Right off the
bat, I just want to start off this review by saying that one of the main
reasons why I decided to read and review The Rebel by Joanne Rock is
because not only is the romance genre one of my favorite genres of books to
read, it’s also my favorite genre of books to write reviews for. Surprisingly,
I barely read or reviewed any books within the romance genre last year; so one
of my reading goals for 2020 is to not only read and review more books within
the romance genre in general, it’s also my goal to review Harlequin romance novels
for my blog on a hopefully relatively regular basis, and I ultimately decided to
kick off pursuing that particular goal of mine by reading and reviewing this
book.
(Check out my review for Andrea Laurence's Harlequin Desire novel, The CEO's Unexpected Child, here.)
Reading Harlequin
romance novels has honestly been one of my favorite guilty pleasures in life
ever since I was in the eighth or ninth grade, and I’m thirty-two years-old
now. While The Rebel is one Harlequin romance novel that I bought on a
whim when I was at Barnes & Noble one day in November; rather than being a
book that pre-ordered on Amazon like I essentially stockpile a bunch of
Harlequin’s new releases every month, I’m ultimately so, so, so glad that I
decided to buy this book, because reading it really reminded me of why I’ve
always loved Harlequin romance novels so much! Honestly, I found The Rebel
to be very satisfying and enjoyable for reasons beyond the obvious romance
aspect of the book. The plot of The Rebel and Rock’s writing for the
book featured several of my favorite storytelling tropes that I absolutely love,
aside from loving the romance genre; namely stories involving dysfunctional
families, and revenge plots. Considering the fact that The Rebel and
Harlequin Desire romance novels in general are fairly short, it’s very possible
that Rock could have easily written this book in such a way that the writing
came across as if she was trying to do too much in a short amount of time, page
wise. Instead, as weird as this might sound to some people, when I first
started reading The Rebel, I was repeatedly gushing over all of the
things that I was loving about the book in my head in a way that reminded me a
lot of Bill Hader playing the character, Stefon, on Saturday Night Live.
