spalmero's Full Review: Susan Wiggs - The You I Never Knew
For the first time in a long time, I am inspired to write a book review. Probably because I enjoyed the book I've just finished so much that I want other people to know about it.
The You I Never Knew is another book by Susan Wiggs. Looking back through my reviews, you will probably note that I tend to like Ms. Wiggs stuff. Some more than others, but I've pretty much enjoyed everything I've read of hers, and that amounts to quite a bit.
This book is her first foray into the mainstream world. In the romance writing world, there are category books (Harlequin and Silhouette), there are romance books, and there are mainstream books. In a mainstream book, the story doesn't have to focus entirely on the hero and heroine. The romance can be secondary. Things don't have to go perfectly.
They're stories told about people who could really *be* you or I.
Michelle Turner is an ad agency artist. She's good at her job. She is in line to make partner at the agency, and she has a good career. She was an artist once, painting because she felt inspired, but she's tucked that part of herself away, and focused on work. She has a nice house. She has a comfortable boyfriend in the form of Brad, the pharmacist, who lives like a doctor even if he doesn't have the degree. And she has a son, Cody, who is slowly but surely driving her insane.
Cody is sixteen and has mysteriously, overnight, turned into a rebel, refusing to do as she asks, being vague and all the fun things that teenagers do. He has a new girlfriend, Claudia, whom Michelle is afraid is leading him down the wrong path. He's smoking. He hates Brad. Michelle is very nearly at wits' end.
When she gets notice from a lawyer that her father, Gavin Slade, former movie star, current ranch owner and the man who's barely been her father, the man she hasn't spoken to for seventeen years, has set up a college fund for Cody. He's dying of kidney failure.
Michelle picks up her life and moves it to Montana, to donate a kidney to the father she doesn't really know. It might seem like an abrupt decision, but it *works*. For anyone who has ever been estranged, for however long, from a parent, it's easy to see disaster as the chance to get something good back. To make things right. This is exactly where Michelle comes from.
She's not counting on her old boyfriend, Sam McPhee, to be in town. Sam is Cody's father, though he doesn't know it. Sam disappeared the night that Michelle was going to tell him she was pregnant, and she's never forgiven him for that. She's not prepared for the no-account rodeo kid to be a doctor and a good man.
The things you think you know.
Michelle has to deal with an old flame. She has to deal with her sick father. With her rebellious son, and with the memories that 'going home' brings with it. It was easy for me to identify with her, I think. Not that we're in or have been in the same boat, but because she had real, *human* issues to deal with, and the decisions that she made didn't always turn out the way she wanted them to.
Is this book true to it's romance roots, and still a feel-good book? Yes. In truth, it's a classic cowboy-and-baby book, but the baby's grown up, and the cowboy actually cares. It's not saccharin, and it's not cliched.
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