That being said, I wish this trilogy had been better. It had a wonderful premise, a strong set of characters and a lovely touch of my favorite hobby — genealogy. (Though I wish Ms. Roberts would do some research of her own — this is not the first book in which genealogy is used. In Black Rose a few years ago, she referenced the 1890 census which…doesn’t exist. It was burned in a fire and very few fragments are to be found — none of which include the portion she used. It’s a small thing but it’s something I always stumble on when I reread.) The elements were there, so why didn’t it work?

The element of surprise was gone — you knew from the moment Cybil entered the picture in Book #1 that the pairings were set in stone and there was little suspense there. When it comes to traditional romance novels, there is very little suspense. There will very nearly always be a happy ending and your characters are together. It’s the journey that keeps it satisfying, but when I know in Book #1 that the next two books will be Fox/Layla and Cybil/Gage, it left me with a little less eagerness to read it. Though this also happened in her In the Garden — I knew it would be Roz/Mitch and then Hayley/Harper, but it didn’t matter because I loved those characters so much by the end of the first book (even Mitch, who we barely knew) I wanted to see how they fell in love. In this set…I really couldn’t bring myself to care about Cybil and Gage because…I just didn’t see the chemistry between them. They were the odd people out — but I’ll get to Book #3.

So Book #1 started off with great promise. A wonderful brash heroine who obsessed about her weight and a sweet hometown boy with a great dog. They were perfect for each from the first moment and I very much enjoyed Quinn and Cal for much of the first book. Of course, their romance wasn’t the only plot. The set up of the Big Bad, which I didn’t find all that distracting. Until Roberts began to gather the main six characters and group conversations began. And continued through the next book. And the third. My God. I barely got through them with any sort of concentration on the first read and I now skip them when I reread because they just drag and I can feel my eyes start to roll back in my head.

There are some great suspenseful moments in the first entry — the Valentine’s Dance and the blizzard with Lump, and without those dreadful group moments, I probably would have rated it an A. The only reason The Hollow rates so highly with me is because I fell utterly in love with Fox O’Dell, the male lead and I found his romance with Layla unforced and very natural. It was sweet and he was utterly charming. The side plot with his sister Sage and her partner, Paula, was also wonderful and I liked seeing Roberts explore that connection, even if only briefly. David was one of my absolutely favorite characters from In the Garden, so I’m glad he wasn’t an aberration. There were more group moments in this second book, of course, and those moments dragged for me but unlike Blood Brothers, it never dragged me away from the center story — Fox and Layla.

So with those two books, I was interested in how the story would end. Where the Big Bad would go, and how Cybil and Gage were going to end up together and then as I got into the book, I found that I didn’t care. The group conversations were even more annoying. The romance was unbelievably forced and while I didn’t find the triple pregnancies very odd I found Cybil’s reaction incredibly annoying. Roberts is not an author who uses pregnancy as a device very often so it doesn’t bother me when she did the triple whammy. It made some sense, actually, and it added to the story. It just annoyed me that it was handled so…I’m not even sure how to describe it. The Pagan Stone is the only one of the three that I didn’t go back and read a second time, so perhaps my opinion will improve then.

I enjoy the trilogies — because I like to see old characters return and update, but I like it best when her trilogies work over time. The last two were compacted in a matter of months and it showed. The Circle trilogy handled it somewhat better. The first two romances were somewhat weak but the story felt somewhat strong and the third, Valley of Silence was so wonderful, it made up for them. I very much enjoyed the Three Sisters, which took place over a year and gave you a chance to see Ripley, Nell and Mia change over the books. It made that final book so much more pleasurable to read because the connection felt so real. In the Garden worked the same way for me. I adored Harper and Hayley so much that I was very eager to see their story conclude and it’s one of my favorite novels.

In the end, while this trilogy is better than a lot of romance novels I have read in my life (I can think of a few Johanna Lindsey books I’d like to clear from my mind in particular), it’s nowhere near the quality that I have read from Nora Roberts. It’s an enjoyable read, which is why I’ve rated it somewhat high, but it could have been so much more and that was the disappointment.