RATING GUIDE:
5 – A keeper!
4 – Very good
3 – Passable
2 – I’d rather read a telephone book
1 – An absolute bomb.
Read at your own risk!
After reading EL James’ Fifty
Shades’ trilogy, I desperately felt like I needed to take my brain out of
the gutter and detoxify it with something that wasn’t so … excessive. EL James’ sexfest is like eating lechon,
alimango and sugpo everyday. It’s
definitely sinful and delicious at first, but you’re bound to get bored by it
very quickly, and you’re soon very, very sick of it. After the last Fifty Shades book, I was desperate for
old-fashioned romance. You know, the
kind that makes you sigh (or squeal) like a lovesick teenager.
My detoxifying agent of choice
was Swept Off Her Stilettos by Fiona Harper. I really didn’t expect much out of this book. To be honest, I’m slightly biased against
romance novels. I always thought they
were a waste of time and money. Why
should I pay for reading material that’s predictable? Boy meets girl, they soon fall in love, break up and get back
together. Boring.
But I was pleasantly surprised by
Swept Off Her Stilettos. In
fact, Fiona Harper changed my view about romance novels. Reading romance novels isn’t a waste of time
at all, and it can be a very pleasant experience, provided you come across a
romantic gem like this one.
Swept Off Her Stilettos is
the story of Coreen, who at first doesn’t seem like the female heroine you’d be
rooting for. She’s a lot like Marilyn
Monroe. She’s gorgeous, she’s curvy and
she knows it; and she has no qualms about wrapping the salivating men around
her finger. Why, she even has the
vintage dresses and the Marilyn Monroe-esque walk to prove she’s one hot
babe. She’s exactly the type women
would usually think of as a potential bitch, right? And yet, for all her flirtatious ways, Coreen’s aspirations go
way beyond getting her way using her body. Despite
her reputation for bedding every man in town (which is soon disproved), all
that Coreen wants is to expand her vintage clothing shop and win the heart of
one man, the handsome, wealthy and elusive Nicholas.
Coreen seeks the help of Adam,
her best friend since, well, forever.
Adam knows Coreen so well that he knows what type of food to bring her
when he drops by her shop. And although
he’s also the type of friend who’d swipe your last piece of prawn toast, he’s
also generous to a fault with his smile, his words of advice and his moral support. He’s also the only man in town who hasn’t
succumbed to Coreen’s manipulation.
Coreen gets an opportunity to get
closer to Nick when Izzy, Nick’s sosyalera sister, invites Coreen to
take part in the weekend murder-mystery party she’s hosting. The only catch is, she needs to bring a companion/date
to the party. So, Coreen asks Adam to
come with her. Ever the reliable best
friend, Adam shows up. As the party
unfolds, Coreen slowly realizes that the man she’d been looking for, the man
who’d sweep her off her stilettos, isn’t really the man she’d been ogling all
this time, but the man who has been by her side for practically forever.
It takes great writing skill to
generate sympathy for a character who’s potentially negative, and I think Fiona
Harper did a wonderful job in making Coreen a likable character. In fiction (and in real life), I generally
dislike girl-girl women who are pretty-centered and manipulative, like
Coreen. Yet, I ended up liking Coreen
and rooting for her. It turns out
there’s more to Coreen than her looks, her fashion sense and “user-friendly”
ways. At the heart of it all is a woman
who’s just like every woman we know --- someone who’s been hurt, someone who
has dreams, someone who wants to find love and acceptance.
And although anyone with half a
brain can predict who Coreen will end up with, it was still great fun to read
about Coreen’s journey in finding Mr. Right.
There’s no way in hell you won’t fall in love with Adam.
Fiona Harper wrote the story from
Coreen’s point of view, and so you get to see the world from her eyes. The way she makes you fall in love with Adam
is very subtle. It’s actually like the
weekend murder-mystery party in the books.
She drops a hint here and there.
To supplement the “clues,” she makes use of Coreen’s narrative to describe
Adam, which is very effective. I can
only describe her process of writing about Coreen’s love story as peeling an
onion layer by layer, or slowly lifting the veil from one’s eyes. Or that cute-but-very-effective Skin White
commercial where the boy slowly realizes, What the hell?!, I've fallen in
love with my best friend!
I promise you, by the time Adam
actually plants his first kiss on Coreen’s lips, you’d actually feel like its
your heart that’s pounding, your knees that are turning to jelly and it’s your
lips that he’s actually kissing. SIGH! Someone should turn this into a movie
starring Katy Perry (or Zoe Deschanel) and Matt Bomer, pronto!
Now, that’s what I call a damned
good romance novel! I’m definitely
going to add this to my collection.
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