Memory loss is one of the biggest plot clichés – the more so because it never really seems to happen in real life. One hears about people losing their memory of an accident or a mugging, but only very rarely do they lose memory of everything. But in fiction?

Bring on the amnesia!

Over the years, as memory-less men and women pile up on the paperback shores, it’s become more and more difficult to write this plot well. But Teresa Medeiros does it brilliantly, and her A Kiss to Remember is probably my all-time favorite amnesiac plot. Sterling Harlow, Duke of Devonbrooke and a notorious rake, wakes up to find a lovely girl hanging over him. Since he doesn’t know his own name, she tells him that he’s Nicholas Radcliffe, her long-lost fiancé.

The truth is that Laura Fairleigh needs a husband, because if she’s not married pronto, she and her siblings will lose the roof over their head…to a duke. Yes, the Duke of Devonbrooke. Medeiros gleefully piles unlikely event on unlikely event – but what carries the readers straight through this page-turner is the utterly charming love story between Laura and Sterling. Told that he’s a well-mannered, honorable man, the rakish Nicholas conforms. He doesn’t like it when Laura arranges for him to be the new rector of the parish, but he doesn’t explode. He saves his rage for the moment when his memory comes back.

This is one of Medeiros’s most charming and most unput-downable novels, the perfect rainy afternoon read.

~buy this book~

I always think it’s really interesting when an author sets up a character with a major flaw. I should clarify that by saying that I don’t consider flawed rakes to be very interesting. Frankly, there were apparently so many rakes in London that Home Depot would have sold them off for a dollar each (ha). Tessa Dare is a fairly new author, but she does something daring in A Lady of Persuasion: she sets up her heroine as a less-than-perfect sort of woman. In fact, Isabel Grayson is pretty close to being an uptight, overly pious, overly charitable twit. Except…she isn’t. She’s trying to be all those things, and telling herself that every time she does something naughty with Sir Tobias Aldridge (her own personal rake whom she marries quick as a wink), she’d better do something charitable to make up.

This makes for a rather bewildering marriage, at least from Tobias’s point-of-view. As soon as he and Isabel make love – and wow, do they have a great intimate life – she leaps out of bed and starts writing letters about climbing boys and slavery. In short: she’s not so good at cuddling. Plus, she’s got him running for a seat in Parliament, though he considers himself among the laziest of men.

What Tessa Dare does with this unlikely pair is pure genius: she spins their story around the fear that we all harbor in some corner of our soul that we’re not lovable. Isabel feels that she must, she simply must be a positive angel of goodness, to make up for her inadequacies. Tobias feels that she couldn’t possibly love him, once she realizes that he’s going to fail at the whole parliamentary thing.

The part that made me heave a huge sigh was the very end, when he tells her exactly what his ambitions are: “I mean to love you so well, so fiercely. To make certain you never doubt what a remarkable, beautiful woman you are. To make certain the world knows it too. To create a stable, loving home for you and our family. To give you a place where you will always feel safe.”

Sigh.

~buy this book~