Mills & Boon, £3.49, ISBN 978-0-263-89131-7
Contemporary Romance, 2012
Well, well, now this is… interesting.
Normally, when I think of the Modern line, I think of abusive Greek tycoons with serious, hideous mommy issues, verbally and physically harassing trembling bread stick heroines that have rocks for brains, all in the name of love. Kate Hewitt’s Beneath the Veil of Paradise, however, is more of a tearjerker women’s fiction viciously condensed into the smaller word count of a Modern title and ruined by the formulaic necessities of that line.
Millie Lang is attempting to clear her mind in a much-needed vacation, but it isn’t easy as she’s still trying to move on from a trauma in her past. She encounters jovial, charming Chase Bryant that also has his reasons not to commit to a steady relationship. It may be love, until Chase reveals why he can’t be with her, ever, and I suppose the tears may fall if the author also hadn’t made it clear that Chase will be okay as this is, in the end, a romance story and so it’s always a happily ever after for everyone.
Yes, no one gets browbeaten or called a prostitute here, nor is there any loud screaming verbal abuse over whose baby the heroine is carrying. This is a romance between two characters that have dark hurts and demons.
Only, as I’ve said, this is a romance story so there’s no actual tension or suspense over whether these two will ever end up together. The author even makes it clear to me that the hero is going to have his happy ending with the heroine, so I don’t know. Maybe I should pretend to be alarmed and at the edge of my seat to humor the author?
The first half or so of this story can be a painful read because it’s a parade of tired, old Modern tropes being dragged out before me without much grace. Millie makes the whole idea of having a holiday fling so painful to follow, because she approaches the whole thing like some weird calculus in which letting a penis inside her hoo-wee has a probability of ending the world or something like that.
I believe the author is aware of this, considering how often Chase teases Millie to lighten up, and I also try to be patient with Millie given the baggage she is carrying around in her mind, but the whole thing still plays out like every other frigid Hilda that needs a hero’s pee-pee to reverse lobotomize her back into something resembling human—just like way too many other Modern stories out there.
However, the second half sees all the cards are laid out. Millie starts boo-hoo-hoo’ing because now that she has pee-pee, she decides she now wants the rest and Chase is all nope, he’s not in for the long haul because he’s actually a hero in a women’s fiction that somehow ends up in the Modern line. This is when I almost get the feels, because despite everything, a part of me is always a sucker for a good tearjerker in the making. Chase’s baggage is something that I can really relate to, so I am ready for a big, cathartic explosion of feels as this story wobbles dramatically to the finish line.
Oh wait, this is a romance story. I almost forget—that’s how sneaky smart the author gets in this second half of the story. In the end, it’s a happy ending for Chase and Millie, and a part of me will always wonder whether this happy ending cheapens the whole, actually pretty good, second half of the story. Then I remember how painfully mundane I find the first half, and just shrug the whole thing off.
I’m giving this one three oogies on the strength of the second half, but a part of me will always wish that this one had been in a different genre, so that I can get that explosive catharsis I am hoping to get out of it.
Still, Beneath the Veil of Paradise is definitely not the average rage-at-the-heroine story of the Modern line, so folks that come across this one in a used bookstore or an airport rack may want to, at the very least, flip through a few pages to find out whether they may like reading the rest of it. This is a Modern story, but it’s probably too good to be in that line.
