BOOK REVIEW (19): Too Close to Resist (Bluff City #1)

BOOK REVIEW:

Too Close to Resist 

Wow.

So I haven't had a leisure read for the past month. The sacrifices I made for my Canadian lit. class...oh man. Not that I didn't enjoy my forced readings, I mean they weren't Bret Easton Ellis and American Psycho bad.

And seeing as I derailed my CampNaNo plan for rewrites I decided to use this month to reach the 3/4 mark of my reading + reviewing goal for this year.

I need another 4-5 books in order to do this. And I started late but I just polished off two books this past week. :) YAY for being on track.

My Book 1 of a 5-book challenge was "Too Close to Resist" by Nicole Helm, the first in the Bluff City trilogy from Harlequin Superromance.

This is Ms. Helm's debut w/ Harlequin and it's also my first with this longer contemp romance category line. As usual (lol!) I made a super (haha. See what I did there) choice.

"Too Close to Resist" follows Grace McKnight and Kyle Clark and the thematic strand connecting them and their stories is fear and the need to control every evil in their pasts.

See the thing with romances are that, sure, they're love stories, but they're NOT just love stories. As in the protagonists have conflicts outside the main romantic plot--after all before they existed as a couple our hero and heroine existed as individuals.

Mini-rant aside "Too Close to Resist" is a down-to-earth read: realistically gritty yet uplifting. The language is frank, and although there was no knight-in-shining armour I promise there's a HFN/happy for now.

And that's what I LOVE about this novel. Grace and Kyle save themselves from their own monsters. They support each other, but they also come to understand that there's an insurmountable barrier where external heroics are null and void. Kinda like how your parents can't help you with everything even if they want to protect you 24/7 (and my family SO would)...

Anyways lotsa sexual tension builds up to two sexy-sheet times, which to be honest were described more sweetly than the diction suggested leading up to the act, but other than that I recommend this to other first-timers to longer contemporary romances like Superromance.

My verdict:

✮✮✮✮✮

(5 stars)