If possible, I think I loved this even more than I'd remembered, and I remembered really loving it. In fact, I stayed up way too late to finish it because I could not put it down, even knowing what was going to happen.I'd forgotten how Pride and Prejudice-like this story is, and how well done that aspect is. I appreciated that it was fascination-at-first-sight rather than "love" and that they grew to love each other as they got to know each other and bring out the best in each other.I'd also forgotten that this is one of the very few romance novels that mirrors my idea of romance and Happily Ever After: that the end of the book, when the couple finally gets together and/or gets married, that's the real beginning of the story. At one point, Christine said, “Oh, not happily-ever-after [...] That is such a static thing. I don’t want happily-ever-after. I want happiness and life and quarreling and making up and adventure and—” and I thought, "YES! That's it EXACTLY!"Most romance novels are based on the Disney and Hollywood ideal of riding off into the sunset, everything perfect forevermore. That simply doesn't ring true for me. I believe that real happily-ever-after includes dealing with bad days, dishes left too long unwashed, dirty socks on the floor, and all the other obnoxious minutiae of daily life. What makes it the real romantic story is loving each other and staying together even through those things, and it was a rare delight to see that expressed in a romance novel.Was this a perfect book? Of course not. Did I have niggles? Quite a few, actually. But none significant enough to detract from my overall delight in this book.
