Improper English

Author: Katie MacAlister
Published: March 2003 (Love Spell)
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Quote of Choice: Lady Rowena gasped in horror at the sight of Lord Raoul's majestic purple-helmeted warrior of love.

Alexandra "Alix" Freemar is in London writing the perfect romance novel. She has the setting and the history, but her actual manuscript for Ravening Raptures is awful in the cheesiest way (as seen in the above quote). Each of the chapters begins with an excerpt from Alix's work-in-progress and it's quite hilarious, in a cringing kind of way. She is distracted from her writing by her neighbor, the devilishly handsome Detective Inspector Alexander Black (yes, our main characters' names are almost exactly the same: Alix and Alex), a man who takes his job very seriously, but is looking for a serious relationship... the woman of his dreams (yeah, if only such men existed).

Of course, there are obstacles to their love. Alix thinks that everything that happens to her is bound to fail and sets herself up for failure and her failures become self-fulfilling prophecies. Alex is very serious about his detective work and is a bit insensitive at times. He's not very good at communicating, but seriously, I still don't think there's very much wrong with Alex. He wanted to commit to Alix, but she was the one who pulled away and broke his heart. Granted, she had good reason for doing so - she wanted to learn how to stand up for herself and stick through to the end of her novel, and actually turned out a good one in the end.

This is one of Katie MacAlister's earlier novels in the contemporary romance categories and you can see how she has only gotten better with time. In her later novels, there's usually an equal balance between the man and woman in terms of relationship strife, but Alix was the 95% responsible for the problems in her relationship with Alex.

It was good, and I had a lot of giggles over the awful romance excerpts. I found that the "fake" manuscript was funnier than a lot of the actual characters in Improper English. At one point, Alix scraps Ravening Raptures to begin writing a medieval romance that included a stubborn knight (modeled after Alex) who has a blind horse, therefore leading his army off in a zigzag fashion.

I'm glad Katie MacAlister appears to get better with time with her standalone novels. The jury's still out on her vampire novels, but I've got A Girl's Guide to Vampires from the library, so we'll see if her oldest vamp novel is better than her newest one, Even Vampires Get the Blues, which I have already reviewed.