supplied via Netgalley, in exchange for the above honest review.