Review: Engaging, charming mood-booster
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 08 17, 2013
*****4.5 Stars****If you don't like novellas, this anthology, which consists of four self-contained yet interrelated ones, probably won't 'wow' you enough to change your mind about the format. As someone who has an oddly deep affection for HR novellas, though, this was a real treat. I feel like novellas in this genre give me just enough to enchant, delight and stimulate my imagination without devolving into the contrived, drawn out conflicts and repetitive, wait-this-AGAIN?! scenes that we often get from today's full-length romances. Plus, the shorter page count forces meander-prone authors to move at a somewhat brisker, smoother pace and to give us a tighter and more streamlined plot. Or maybe my attention span has just grown too short for many of the 350+ page books we get today, especially when about a third of those pages turn out to be nearly identical sex scenes ;) Rest assured, though, that these aren't 12-page, blink-and-you-miss-them short stories; they're certainly long enough to give us actual characters and storylines, at least in this reader's opinion!Prior to reading this anthology, I wasn't really familiar with any of the four featured authors. Writing style factors extremely heavily into my overall opinion of a certain book (far more so than actual plot!), and I was very pleasantly surprised by how well-written I found the first three of these four stories. Maya Rodale's and Caroline Linden's were particularly witty and engaging to me, with enough clever turns of phrase to keep my Kindle's highlight button active. Reluctantly, I deducted half a star because the fourth story is a time travel tale. Those are pretty much never my cup of literary tea, and this one was no exception.Overall, this is an utterly charming and at times surprisingly clever collection of four stories that can be enjoyed individually while also connecting and overlapping quite nicely with one another. I saw just enough of most of the characters to find them amusing and compelling---and, unlike certain full-length romance novels, not enough of them to start to find them tiresome or to silently scream at the main couple to just stop playing games and *finally* get the heck together ;)  Novellas tend to serve as the perfect fix for my romance cravings, and while this isn't a perspective-altering literary masterpiece, it turned out to be one of the more genuinely enjoyable and engaging reads of my entire summer. I highly recommend this reasonably priced charmer to fellow fans...especially the first three of the four :)