The Wallflower by Jan Freed is another of my favorite books. The heroine is a twentysomething professional woman and witnesses a murder. She’s put under protection until she can testify, but someone betrays her. Not knowing who to trust, she decides to hide on her own–by pretending to be a high school senior. The hero is her English teacher.
This is one of the few old books that I loved that’s actually available for the Kindle! I’m not getting rid of my paper copy, but it’s appealing to me to have the books I really loved in multiple formats so I can read it wherever and whenever and however I want. (Since it’s a July 2011 reissue from Harlequin, I’m assuming that it’s available for all the different ereaders. No links for them, sorry. I have a Kindle, so I was on that page.)
The book is just plain good and a lot of fun. One of the things that appealed to me was the idea of going back to high school and being cool. The heroine, Sarah, gets to do this and she helps the other geeks live up to their potentials.
Okay, well, I just stopped to reread the book. Some of the references are a bit dated since the book was published in 1998, but I still enjoyed it. The heroine’s growth arc was something I’d forgotten. She starts the book as an ambitious career woman just looking for feathers in her cap, but not really thrilled with her job, to someone who uses her professional skills to do something that matters to her.
The relationship she had with the kids was one of my favorite parts of the story. This is a book rich with secondary characters. The heroine’s best friend and their relationship was strong. The relationship among the secondary characters. It wasn’t as if they all revolved around the hero or heroine; they felt as if they had lives of their own. If that makes sense. Some books make the secondary characters feel as if they don’t exist out of context of the h/h, but Jan Freed does an tremendous job making everyone feel 3D and real.
The book isn’t a true romantic suspense. (It was originally published in the SuperRomance line.) The suspense aspect is really just there to set the story in motion. There’s a bit of wrap up of that at the end, but by and large, it’s a contemporary (circa 1998 contemporary) romance. It’s also a relationship book. Not only the relationship between the h/h, but their relationships with other people as well.
Highly recommended.
