i  picked up a copy of Swept Away today and read it over dinner. Let me preface this by saying that as a general rule, I don’t like contemporaries. I guess I’ve just read too many of them where the women give up satisfying careers to be wives. I don’t have a problem with women taking time off–in fact, I see no way to get around in this world if one spouse doesn’t make him or herself more available (but–you know, it can be the guy).

I picked up a copy of Toni Blake’s “Swept Away” today because I read the excerpt she posted. It was smoking hot, but more importantly, the emotion really connected with me, and I just had to know what happened next. I read it over dinner, and I couldn’t put it down. It’s the ultimate fantasy–making That One painful rejection every girl remembers deep down in her pride, if not her heart, come right; the bad boy and the lawmaker (all in the same person); and the woman coming into her own.


And the writing just sizzles. The description hits home—at one point, she describes a series of short kisses as (I don’t have the book with me, so I’m paraphrasing) a series of short sips of hot liquid. I could just taste the words. And there is a point when the heroine is sitting on the beach and she does the most marvelous thing with a handful of sand. I felt like I knew her when the book ended, like she was a friend.

My only gripe was with the ending. Minor spoiler alert here. The blame ended up getting placed on two people, and I didn’t find the actions of one of them believable. I mean, an explanation was given, but I have a hard time imagining that such a person could be so lost to everything that the person wouldn’t realize some of the more frightening implications. Also I don’t understand why the other person–the real bad guy–wanted the heroine to begin with, and I think the story could have been cleared up just a bit if we’d gotten a hint as to his real motivations, which I imagine could have been clearly pecuniary. But this is tiny, tiny, tiny. I was just swept away by this one.
I haven’t read a ton of contemporaries, but damn. I’m going to have to start. And I think I’m starting with Toni Blake’s backlist.
EDIT: Okay, I’m going to say one last thing about this, a second thought I had after I got away from the sheer delight of this book. I do have to say that there is a make-it-all better aspect to the book, where the heroine doesn’t have to deal with the fact that ultimately, she did a Very Shitty Thing to another person. And the fact that the person she did it to was shittier doesn’t matter, because she didn’t know it at the time. It’s a — problem? — with romance novels in general. The heroes and heroines don’t suffer nearly as much as they ought. But there I am, moralizing where it doesn’t belong!

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