My Heart Will Find You

My Heart Will Find You is one of Jude Deveraux’s romances, working in the kind of emotionally rich territory she has built her career around. Deveraux made her name in historical romance with a catalogue of dozens of novels going back to the 1970s, and her late career has included shifts into contemporary romance, mystery, and time travel inflected work that combines elements from across her earlier subgenres.

The my heart will find you premise hints at the kind of soulmate or destined love story that Deveraux has written across multiple settings. Her readers know the shape. Two characters whose connection runs deeper than circumstances would suggest, who find each other across obstacles that should have kept them apart, and who slowly figure out that what they have between them is the kind of love that defines a life. Deveraux handles this kind of premise with the practiced confidence of a writer who has been giving her readers what they want for almost five decades.

What distinguishes Deveraux from a lot of her contemporaries is the warmth of her supporting casts and the willingness of her plots to take real time to develop the central relationship. Her novels are not the shortest in romance, and the patience she takes with her characters’ emotional growth is part of why her readers return. The settings, whether historical or contemporary, are rendered with care, and the moral seriousness of her characters’ choices gives the romances weight beyond just the chemistry.

For longtime Jude Deveraux fans, My Heart Will Find You delivers what her readers expect from her. For new readers curious about her work, the catalogue is enormous and most of her standalones can be read in any order, with the exception of the connected series like the Velvet trilogy or the Taggert family books which work best in sequence. Readers who enjoy Julie Garwood, Johanna Lindsey, or the historical end of Lisa Kleypas’s catalogue will find similar pleasure in Deveraux’s work.