The Homing Instinct [Paperback]

ISBN 0373087470 - Just when I feel that my lifelong certainty that romance novels are all stupid, ridiculous, vapid wastes of trees is about to be proven true, there always seems to be that one author who falls into my lap to disabuse me of that notion. This time it was Dixie Browning.

Chloe Palmer, running away from what remains of her life, finds herself on the road, playing a game. She tells herself a story about the people she sees and this story, this time, involves a Ukrainian man on a secret mission regarding a soybean fertilizer formula. Moments later, she's driven her car into a tree. Luckily for her, her fertilizer spy is actually Quint Stevens, a very nice man who just loves to bring home strays. Chloe is close enough to a stray and Quint whisks her away to his castle... which is really a small house and quite a pigsty.

Quint is engaged to another woman, a business arrangement more than anything else, but Chloe doesn't know that. What she knows is that she's growing more attached to Quint every day and if she doesn't get her car back soon, she may never leave. To repay his kindness, she takes on the tremendous task of turning his bachelor pad into a home that is ready to welcome his new bride - and Chloe definitely doesn't want to be there to witness that!

In the same 180-odd pages that all romances fill, Browning somehow manages to make the story much more believable. The characters don't meet and fall head over heels in love in the first day, which is a nice twist, and the sex scenes aren't thrown in just to brighten the reader's day. My endless search for the most ridiculous line ever discovered in a romance novel hits a brick wall, but I find Browning is actually a funny woman (ie. "... beaming at her as if she were a big chocolate bunny he'd found in his Easter basket.")

Still, The Homing Instinct isn't without flaws. Browning seems to speak another language entirely a couple times, never bothering to explain the meaning of phrases or words that defy Webster's. "Ginny...laughed and told her not to be a 'noggin'." - a head? Don't be a head? And "...had taken him a good whack of time..." which, I find, does have a fitting definition but seems out of place in the book. Picky, sure, but in a book that otherwise surpasses almost every hope I'd ever held for the romance genre, I'd like to understand what I'm reading. Quick read, unexpected fun, well worth the small investment of time.

- AnnaLovesBooks

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