Overall Grade: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Tropes: arranged marriage; hate to love; side of romantic suspense; grump/sunshine
Winter Renshaw’s gold lies in the way she crafts her MMCs. There is a common thread to them: alpha in nature, closed off, and stubborn. It takes the tenacity of the FMC to blow through their tremendous emotional walls. Over and over again, Renshaw makes us fall in love with this character construction, no matter the plot points. This is also the case in her newest story, Hate Mail. Slade and Campbell’s parents are life-long friends who decide early in their children’s lives to arrange a marriage, effectively joining their powerful families. Their parents also encourage them early on to become pen pals, and it becomes clear from the start that the two don’t want what their parents have decided.
The first half of Renshaw’s Hate Mail is compelling. Slade is Renshaw’s typical hero, and while Campbell hopes to forgo the arranged marriage, she strives to understand and connect with Slade, who makes that task almost impossible. This first half, their strife and Campbell’s pain, is where the angst of her story resides and where she pulls her reader into Hate Notes.
Unfortunately, the second half falls apart a bit. For one, Slade spends two-thirds of the story pushing Campbell away, and he makes a sudden 180 with very little provocation. His acceptance of Campbell comes too easily given the strife of the first portion of Renshaw’s book. It feels like “a miss” of sorts. Secondly, there are two situations that arise for Slade in the story, one resolves too easily and the second feels thrown into the story. Had I read a draft of Hate Mail, I would recommend removing the second and developing the emotional turmoil of the first so we can better empathize with Slade.
The ending for Slade and Campbell in Hate Mail is sweet, and they earn their happy ending. It’s the latter third of this book that simply needed a bit more work, save for the epilogues.
In love and romance,
Professor A
Professor Romance 