Cat's Books: Romance

On Thursday, I feature a book I adore. This week I am sharing the wonderful  Beautiful Stranger (The Last Roundup #4) by Ruth Wind.

This a perfect sized romance. It houses one of the first and best BBW heroines and an artist hero against the backdrop of the Southwest. The class issues are compelling as well as those of race.  Wind always builds such fine details in her character driven love stories and this book is a showcase for her talent. 

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Raised in a gilded cage, she was the chubby twin sister no one noticed. Now her weight loss made Marissa Pierce the kind of woman every man desired - including Robert Martinez. If only she had the courage to return his seductive gaze. A proud Native American, Robert resented Marissa's privileged lifestyle. Yet this elegant stranger understood his wounded heart. Now Robert was determined to show her how truly beautiful she was - before the princess could escape to her ivory tower forever.

Review

There are endless treasures to be found in the troves of category romances. This love story shines.

Ruth Wind creates excellent nuanced characters that at once embody archetypes in order to explore the themes that draw a reader to a kind of character and then she sketches them so finely we can never see these people as anything but real, human, and compelling.

In this romance, we have a the less traditionally attractive twin as a larger sized heroine from the upper class and a hero who is a seen as a bad boy but sees the world and the heroine through artist's eyes.

The issues of class difference and self esteem around body image are deftly handled. The empathy and compassion that these two find for each other make a love story worth reading over and over again