Second-Best Husband

Rating:
Summary: Here's Penny's strongest female lead!
Review: Sara has been in love with Ian, her boss, for years. Now that he is engaged to someone else, she quits her job to go back to the comfort of her parents' home and lick her wounds. Before she left, though, a friend suggested that if she truly felt herself unlikely ever to fall in love again, she should marry someone with similar values for companionship and to start the family she has always wanted. When she gets to her parents' home she meets and befriends Stuart, her parents' new next door neighbor and an attractive man about her own age. Unlike in any other Penny Jordan romance I have ever read, Sara and Stuart develop their friendship from positions of equal strength and honesty. They find that they are kindred spirits and, as suggested by Sara's friend, decide to marry and start a family. However, unbeknownst to Sara, Ian's engagement has been called off and now he has come looking for her...

Rating:
Summary: Here's Penny's strongest female lead!
Review: Sara has been in love with Ian, her boss, for years. Now that he is engaged to someone else, she quits her job to go back to the comfort of her parents' home and lick her wounds. Before she left, though, a friend suggested that if she truly felt herself unlikely ever to fall in love again, she should marry someone with similar values for companionship and to start the family she has always wanted. When she gets to her parents' home she meets and befriends Stuart, her parents' new next door neighbor and an attractive man about her own age. Unlike in any other Penny Jordan romance I have ever read, Sara and Stuart develop their friendship from positions of equal strength and honesty. They find that they are kindred spirits and, as suggested by Sara's friend, decide to marry and start a family. However, unbeknownst to Sara, Ian's engagement has been called off and now he has come looking for her...

Rating:
Summary: What? Strong female lead, my hiney!
Review: This book was LAUGHABLY bad. I mean, really horribly, laughably bad. And, excuse me, the other reviewer said this book has a strong heroine?? Sara is a WIMP (we get page after page of her self-berating introspection) who's quietly and patiently loved her selfish, arrogant, people-using boss for TEN, count 'em, TEN years! And Sara doesn't even realize for HERSELF that he's a user; she needs her boss' bitchy fiancee to tell her so. Finally, she leaves her job & goes home to recover from her raging masochism (another wimpy move, going home) and meets Stuart the dull-as-dishwater (but noble & handsome) hero; thanks to her parents' efforts to fix them up they get married...their growing romance is about as dull and stupid as they are...the novel is basically written from Sara's POV, so you never get a feeling as to why Stuart would be attracted to this wishbone-for-backbone heroine (except that she's thin and pretty, of course)...OOOH, books like this make me actually angry! Because they are SO dumb, with such transparent plots & formulatic characters. What a waste of time!

Oh, yes, don't let me forget, that after setting up Sara's secret love "Ian", as the crappy, selfish boss-man with a heart of stone, the author makes Ian come looking for Sara, admittedly he only wants her back as a secretary, but don't you think a phone call would have been more realistic than his coming all the way out to her parents' place to ask her to come back? It was just one last effort by the author at keeping the H/H from admitting their "love" for a little while longer...(of course Stuart sees Ian & Sara talking & draws the wrong conclusion)...my God, the whole book was just SO hoky & unbelievable. This story is definitely NOT one of Ms. Jordan's best efforts.