A review by keberwick
Exclusively Yours by Shannon Stacey

3.0

I launched myself into this book in hopes of finding a nice, relaxing, mind numbing tale of romance sprinkled with a few laugh-out-loud moments. I found most of what I was looking for, fortunately. It was heavy on the romance- a good thing considering it is, in fact, a romance- but a little light on the laugh-out-loud factor. That being said, it was still (mostly) light-hearted and adorable.

I can tell the author really spent time thinking and developing her characters to act, think, and talk like real people (something i think is more rare on the romance-novel side of the book-genre-spectrum). The only character I felt was a little less than real was Terry, but I felt that the rationale behind her stubbornness made up for her (initial) lack of depth. All of the relationships the author included in her book were very realistic as well. No Kowalski couple was perfect, but the way that they went about working through their problems came off as very natural and how, I think, people that love each other should handle marital or relationship problems.

This is the type of contemporary romance that I can really get behind and use as an example of romance novels that aren't super embarrassing to talk about out loud. There was no "insta-love", nor were there any other real romance "cliches". I'm definitely going I read the second book- I've actually already started- and I'll most definitely recommend this book to my friends.