Customer Reviews

Hero In Disguise (Hometown Reunion)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

One of the worst things to find in a romance is the fact that the emotional exchange and growth in a relationship winds up being all one-sided as is the case with this book. This romance is one of those almost forbidden kind of romances as the hero Douglas was once the history teacher (13 years ago) to the heroine Sheila when she was in high school. Obviously the taboo is no longer there about a relationship but the whole idea isn't really presented with a lot of believability. The romance is presented very simplistically as a case of "he was in lust with her when he was her teacher and she had a crush on him when she was his student (unbeknownst to each other), they meet again 13 years later and fall in love". Unfortunately I never believed that Sheila ever was really in love, rather just continuing in her crush as she never has credible real adult feelings conveyed in the story. When the inevitable conflict arises in the story and the "big argument" surfaces, Sheila continues in her rather insecure, emotionally-stunted fashion and lashes out very nastily and childishly with some extremely hurtful comments about Douglas. Afterwards she gets all whiney that Douglas walks out on her and goes after him only after prompting by her father, and when she catches up to him she never sincerely apologizes (at least I didn't believe it) for her comments. Another crisis turns up right afterwards (and anyone with half a brain cell would have figured out that this little scenario was going to happen as soon as they were introduced to the three main characters, Douglas, Sheila and Sheila's father) wherein the hero saves the day, forgives his childish love's ill-will and they live happily ever after. The book up to the big argument was a pretty solid 3-star fluff romance (not great but not bad) but fell to a 0-star afterwards and never recovered. Sheila never faces her own insecurities and never grows as a person at all while Douglas does face his own problems mostly and shows growth. I cannot really see a true happily-ever-after type of marriage coming out of this romance as only the hero really is showing any effort and the heroine would probably lapse back into her nasty behavior and there was no true closure to the heroine's background storyline.

I thought the first reviewer was grossly unfair to this story. I liked it and found the majority of the book believable. This is a difficult situation and mirrored in society of teacher/student romances. It fits perfectly with the adult and he was only 23 as her teacher who acted maturely. He held his love and lust back from this 17 year old student until 13 years later when he could convince her that he was no longer her teacher and their feelings could then be explored. Granted neither knew of the others feelings while she was his student and she is still a lot younger than he so some life experiences had not all come to her yet. She is believable as a young woman and he's a dashing believable mature teacher who delves into reenacting with gusto. I think this other reviewer was greatly unkind to Ms Thompson's story. I liked this story enough to decide to find all the other books in this and the previous series.