A review by turophile
Suddenly Last Summer by Sarah Morgan

3.0

I love the world that Sarah Morgan has built in the O’Neill Brothers series, but this may be my least favorite though it is still pretty good.

I love the heroine– Elise, the feisty French Chef. And the hero , Sean the Surgeon, is likeable enough.

As with the other books in this series - there’s so much too like – amazing scenery, humorous snappy dialogue and a romance that builds over the course of the book.

The thing that drove me crazy and is causing me to downgrade it from the others in the series is this secret emotional wound trope – I don’t know why, but it seems like the last three or more romances I’ve read (and the one I’m reading right now) all have this issue. Is it more common than I remember and it’s just now beginning to drive me up a wall?

What I mean by the secret emotional wound – is something that has happened in the characters’ past that impacts them in such a severe way that they won’t enter serious relationships with others. The character is aware of it, but refers to it without detail so the reader is left guessing. And it’s annoying – seriously, if this secret is so impactful to a person, I can’t imagine that so many people would mentally refer to it as “the secret” rather than the time this person did x to me. It creates fall suspense. Seriously authors – get it out there – and build your tension in a more real way, rather than simply withholding information from the reader. If you want to withhold from the other main character at first, fine. But this artifice of a character who’s so shaped by a secret but mentally never refers to what happen seems so unrealistic.

Blerg.

3/5 stars.