RITA Reader Challenge Review

Blueprint for a Kiss by Nancy Warren

This RITA® Reader Challenge 2015 review was written by Sybylla. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Short Contemporary Romance category.

The summary:

You can design a perfect life, then a woman comes along and messes it all up!

Prescott Chance is the go-to architect for the wealthy and famous, which has made him more wealthy and famous than he’s ever wanted to be. He turns down more commissions than he accepts and is extremely private. Holly Legere is barely making ends meet between rent and student loans. As an assistant to Alistair Rupert, the notoriously difficult industrialist, she works night and day for slave wages, hanging on in hopes of a promised promotion in his huge organization. When Alistair Rupert’s wife decides she wants a Prescott Chance designed house, and Prescott turns her down, it’s Holly’s job to make the choosy architect change his mind. And Holly is a very determined woman. In this modern romantic comedy, she’ll go to any lengths to get him to design her boss a house, including pulling in his huge family for support. This is the third book in the Take a Chance series, though the books stand alone.

Here is Sybylla's review:

I knew nothing about this book going into it. My selection process was, “Let’s try something new, oh, I think I might’ve read and liked something by Nancy Warren five years ago, let me give that one a try.” I didn’t even read the cover copy beforehand. That can be good, but in this case, it would have been better for me to know what I was going to read.

The book opens with a flustered Holly Legere “as you know, Bob”-ing herself about “the famous architect Prescott Chance” and “her boss, the media mogul Alistair Rupert.” Alistair and his wife want Prescott to design them a home, and Holly has to convince him to do it. Naturally, she’s running late, things go predictably wrong, her job’s on the line, etc. Honestly, the set-up soured me on the book a bit. That’s a reflection of my own biases: some people love stories with economic power disparities and desperation, but more often than not I find my skin itching when I read them.

This aspect was handled fairly lightly: Holly says she feels desperate, but she has such an optimistic determination that things will work out that her circumstances don’t ever seem all that dire, and I was able to push my discomfort with this part of the story aside.

The overall plot is perfectly serviceable, but each element slots neatly into the story from the moment it is introduced, which makes the journey less one of “how will they get there?” and more “how much time will be spent at each stop along the way?” In this case, thanks to my truly random knowledge of Russian superstitions, I knew not only the ultimate resolution of the house issue but the plot device that would precipitate it. (And why is it that I can’t remember if I closed the garage door after I leave the house, but I have no problem recalling details of a conversation with my Russian host family from a student-exchange trip in 1991?) The characters, though, are great, so I’m going to concentrate my review on them.

Holly is hyper-organized, hyper-competent, stressed about her job, and possessed of a wholly wonderful ability to keep a sense of perspective about everything and everyone, including herself. When she winds up staying with Prescott’s enormous family for a weekend, she compares them to her own family, feels “as though she’d stepped out of a cold room and into the sun,” and realizes (“as she scoop[s] up another flavorful bite of lasagna”) that this is a “bad metaphor. Corny and self involved.” That tendency to recognize her own self-dramatization and skewer it delighted me.

She is also able to keep that sense of perspective about Prescott and her relationship with him, which means that when things happen that could cause conflict in another story, she can take an emotional step back and actually have a conversation about it. Communication between characters makes me very happy, as does the acknowledgment that no one can “fix” another person:

“She could fight a lot of things. She was a resourceful woman. But she didn’t think she could fix what ailed Prescott, not if he wouldn’t face up to his problems. Together, she thought they could fight his demons into submission, but all on her own? She didn’t have a chance.”

Prescott is less entirely appealing, as he has given in to the temptation to take himself too seriously. Before he can decide whether to design a building in any particular location, he “need[s] to feel a site and let it communicate with” him, and if he can’t see the proper building there, he won’t design a thing; there’s a lot of stuff along these lines, and I rolled my eyes every time it came up. Apparently he’s been this finicky ever since the very start of his career, not just after he achieved prominence in the field, and I couldn’t suspend my disbelief enough to accept his success: architecture is a business as well as an art, and insisting on following only your own vision at all times is a fast track to principled unemployment.

(Tangent: could we please, please, please get rid of the “person has deep, unspoken connection to nature, therefore person must be partly Native American” trope?)

He is obliged to return to his family home at one point to take part in the preparations for his brother’s wedding. The entire time, he complains at every opportunity about having to wear a rental tux, and generally reveals himself to have some very unattractive tendencies toward snobbery. His family, however, points this out to him over and over again, shaming him for thinking about himself and not the groom-to-be’s wishes or his youngest brother’s economic straits. (The resolution of this subplot is entirely delightful, and Prescott’s ability to see his own bad attitude for what it is and to laugh at himself afterward went a long way toward endearing him to me.)

When Prescott makes mistakes in his dealings with Holly, either from not communicating when he should or from assuming things he shouldn’t, he not only sees his mistakes as mistakes, but he owns them and apologizes for or explains them as appropriate. This was a relationship between adults who know how to adult, and I thoroughly enjoyed that.

Overall, I liked the development of the relationship. When conflict inevitably arises, it feels natural. The characters as they have been written of course would act in the manner they do, and would make these assumptions and decisions as a result. They don’t feel like they’re being forced into contortions by the plot. The story is light and enjoyable with a minimum of angst. The characters are well-drawn and I liked spending time with them. The plot is workmanlike, but it does what it needs to do. I don’t anticipate ever rereading the book, but I’m not sorry to have read it once.

This book is available from:
  • Available at Amazon
  • Order this book from apple books

  • Order this book from Kobo
  • Order this book from Google Play
  • Order this book from Audible

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks!

Blueprint for a Kiss by Nancy Warren

View Book Info Page

Add Your Comment

Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

*


This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

↑ Back to Top