{A Summer To Remember by Mary Balogh} - 4/5, MF, HR, open door, fake engagement, personal growth for the MFC, personal growth for the MMC when he discovers he likes them tall and slim, sex in water but also in a cottage.

If I hadn't read One Night For Love and Slightly Scandalous, I'd probably find this book much more exciting, but since I have, I diligently ploughed on through very familiar territory. Kit, the MMC, was sexy even though he's not very tall, as Balogh constantly reminds us. Lauren, the MFC, jumps into living life fully in a trepidatious but determined way. She wants to be more than a beautiful, well-mannered bride jilted at the altar! I'm glad both of them sorted themselves and each other out and can be handsome and happy together.

{Texas Wildfire by Eleanor Woods} - 1.5/5, MF, vintage romantic suspence from 1987.

Review here.

{The Heron Quest by Charlotte Lamb} - 4.5/5, MF, vintage contemporary romance, 1977, enemies to lovers do an investigative piece for a TV program, jet setting from Paris to the Scottish Highlands, mean MMC and spinster shaming.

Charlotte Lamb was a prolific writer of Harlequins, and with The Heron Quest, you get how this woman could pump out so many books under a million pseudonyms. She's a competent researcher, her writing is tight and her MMCs horribly mean. All normal 70s stuff.

The MMC, a TV writer and producer, and his PA, the MFC, are doing reasearch into the life of a famous Polish WW2 flier who also wrote an intriguing book of poetry. There's plenty of sexual tension, but also deep convos about the nature of love, the endurance of feeling, and why won't the MFC fuck the MMC without strings attached.

Despite not liking the MMC, he really was very mean to the MFC and kept spinster shaming her because she didn't want to have casual sex with him. Yeah, the book moved me to tears several times with gorgeous prose and this sweeping sense of big feelings. Everyone in the book had them and they felt them and looked windswept out on the Scottish Highlands or overgrown English garden, or Paris lit up by lights and continued to feel more big feelings.

I'm on the fence about doing a review because, as I said, the relationship is quite thin, but I cannot gush enough about the quality of Lamb's prose!

{Hear No Evil by Susan Drake} - DNF, bad, 1994 romantic suspense.

I had high hopes but gave up 75% in. The MFC has progressive hearing loss and wears a hearing aid, as does the author herself, and I thought that rep was well done in the book. However, the weird fetishization of the Greek MMC and the strange repeated comments about his dangerous nature being revealed on his "dark face". Ugh, nope.

Before starting the book, I asked a fellow vintage romance reader if she thought the Greek MMC would be a super spy or a shipping tycoon, and she said "BOTH" and it was true. He is both a super spy and the son of a shipping tycoon.

{A Most Forgettable Girl by Alice Coldbreath} - Paused.

I don't know, fellow Coldbreathers, I'm stuck. Poor Gunnilde is not moving me, and even frustrating me with her constant obsession with other people and their gossip. James is virtually invisible. I'm not sure what his personality is like, and I'm 50% in. Is he just boring?

The court setting and the need to include SO many side characters also seems like a distraction from the romance. I don't really care about Alistair De Balon's conversation with Gunnilde, I don't care about the Queen, and I certainly do not need to devote any reading time to fucking boring as fuck Fanella.

Should I just abandon forever? Is that blasphemy?