See Jane Date...or more appropriately See Harlequin Grow Up.

I have to admit that I was a wee bit leery when Harlequin announced their Red Dress Ink line. I spent a good deal of my allowance and teen years reading Harlequins, then Silhouettes when that line was launched. I came back to Silhouette about three years ago and found that not much had changed.

The books were a bit more modern, but the characters were still stuck in the same formula. Boy meets girl, lots of tension, lots of contrived plots that keep them apart, then true love conquers all. Now and then I'd come across a gem, but for the most part it seemed as though the names of the characters and locations were changed, but little else in the stories was different. It seemed even the sex was the same.

Then Harlequin launched their new line for the new millennium, the Red Dress Ink imprint. I figured it couldn't be too different from their other lines, unless there was more sex. I wasn't all that interested in reading any of the books in this line until Harlequin offered a free copy of the first book to their online members.

Was I ever wrong. About the sex, about the formula, about everything.

Melissa Senate's style is so vastly different from what I've become accustomed to with Harlequin that I had to check the book's cover a couple of times to make sure I was reading a Harlequin imprint.

Refreshing comes to mind, as does sexy, realistic, and modern. I loved Senate's main character, Jane Gregg. She was a breath of fresh air after three years of Texas cowgirls, single mothers, and women in danger.

Jane is twenty-nine, single, and besieged by well-meaning relatives and friends who have turned Jane's cousin's upcoming marriage into a mission to save Jane from spinsterhood. Jane buys into the notion that she needs rescuing, albeit not by her relatives or friends. She's confident in her abilities to save herself and find her own man.

The book is smart, funny, and doesn't relegate Jane to the role of the goody-two-shoes woman who simply needs a good man to make her life complete. Jane's got a lot going for her as an assistant editor for a second rate publishing house. She's living the single life, has good friends, and while she's not where she wants to be in her career she's got a plan to get there.

The unexpected yet pleasant surprise came midway through this book. The book wasn't focused on The Man. I'm talking about The Man that is supposed to turn Jane's life around, magically transform her from a shrinking wallflower into the belle of the ball. The Man who sweeps her off her feet and who she simply can't live without. The Man who fixes everything that's wrong in Jane's life and leaves her wondering what she ever did without Him.

The book focused on Jane. She made mistakes, had a deplorable attitude at times, smoked like a fiend, measured her worth by whether or not she was involved with a man, and mostly spent two months looking for a steady boyfriend so she wouldn't have to go to her cousin's wedding alone.

Jane met a lot of frogs along the way. At one point I wanted to strangle her; some of the men she went on blind dates with were jerks I'd have walked away from within ten minutes. What Senate gave me was a character who learned to stand up for herself. She gave me an imperfect Jane who had to discover, just as we all have or should do, that a man doesn't make us any more or any less worthy of respect, nor should a man be a status symbol.

Before the story ends Jane makes a transformation that comes from inner knowledge, not from a temporary bandage she's long thought only a man could give her. Jane's story isn't about finding Mr. Right, but becoming Ms. Right, which was just fine with me.

If you're hoping for a sexy romp a la Sex and The City style you won't get it with this book. If you want a story about a smart, sexy, woman who wins more than love in the end, then read See Jane Date.

The only nit I did have with this book was what I thought to be excessive product placement and name-dropping. Senate took the easy way out descriptively by comparing all her characters to well-known actors. One man looked like Thomas Gibson, another like George Clooney, and then there was Nicole Kidman. Are there that many celebrity lookalikes in one person's life?