OK, that was a longer break than I meant it to be. In the previous post, I divided romance novels into various categories, ending with the ones where the hero and/or heroine aren't very likable, but either the story is so well-plotted or they so completely deserve each other that you end up liking the book anyway. That was leading up to a review of one of Kathleen O'Reilly's that I read a couple of weeks ago, The Longest Night.
The Longest Night is the fourth book in a series called The Bachelorette Pact. I realized as I pulled out my decrepit, banged-up copy (I bought it very well used) that I can't possibly be reviewing this book so I can recommend that you read it, because it's out of print (the whole series is) and not easy to find. I wouldn't have bothered to track it down myself except two of the other books in The Bachelorette Pact were so far above average that I poked around until I found a copy (I think it was on Alibris-- great resource for out of print books).
So if I can't recommend it to you, why review it? And I confess, it's to salvage my own credibility. I made a complete ass out of myself in a couple of previous reviews by griping about women who dress provocatively and then whine when men hit on them (one of them was also by O'Reilly, Beyond Daring, and the other was SEPhillip's It Had to Be You). No one understands them, no one sees that underneath that scrap of see-through spandex they're wearing, really she's just a shy, all-American girl.
I made myself sound like a pruned-up old spinster. So I'm reviewing this book, because Cassandra, the heroine of this book, is a complete knockout who wears clothes that outdo any of the outfits of the other heroines I griped about. But Cassandra was great. I didn't necessarily want to be her best friend-- and she certainly isn't in the category of heroines who are like me (you can't imagine anyone who dresses more boringly than I do)-- but I found her enormously appealing as a heroine.
And here's why: she didn't whine. She knew what she looked like, she knew she was dressing provocatively, she knew how men would react, and she dealt with it. She didn't complain that OMG, I'm wearing a halter top and a miniskirt, and these guys at the bar were practically drooling on me, and all the women hate me, and no one understands what a sweetheart I am underneath the eighth of a yard of fabric I'm wearing. Some of the men were trolls, some of them were slimy, but more often than not, she was able to use her looks and her brains to get what she wanted.
The heart of the story, though-- the romance between her and Noah Barclay-- is really a very sweet story of learning to trust. Noah has to break through her assumption that he's only after her because she's hot, and Cassandra has to learn to be vulnerable, to let Noah in through the emotional armor she's had to build up from dealing with horny men all her life (the task is helped by an enormously ugly dog named Spawn that she adopts). And Noah, who knows from the start that Cassandra is a smart woman, comes to realize how brilliant she is at reading people and understanding how power is brokered amongst the bigwigs in Chicago. I really enjoyed it. If you can find it, it's a great read.
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