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22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Seven Secrets of a Good Romance, May 27, 2010
1. Start the story with a heroine who is not childish or overly innocent. In this case she is described as optimistic tempered with a sense of realism.
2. Lots of sexual tension and build up. This story certainly had lots of it.
3. Keep the dialogue fresh and witty. I actually laughed out loud a couple of times.
4. Have other characters who are actually interesting. Georgette, her friend, was fabulous. Maxim's staff was interesting too without too many stereotypes.
5. Reveal the hero slowly and piece by piece. I personally hate novels that go back and forth between the thoughts of the heroine and the hero so that there is no mystery or uncertainty. He was complicated and multifaceted. I loved in this book where you were along for the ride with Miranda.
6. Don't have the heroine be a martyr or willfully blind. I like that Miranda was able to puzzle out the mystery and that she wasn't so fragile that when she did find out she didn't have a complete melt down.
7. Have your hero truly fall in love with the heroine, perhaps even before she falls in love with him. He was sooooo romantic.
The first book I read by Mallory was Three Nights of Sin. After that I read several other of her titles, but none have compared. Seven Secrets of Seduction is, I believe, the first contender and in many ways I believe it may be superior. In this one I would say that Three Nights of Sin ran a little hotter, but Seven Secrets ran sweeter. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and could not put it down. I disagree with the other review about the end. I enjoyed it the whole way though.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Best sexual tension/verbal seduction I've read in a while., May 25, 2010
This review is from: Seven Secrets of Seduction (Mass Market Paperback)
(3 1/2 stars rounded up.) This book has two drawbacks that usually bother me in historical romances: 1)Rather anachronistic behavior for females of the 1800s, and 2)Romance between a commoner and a member of the peerage. But I'm giving this book a bit of a pass just because I enjoyed the writing, the spirited and witty dialog between H and H and the hot, verbal seduction (not sophomoric, with no vulgar references to sex) of heroine by our hero. We have more than 190 pages of verbal foreplay before they even kiss and even more pages to the actual act of intimacy (at about page 280). Yet without H and H even touching each other, this book was sexier, IMO, than Anna Campbell's new release, MY RECKLESS SURRENDER, which has the H and H going at it like rabbits for most of the book. As for the story, I don't want to say much, but I found it interesting and different from the usual same-old, same-old plots. The heroine, Miranda Chase, is an educated, respectable commoner niece of the owner of a known bookshop in London and she lives with him and helps out in the shop. Our hero is the rakish Viscount Downing, Maximilian Landry, who has an extensive library and interest in books. In addition, there are two mysterious men that Miranda exchanges correspondence with but has never met in person: Eleutherios, the author of the scandalous SEVEN SECRETS OF SEDUCTION, and a Mr. Pitts, who dislikes intensely Eleutherios' writing. Back to our viscount. He visits the bookshop, shows an interest in Miranda and contracts her to organize his library, which is in an inexplicable disorder. So Miranda is at the viscount's residence daily, organizing his collection of books and manuscripts. This, of course, gives the viscount the opportunity for his verbal seduction of our fair Miranda.
Read the book to find out more, because it's mostly an interaction between the two protagonists and I don't want to give anything away. I enjoyed this more than I thought I would. It is Mallory's best work since THREE NIGHTS OF SIN, but it is not superior to that book. The ending here was a bit of a letdown for me, in that I was disappointed by the heroine's actions and reactions when she makes some crucial discoveries about certain people. She seems surprisingly indecisive and passive in dealing with this. So for me the last 70 pages don't quite live up to the promise of the first 300. However, all in all, it was a good read.
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16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Missed the opportunity to be a classic, June 15, 2010
This review is from: Seven Secrets of Seduction (Mass Market Paperback)
I really wanted to give this book 2 1/2 stars but have bumped it up to 3 stars because it doesn't follow the modern trend for gratuitous sex. It had the potential to rate alongside Mary Balogh classics because it is a study of a developing romantic relationship. The book has a tormented rake and innocent shop girl, and a slow build up to sexual consummation which usually totally grab me. Unfortunately this book misses the mark. There is far too much nebulous writing which is supposed to be setting the mood but I found it too wordy to really get to the core of what the characters were thinking. I felt like I was always in a mist...couldn't quite get to the clear picture. I got a glimpse of the inner heart every now and again, but not enough to really understand how the characters worked. This lack of clarity made Max a blurred person yet at the same time, prevented me from feeling any warmth toward Miranda. In summary, this book left me very frustrated - I desperately wanted to fully engage with it, but felt I was being kept at arms length.
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