On Thursday, I feature a book I adore. This week I am sharing the wonderful  Beautiful Stranger (The Last Roundup #4) by Ruth Wind.

This a perfect sized romance. It houses one of the first and best BBW heroines and an artist hero against the backdrop of the Southwest. The class issues are compelling as well as those of race.  Wind always builds such fine details in her character driven love stories and this book is a showcase for her talent. 

---

Raised in a gilded cage, she was the chubby twin sister no one noticed. Now her weight loss made Marissa Pierce the kind of woman every man desired - including Robert Martinez. If only she had the courage to return his seductive gaze. A proud Native American, Robert resented Marissa's privileged lifestyle. Yet this elegant stranger understood his wounded heart. Now Robert was determined to show her how truly beautiful she was - before the princess could escape to her ivory tower forever.

Review

There are endless treasures to be found in the troves of category romances. This love story shines.

Ruth Wind creates excellent nuanced characters that at once embody archetypes in order to explore the themes that draw a reader to a kind of character and then she sketches them so finely we can never see these people as anything but real, human, and compelling.

In this romance, we have a the less traditionally attractive twin as a larger sized heroine from the upper class and a hero who is a seen as a bad boy but sees the world and the heroine through artist's eyes.

The issues of class difference and self esteem around body image are deftly handled. The empathy and compassion that these two find for each other make a love story worth reading over and over again

Sara Dillon, Chloe Mills' best friend, dumps her cheating fiancee and relocates to New York when her BFF and her Beautiful Bastard of a boyfriend open a new set of offices there. Out celebrating Chloe's engagement, Sara meets a tall, sexy stranger in a nightclub and ends up hooking up with him, without even exchanging names. Turns out her sexy f*ck buddy is an old friend of Bennet's, Max Stella, and he can't get the alluring lady from the nightclub out of his mind. While Sara is actively avoiding a new relationship, she can't deny her strong attraction to Max and with every new meeting, she discovers new things about herself and what she gets off on (hint - it's mainly mild forms of exhibitionism, the thrill of nearly getting caught).

While Max has a past as a playboy of note, he's tantalised by Sara, especially her initial plan that they see each other just once a week, and then only for sex. He wants to take their relationship to the next level much quicker than her, but once he realises why she's so wary about long-term commitment, he's content to wait for her to return his feelings.

In this second book in the Beautiful series, you can already see Christina Lauren getting more skilled at writing, and including more to the story than just people yelling at each other or tearing each other's clothes off. I found the first book sadly lacking in most of the plot and character development, and Bennett and Chloe's hook-up MO didn't really thrill me all that much. There is more back story given to both Sara and Max in this book, and the reader is given an explanation as to why Sara might want to let herself go and have a purely physical relationship for a while, having been with the same man (who treated her badly) for far too long and finally breaking free.

Max is the contemporary romance version of a rake who's ready to be redeemed and he's all about respecting his lady love's wants and wishes. Even though he's emotionally at a place where he's ready to settle down, he's ready to wait until Sara returns his feelings. Of course, towards the end of the book, there is a big misunderstanding and some added complications thrown in the way of our lovers. It's one of my least favourite plot tropes (along with "I must push the people I love away from me to protect them!") and it is pretty much just a frustrating way for the authors to pad out the story for a bit until the couple can move on to their HEA. 

In conclusion - Beautiful Stranger is better than the first book in the series (and the novella following it), but still not up to the quality of either of the four books in the Wild Seasons series, where I would suggest readers begin if they're interested in the work of Christina Lauren.

I've been reading a lot of Christina Lauren's books over the past couple of weeks, but I still haven't read the first of this series, Beautiful Bastard. This one is the second in the series, but I don't feel like I was missing anything by starting here.

Sara, recently split from her cheating boyfriend, relocates from Chicago to NYC. Out with her friends (Chloe, from Beautiful Bastard), she meets Max at a club. They hook up at the club but don't exchange names or numbers. Max is British, "gorgeous" and "really tall." He's also a wealthy businessman, investing in art.

Sara works for Bennett (hero of BB) as his new VP of Finance of a public relations company. Max pursues/stalks her when he sees her at Bennett's new offices.

Sara and Max's relationship centers around their shared kink of enjoying public sex. It also includes cellphone pics and videos "but no faces." I found their smexytimes interesting and creative, but it took me a while to buy into the romance.

I really liked Sara. She had a shitty ex and knew enough to know it wasn't a great time to get into a new relationship. Max, as a character, felt uneven at times. In the first few scenes, he didn't come across as British. Maybe him being described as having really large hands made him sound like a basketball player? I don't know. His dialogue just didn't read British to me until about one-third in. So, I liked that he was into Sara and he eventually falls hard for her. He felt like a bit of a millionaire/billionaire caricature in some scenes.

So, I liked it but I didn't love it. By the end, I was rooting for Sara and Max to be together and they made sense as a couple.