Finally - A Good Book!

I have been going through the Reading Slump to End All Reading Slumps lately. Unable to find anything I wanted in the bookstore, I virtuously decided to attack some of the books on my TBR shelf.

I guess my gut was telling me something when it told me not to read those books right away. It was telling me they sucked.

I went through four books without even remotely finishing them - and three of them were romances. PU. Then I ended up mired in a literary slog for my face-to-face book club - I love my book club, really I do, but it gives me a bigger dose of literary fiction than anyone could really ask for. Reading those books is work, I tell you.

Then, finally, I picked up the next book on my TBR and found myself a gem.




I hate it when people overhype books to me, so I'll temper it by saying that maybe it was my mood - sometimes you just need a book to take you out of it all, you know? But I liked everything about this book. I liked every page, every character, every scene - everything. I was so completely taken up with the story that I didn't want to put it down.

It's about a woman in the late Victorian age who spends five years working as a secretary to a self-involved peer. She thinks he's low and shallow; he hardly notices her existence at all. Then, she has a sort of mini-breakdown and decides to chuck everything to follow her dream, quits, and decides to go about a new life. It's only when she quits that he takes any notice of her.

Here are the things I liked about this book: The heroine has a real inner life that an actual woman would have; she has interests outside of the hero; the characters take a long, long time to get together, which makes sense given how far apart they are at the beginning of the story; they make realistic decisions; they actually get to know each other; they don't have excessive, melodramatic baggage; the sex is decently written, at least mostly; there are no spies or murder subplots; they interact like real people. Oh, and I think the cover is gorgeous.

So I went to Laura Lee Guhrke's website and found this:

And Then He Kissed Her is not, to my mind, just the story of how Emma and Harry fall in love. It’s also about how one woman decides to abandon what is safe and familiar and find the courage to go after what she really wants from life. I hope you enjoy her story.

And I realized that this is what I liked best about it: it's a romance that is unafraid to be all about the heroine. Thank goodness. I am so there.