There are plenty of bad marriages that beg for a bullet, but as you grow older and wiser you also come to realize that some great passionate marriages were not actually a mistake but rather done in by pride and stubbornness (sounds almost like an Austen title).
Meant to be together in real life, or on the page, the couple were simply too young and stupid to know how to negotiate the peace . . . much less a way back into each other’s arms.
What star-crossed married couples rarely manage to do in real life—even if they never actually file divorce pages, a clever author can do with a winsome plot and a little literary derring-do.
But truth be told, though a few authors had broached the idea of an estranged couple reuniting (think Sherryl Woods in the contemporary A Slice of Heaven in 2005), no one had dared to do it in a historical until Sherry Thomas’s Delicious was published in 2008 by Bantam. The book launched her Marsdens Series, and the sequel — Not Quite a Husband — a year later was just as satisfying as Book 1. More than one reviewer oohed and aahed over Thomas as one of the most original authors writing romance at the time.
I had to agree.
Since then, a number of contemporary romance authors have explored the idea, (I’m thinking Kristan Higgins in My One and Only back in 2011) but if you peruse GoodReads’ list on the subject, Sherry Thomas remains the historical queen of the second chance.
And the fact that she is a great storyteller, well, that’s just a bonus.
—Jeanne Devlin