Their Secret Child

Category romances are my guilty pleasures since high schoool. They are like popcorn at the movies (eaten without much thought) or soda with my fast food meal (hey, its with the meal!). But every now and again, I come across a category romance title that I know will stick with me long after the month is gone. So it is with Their Secret Child by Mary J. Forbes. The story is simple: A teenage girl gets pregnant, her boyfriend appears to have ditched her, she has the baby and gives it up for adoption. The boyfriend comes back to town and they reunite. The story has been done many times over, but what sets this novella apart is the low-key approach it uses to tell the story. Skip Dalton did leave his teenage girlfriend. He was weak at 19. He made a difficult choice. Addie Wilson has the baby and gives it up for adoption as she really has no other choice. There is no excusing of their pasts nor of the people who encouraged them to make those decisions. But there are second chances and when the second chance comes along, it is very refreshing to see how each character reacts. I very much enjoyed the realism of the reactions and the consistency of what we know of the characters. Addie is characterized as a smart and thoughtful woman so when she gets her chance to assess the past and the present, she does so in a smart and thoughtful way. The same goes for Skip. He knows he's made mistakes but he is, at the core, an upstanding guy and he follows through with that behavior. The minor characters also serve their purpose in interesting and memorable ways and it helps to set the tone that while this is a romance between a man and a woman, the man and woman are not just tied to each other but to others as well. Overall, an excellent book and a keeper for my shelf.