Review of Good For The Goose by Anne Holly

Author: Anne Holly
Title: Good For The Goose
Series: holiday series
Publisher: Wicked Nights
Release date: November 19, 2010
Word/page count: 12k words / 27 pages

Backblurb/Goodreads link | author's website | buy link

Genre & keywords:

M/F, Romance, Contemporary, Christmas, Divorce, Professor/student, May/December romance

Synopsis in short:

After her divorce, 36 year old professor Natasha is not looking forward to spend the holidays alone. Good thing 23 year old graduate student Raphael is helping her grading some papers. One thing leads to another.

My thoughts:
The romance between the hero and heroine is a so called May/December one, a couple with a substantial age difference, where in this case the heroine is the older person of the two. Aside from that, there's also a teacher/student relationship between them. Two reasons for Natasha to stay away from the temptation called Raphael. They would make an unlikely couple. Yet, they fall in love and I didn't find that completely unbelievable; I actually liked the reversed roles of hero and heroine, compared to more traditional patterns were the man would be the older one and the woman the student. However, it was difficult to understand where Raphael's feelings were coming from, because we didn't get much of his internal process: his view, thoughts or feelings. And given the short length of the book things went a bit swiftly all in all.

The story is told in third person and starts out from Natasha's perspective. After a while when things heat up between her and Raphael, the point of view suffers a little bit from some head hopping between heroine and hero. But the perspective stays mainly with the heroine throughout the story. Due to this mainly one sided point of view it's easier to empathize with Natasha than it's with Raphael. In general, I had a bit of trouble to feel connected with the characters. But that probably has partly to do with the fact that the May/December nor the professor/student trope is one of my favorite themes in romance, despite the choice to reverse the traditional roles.

The main characters are sexy, sensual characters though, and their physical attraction is undeniably hot. I thought the sex scenes were very well written, tender, sweet and scorching. These scenes were visual and tangible. A significant part of the intimate physical moments of this pair however also took place 'off screen' with only a few words for us readers to inform us about them.

Even with the short length of this book there's an attempt to weave some sort of angsty moment into the plot, based on fear for commitment of one of the protags. It was kind of inevitable, so, not much of a surprise that the story took this turn. And the reunion was more sexy (and also a bit over the top) than it was touching or sweet. Therefore, I was able to keep my eyes dry.

All in all, this is just a short story and altogether a nice, quick and hot read. It amused me for a short time, but it probably won't keep me occupied very much longer after reading it. Yet, I’m looking forward to reading more of this author, who has also written a Valentine's Day themed story and has a first full length novel available in the near future.

Final judgment:

Engaging and sexy holiday themed May/December romance with characters that won't stay on my mind very long after finishing the book. More chemistry driven than character or plot driven.  
3.5 out of 5 stars & 2 out of 3 flames
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