A review by polarmouse
Moonlight Masquerade by Jude Deveraux

2.0

Cute Sophie Kincaid who has given up on her dreams is finally able to start thinking about the future now that her sister is safely in college away from their lecherous Step-Father. The one give she thought she had, her boyfriend asking her to marry him, comes to a halt when he throws her out. In the heat of the moment she steals the family cookbook, which is the basis of her former boyfriends family frozen dinner empire. She takes off with the help of a friend to Edilean where she is almost run over by handsome Dr. Reede Aldredge, brother of her friend who's helping her and her new boss. She gets back at him and the entire town gets behind her, Dr. Reede is famous for his crankiness and it seems no one in town can stand his attitude. Will the town manage to get the two of them together? Will Sophie's theft be discovered and pursued? Will Sophie ever figure out what she wants from life? Will this book be even more ridiculous than I can handle?

I expect a certain amount of unbelievableness from romance novels. The world never quite throws up such huge barriers or has things fall so perfectly into place as a good one. This one had me cocking my eyebrow and saying, "Oh really! Are you serious!?!?" which is never a good thing when reading any book. When the ridiculousness shakes you out of the book so many times, your book is in deep, deep trouble. The Halloween party , carving animals out of potatoes for traumatized children, her magically presented business opportunity that she didn't even want and seemed slightly bitter about, her even MORE amazing magically presented business opportunity that, alas, is not for her, made me want to smack her. The urge to smack the main characters happened a lot during the last half of this book. They couldn't communicate with each other at all for months. How does this make a good relationship? It doesn't. If they had a fight or a discussion about what they really wanted out of life and from their relationship when it should have happened, the book would have about 200 pages shorter, and the better for it.