Worth Any Price

It's probably a mistake to read fanciful romance at the same time as reading Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score because I have in my head detailed descriptions of the myriad ways humans react to complex trauma, and Kleypas' heroes don't react consistent with the detailed and gripping exampels in van der Kolk's influential text. They bought and paid for their HEA far too easily and were messed up far too little for the trauma Kleypas describes.

However, they did feel like real humans with some real reactions set in a well-researched world written by a skillful author–and maybe the genre isn't really about realistic trauma reactions, and ploddingly working through the years and years of re-writing brain and body reactions to overcome trauma before a stable, loving, mutual relationship can be earned and believable? There definitely were some true-to-life trauma reactions–the hero's trouble sleeping and violent nightmares, the heroine's reaction to teenaged abuse of freezing (one of the fight/flight/freeze reactions to danger).

I'll keep reading Kleypas, whom I've enjoyed in the past...but maybe I should read non-fiction alongside van der Kolk for a while unless I wish to be unduly critical of the whole fantasy world of a romance script.
3.5 stars