Truth be told I have a sincere soft spot for many of the late 80's/early 90's Harlequin titles. I grew up on those as a young teen. Even now, as I prefer historical romance or paranormal romance, I have at least a dozen of my favorites from Harlequin that still please me. I only recently began reading Hart and since I saw this as my used bookstore I decided to pick it up.

Admittedly I had to first put aside the eye-rolling at the male lead (Kier's) preponderance with posturing and acting like the female lead (Penelope called Poppy) didn't affect him. Anyone with half a brain could see that a normally placid, professional man who suddenly becomes prickly and irritated when a certain female around is obviously having some sort of big feelings for her. It also helps to ignore how passive Poppy tended to be.

In short this was, while not being one of my favorite Old School Romances, definitely was in my top twenty-five percentile. There were definite moments when Poppy was sassy and gave Kier back as good as she got and it was with some relief that at the end Kier isn't asking Poppy to give up what she is good at.

I am seeing a definite trend in some of Hart's characters thought; she seems to like writing about the off-beat sorts who march to their own drummer and make people's lives a little brighter just by being themselves. ( )

Sweet old Harlequin romance. The heroine was a klutz which is a character type I like and there aren't enough of them written for my tastes. The hero was a grumpy scientist who had to deal with the heroine in a jungle setting. She turned him upside down of course. There was an evil OW of course. Some books you just can't wait to get to the end because things are going so poorly for the heroine but this one was a fun read all the way through. ( )