This is definitely a romance novel. A very, very middle-American romance novel, since the characters are so completely concerned with mundanities like cheerleading, football, barhopping, and suchlike.
Supposedly 12 years have passed since the epic tragedy their senior year of high school, but it's pretty hard to see that since the characters all talk like barely a year has passed. These are people on the cusp of middle age? The dialogue sounds like it was written by TV writers.
When we find relatively early on that our heroine has a new identity to escape the past, it seemed to me that the book entered territory where it could have been filmed as a lush 1950s melodrama like those directed by Douglas Sirk.
If you want a romance novel, this is a romance novel. ...I could have done without the characters' taste for coarse, cheesy humor, but that goes with the whole "middle American" thing.
Supposedly 12 years have passed since the epic tragedy their senior year of high school, but it's pretty hard to see that since the characters all talk like barely a year has passed. These are people on the cusp of middle age? The dialogue sounds like it was written by TV writers.
When we find relatively early on that our heroine has a new identity to escape the past, it seemed to me that the book entered territory where it could have been filmed as a lush 1950s melodrama like those directed by Douglas Sirk.
If you want a romance novel, this is a romance novel. ...I could have done without the characters' taste for coarse, cheesy humor, but that goes with the whole "middle American" thing.