Customer Reviews

Stone Angel

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Okay, I am really found of the old, old Harlequin Romances because they had very little if any strong sexual content, but a lot of times I had to trade off for abusive, mean, cold and sometimes hard men. Most of the times naive young women and often it made me a bit puzzled as to why the female lead character was attracted to the male lead character.
So I really like Helen Brooks, and I have all the books she has published in the US, except Dance Sonata, so I am rereading them so I can give a review to them.
So here goes; Enrico Meliora was the exact copy of a stone angel Tania Miles had seen, and he had the countenance of that statue.
Tania met him as she was coming home on her bike, from an interview that went over the time she had allotted to get home before dark, and the interviewer was so inapt that she knew she wouldn't get the job anyway. But going home in semi darkness, she was run off the road by a car trying to pass Enrico's on a blind turn, that wracked her bike. By the way we never heard anything else about the bike after she got her job with Enrico as help to his children's nanny Gilda, and sometimes secretary to him.
Enrico's eyes were black in one chapter, and brown in the next for the first five chapters of the book, as Tania's hair when from deep chestnut red, to tawny.
Enrico had been widowed for two years, his wife had died giving birth to his son Emmanuele, and he already had a little girl Louisa.
His late wife Catalina had love him beyond all bounds and he never felt that way about her, Enrico blamed himself for her death, but he liked to say as quoited on the back of the book, "The female sex is not capable of deep emotion!" Yet his wife proved him wrong, but he conveniently ignored that. In fact he was the one that seemed to be without emotions, and when he did show some human qualities, he blew hot, then cold.
Also although Enrico stressed that he was overly cautious because his son had been kidnapped, he never seemed to have body guards watching his kids when they left the house.
When Enrico said those famous last words on pg 44 "I wouldn't have done anything to hurt you." I thought oh, ooh, here it comes. And it didn't take long, pg 46,47,76,110,174 made me want to throw the book in the trash. But as I said I like Helen Brooks, and sure enough the ending was worth the stress the book put me though.
In fact I have this uncanny(sometimes scary) ability to go into the book, and I find I see the characters and real people, and often I want to tap them on the arm and point out some inconsistencies that they themselves have overlooked, and most of the time I really do enjoy it.
Even when the eyes of Enrico r black pg 7, 11, 24 to the end of the book, and then brown pg 8, 15. I think maybe Ms Brooks was distracted by one of her family and because most of the men in her books have black or brown hair, she just slipped back into the writing of the book before cheeking to see what color eyes Enrico has. The fact that some books I have read have changed the characters names throughout the book is another reason I can see why these small mistakes are made. But they do,(for me)detract from the story.
From the back of the book: '"The female sex is not capable of deep emotion!' Enrico Meliora's emotions were carved in stone and just as hard. He was cynical about love, scornful of romance and burning with bitterness. He was like a fallen angel, and no woman had ever been able to move him!
So why wasn't Tania able to leave him? When he tortured her emotions, why did she always end up begging for more? What was it about Enrico that made her a prisoner of his passions?'