Nameless

Nameless
by Claire Kent
Rating: 4 of 5 stars

My Review:
I picked up this book a while ago because I liked Claire Kent's other book, Escorted, so much. But the description for this one really didn't do anything for me so I put off reading it for a while. The description feels like pretty much any Harlequin romance – unexpected pregnancy, rich businessman, average any-girl. I kept picturing Diane Palmer's “The Case of the Mesmerizing Boss”. The description of the book is accurate, but wow was this book compelling.

Be prepared that this one is really long. Like, you really can't stay up late ONE night and read it. This one took me three or four nights of staying up moderately late to finish. There's no real external conflict in this book, so you'd think it would start to drag eventually, but it didn't at all. It was so fascinating that you just keep reading and reading to see what else these characters will do.

Erin was a little hard for me to decode. On the one hand, she's had a bad marriage experience so she's not into this whole idea of love and she really doesn't trust people/men. But she's got a really great family who cares about her and is totally great. She interacts with them in a healthy way and seems to get how to be in relationships with people. It's just the idea of romance that's messed up for her. And it's confusing because she acts in a perfectly healthy relationship way. She just can't seem to get through this idea of “Love” with a capital L. Caring, sex, dates, etc. is all fine but she nearly gets hives if you mention the L word or the R word.

Seth wasn't much better at relationships, but at least he had a better excuse. He's not working with simply one failed relationship, he's going off his whole formative years with no real caring. He just lost the only person who really tried to care about him and he feels like he failed at his one chance to love and be loved.

One of the most compelling things about this book is that we only get Erin's perspective. It's still written in third person, but we're never inside Seth's head. Erin is not hugely perceptive, so we see very little of Seth's reasons for doing stuff. There's the occasional mysterious eyebrow raise or half-smile, but we're left guessing a lot. I was unable to put the book down, often because I just wanted to see what was going to happen with the mystery of Seth.

There were a couple things I felt were eluded to that never panned out into anything. I totally thought there was going to be some significance to Erin and Seth's first sexual encounter resulting in a pregnancy. I really thought it was going to turn out that Seth got Erin pregnant on purpose and/or purposely hid a condom failure or something in order to give fate a hand in providing him with a relationship. I mean, there were some (I thought) significant actions that happened during their first encounter that would have had some explanation later, but it didn't turn out to be part of the story line.

The sex scenes were wonderful and raw and really awkward. This was not a book with ephemeral, cloud-nine sort-of sex scenes. Everyone was satisfied, but it was gritty and messy and rather ungainly. I liked it and it fit the flow of the book. Erin was really self-assured when it came to sex and I liked how she was unashamed of her own sexuality. Seth was considered to be slightly in the sex-god category, but he felt less sure of himself during the sex scenes. He stayed back most of the time and seemingly trusted that Erin would say if she wanted something from him. It's not very often I see that in romance novels, but it was a nice change even if it did mean that most of the time Seth was not trying to attract Erin sexually.

I was surprised and pleased that Ms. Kent was able to keep the angst and tension so high throughout this whole book. I really thought I would burn out halfway through. I can't say that there was some huge problem these two were battling besides their own inability to trust and give themselves permission to accept love, but it also didn't feel like they just spun in circles the who time. It was all so fascinating and heartbreaking. I ended up crying a couple times. These two characters were large enough for me to be completely sucked in.

I don't think this is a book I could read everyday. By the second or third day of reading, I was feeling rather depressed for these two and it was hard to pull my own emotions out of the book. It's the mark of a well-written book when that happens, but it is difficult to interact in the real-world without those emotions spilling over. This isn't a happy-escape book, but it is it's own wonderful world. I will definitely keep looking for more books by this author.