Jude Deveraux's A Knight in Shining Armor
The premise of this book is a great nod to and twist on romance: A woman in despair wishes for a knight in shining armor... and gets one, in the form of a sixteenth-century time-traveler. Deveraux uses great aspects of both historical and contemporary romance to create tension between the characters: a woman's contemporary expectations of a man matched with a man's dated views of a woman and his role in general. Both characters are both equally surprised and comically skeptical of the other's accounts, interpretations and reaction to this unbelievable situation.
And that's what makes this book worth reading. The scene where our heroine, Douglass, tries to outfit hero Nicholas in suitable, modern clothes is laugh-aloud funny. As I've seen before, Deveraux is good at keeping up the plot tension, and, unlike most romances, I didn't guess the story would end the way it did. The book was written in 1989, and since then, the romance genre has taken a different turn, making the heroine's worries and actions sound annoyingly dated at times. Still, the book is fun enough to overlook this piece and enjoy.
