Innocent Virgin, Wild Surrender (Mills & Boon Modern ) [Paperback]

This is a well-written book, descriptive and it's easy for you to visual the scenes/people described. It did remind me of other books written by Anne Mather but in a positive way. This is a more traditional love story and much more believable for it. Anne Mather has written a believable and loveable hero and you can understand why Rachel would fall in love with him. If I had one criticism it's that this book would have benefited from being a few pages longer - but I'm probably just being greedy!

I must say, this was my first time reading a romance by Anne Mather. Innocent Virgin,Wild Surrender was no "innocent" romance. The beginning reason Rachel Claiborne was sent to an island off of Jamaica was interesting. Her father wanted her to fly to the island of St. Antoine to bring her mother back to England. Her mother had wanted her father to retire and he didn't and now he wanted he wife back home. Personally I thought what kind of a back bone did this man have? Sending his daughter, for a couple of weeks to find her mother? What would that accomplish because she and her mother didn't have a good relationship. Plus that fact when she finally found her mother there was nothing but nasty words exchanged and scenes in the Brody home and at the hotel.

Thirty year old and a virgin, she worked at the local newspaper in her town selling advertising. I wondered how she would deal with her missing mother. Especially when the very handsome and rich Matt Brody made his entrance and meeting by accident. It was obvious they were attracted to each other. They spent some time together but she wondered how this man and her mother were connected. And then there was the fact of Matt's father Jacob and the evening she spent at their plantation and her mother "exploded in" making a scene. That wasn't the only scene she made, there was also one at Rachel's hotel. Taking also into the factor, their night of passionate love making even though there were questions not addressed by the Brody family concerning her mother.

A lot of things happened on this tropical island. Sexual tension between Rachel and Matt but there were two things in this romance that bothered me. First of all she suspected her mother might be having a relationship with Matt or there was a secret. At the end, her mother allowed something to be "assumed" that was horrific. I thought her mother and even her father who had kept secrets from her, should be shot. Add to the mix a honeymoon couple where the groom made a pass at her.......interesting.

While the writing was descriptive the two plots involving her parents and the Brody family were disturbing., I tried to make sense of this love story. It was just some things that were lightly suggested between Matt and Rachel which suggested a taboo that bothered me.

While they got their happy ending there were certain elements that disturbed me from the family secrets to her mother's behaviour. Maybe that was what the author intended, I'm not sure. Will I read another Anne Mather book, of course because I'm a Mills and Boon and Presents author fan. We all have differences of opinion and there was this "one secret" and it unsettled me.

I borrowed this book from my library, based on the previous reviewer's tale, and I regret the waste of my 40p reservation fee. I suppose I should be thankful that I didn't buy it!

Yes, the male lead is quite sweet, but the author is so fond of having her characters 'hold' info back, which yes, adds a tiny bit of a twist to the tale, but for the female lead to think she's bonked her half-brother is yuck (on top of bonking him despite thinking that he's her mother's lover). And yet again, we see a 'mother' who has issues with her daughter...ad nauseum in AM tales.

The leads barely have any interaction with one another, yet she sees him once fleetingly at a hotel check-in desk and, despite being an ice-cold blonde VIRGIN, has a deep-felt and lasting attraction to him, and vice-versa? Come on, we need at least a touch of reality, surely?

Add to that the female lead who seems obsessed with still being a virgin at 30 (VIRGIN seems to be in her every waking thought: she's SO beautiful she's kept herself away from men and their advances/she's feisty and therfore under the impression that no-one would believe she's a virgin/she has an un-natural virgin attraction to the male lead/she is wearing a revealing bikini that you wouldn't think she's a virgin etc. etc. yawn. You name it, where 'virgin' could be dropped in, it was there).

Overall, boring and this has cemented the lid on the AM coffin for me.