Read Recently

If My Love Could Hold You by Elaine Coffman:

Description: When Charlotte Butterworth prevents the hanging
of Walker Reed, she changes her life forever. Afraid of men
(the result of seeing her mother brutalized and murdered),
Charlotte has become a bitter spinster. When Walker learns
the reasons for Charlotte's attitude, he decides to repay her
for saving his life by awakening those feminine passions she
has so long denied.

The Good: Charlotte Butterworth is one of the most fully realized romance novel heroines I've ever read about. She's intelligent, sensible, stubborn, and has a wonderfully witty way of putting things. I kept reading this book because I was rooting for Charlotte the entire time and I wanted to see her happy.

The Bad: Walker Reed manages, all in the space of one book, to be a complete creep, a jerk, and an idiot, all at the same time. He treats Charlotte like a child, isn't honest with her, and then has the temerity to get pissed off when she reacts badly to being lied to. There are also scenes in the book that very definitely border on rape, and I'm extremely not cool with that. Thankfully, Walker never does rape Charlotte, but there were times I had to clench my jaw hard while reading certain passages lest I start screaming at him to just STFU and go away.

Overall: The novel is told very well. I like Coffman’s narrative voice. It’s not really all that surprising, and I’ve read books that pulled off very similar plots before. Generally speaking, those were a lot better than this one, but generally speaking, those books featured heroes I liked.