Stinky Old Romances

A few months ago I got on a romance reading kick.  Being a cheapskate, I decided to buy romances in bulk off of Ebay.  Thus began my foray into cigarette-scented romances from the nineties. 

I went to high school in the nineties, and I was reading romances back then too, so I was very surprised to discover how dated they were.  It’s made me much more aware of how important it is that the writer of a romance novel captures the current socio-political situation between men and women perfectly, or else it feels out of step with the times.  I’m finding it very interesting how many mixed messages these romances from the nineties are, and it kind of helps me understand a little bit more of how we got where we are today.  Men and women, I mean.  These books pretty much all have strong, feminist women, often telling the men what they’re doing wrong, and insisting on their rights.  However, for the most part, it doesn’t seem like the men have done anything wrong to deserve all this ranting and raving.  At least, not the ones I’ve read so far.  Of course, that is the hard part about writing romance novels in the first place – your characters need to have fights, but neither of them can be very wrong or the readers won’t like them!  It seems a lot of writers can’t figure it out and end up writing nice guys, and women who treat them like they’re jerks.  It makes for a very schizophrenic reading experience.

Retro Review: A Kiss in the Dark

Brittany Astor wanted three things: to be beautiful, to marry Ethan Moss and to own a cat.  The rare, expensive Bengal kitten was a possibility. 

Yeah, it’s that bad.

A Kiss in the Dark, by Tiffany White*, circa 1994, is a charmingly sweet romance about a crazed, psychotic stalker lovelorn heroine who seizes upon the opportunity to make her victim Prince Charming fall in love with her when he is temporarily blinded by a polo accident.  Brittany Astor had been in love with Ethan Moss since she was a teenager, always just a few steps outside of his circle of friends.  In other words, despite the fact she had been obsessively showing up at every event that she knew he would be attending, for ten years, Ethan doesn’t know Brittany exists.  When she heard he was to be married several years ago, she tricked his bride into not showing up for the wedding.  Because Brittany loves him.  And that’s what you do when you love somebody, right?  You save him from marrying the person he wants want to marry, because he should be marrying you instead.  Right? Of course you do.  It’s Chapter 3 in the Stalker Playbook.

Ms. Psycho, who is a successful book editor, responds to an ad requesting someone with a good reading voice.  She responds to the ad because she wants some extra spending money to buy a ‘designer cat.’  I did not make that up.  An excerpt from page 10: “If she got the reading job, she could afford the twelve hundred dollars to buy the designer cat.  Then she’d have some company.”  It turns out that despite the fact that the population of Manhattan in 1994 included well over one million people, the person she ends up reading for is none other than the man she’s been obsessing about for her whole ridiculous life!  OMG!  What luck!

But it seems they were made for each other after all.  An excerpt from page 28, their first meeting:  Ethan: “Damn!  I would rather be dead than such a useless wretch.  I can’t bear the dark prison I’ve been thrust in.  I can’t!” 

I can almost feel my hand moving up to my brow to re-enact the pain.  In any case, Brittany’s heart is torn in two with pity compassion for her victim beloved, and she nurses him back into health, teaching him how to live as a blind man and still have pride.  Of course, his blindness eventually goes away, because, like, blindness is gross, right?  Heaven forbid a hero should be blind permanently!  Apparently the author never read Jane Eyre. 

Anywho, Ethan finds out Brittany is that girl who used to follow him around, and isn’t bothered by it.  He then finds out she is the reason he was left standing at the altar on what was supposed to be the happiest day of his life.  He gets mad for roughly five minutes.  In book time, not real time.  Real time it was about 15-30 seconds, depending on how fast you read.  Then Ethan admits that she probably did him a favor by destroying his marriage, and then they live happily ever after.  And she gets a cat.

Retro Score: 4/10
Feminist Shame Score: 8/10

*While looking for A Kiss in the Dark to link to on Amazon, I ran into about eight million novels under the same title, one of which is by the fabulous Lauren Henderson!  Whoop!  I am a huge fan of the Sam Jones series that starts with Black Rubber Dress (in the genre of “tart noir” – a spunky little mystery genre spinoff of chick lit), so I will probably take a chance on this Scarlett Wakefield series, even though it’s apparently a YA series.  I’m willing to chance on it – I’m so excited to see one of my favorite authors has a series I didn’t know about!

Book Review: Seized by the Sheik

After one too many death threats, Sheik Efraim Aziz was ready to end his business in Wyoming and head home. But one last horse ride had kept him in town a little longer. Callie McGuire had followed him on his private journey, leaving him mesmerized by her beauty and just enough time to save her from the gunshots they both barely escaped. Now, figuring out who was targeting them would keep him glued to her side no matter how much she claimed she didn’t need his protection. With their list of suspects growing—along with their attraction—Efraim found working with Callie an unexpected pleasure. Suddenly, despite the danger surrounding them, Wyoming seemed so much more appealing….

Harlequin Intrigue brings us another from the Cowboys Royale series, where a group of Middle Eastern royals from different countries are all gathered together in Wyoming to negotiate some sort of treaty.  The other novel in this series is Brandishing a Crown, by Rita Herron, which I have yet to read. 

The book starts out a little fast-paced.  In fact, because its part of a series and it appears another book came first, it seemed as if the book started halfway through the story.  I could have used a little more of the overarching story to be able to figure out what was going on.  The novel spent a lot of time dealing with the anti-Arab bigotry of friends and relatives, which was a relevent topic that I appreciated, although the relentless xenophobia of the locals was a little upsetting to consider – I like to think that people are more open-minded than that, although I know that regionally, a lot of that anti-Arab suspicion does exist.  However upsetting, Ann Voss Peterson’s depictions of the suspicions of the locals did ring true.  Also, Efraim and Callie didn’t really didn’t grow on me, so I had a hard time connecting with their story.  Maybe it was because they seemed to spend so much of their time running or doing amateur sleuthing, but I just never really saw them as a couple.  For an example, it’s only been four days since I read this book, and yet I had a hard time remembering if Efraim and Callie had ever had sex.  It’s a Harlequin, so of course they did, but I actually had to pick up the book and page through it to find out when!  When I did read back over the sex scene, it was appropriately steamy, so it’s really just a matter of me not connecting with the characters. 

All in all, I think I’m going to stop reading these series romances, at least for a bit.  I think my reviews are focusing too much on the inherent problems with the series concept, instead of on the way the author deals with that problem, and I don’t want to be too hard on authors, especially when they’re just doing what their publisher told them.  I actually think the series novel is a pretty tough assignment and underneath my complaints, I’m impressed at Ann Voss Peterson’s ability to pull it off.  So, I’m going to take a break and cover some standalone romances for a while instead.  Happy reading!

Book Review: Guns and the Girl Next Door

Agent Holden Price didn’t have to go far to find his next case—it crashed right into his living room! Not only had the beautiful blonde lost control of her car, but if she was telling the truth, someone was also trying to kill her. As a recovery agent, he had an obligation to investigate. And he couldn’t deny that Mia Landers interested him more than she should.

Nothing made sense to Mia—especially not the attempt on her life.  All she could do was trust Holden, the tall, dark and devastating agent who discovered that he and Mia had a common enemy…and a fierce attraction.  But in order to act on it, they’d first have to come face-to-face with their darkest fears and a deadly revelation that might put their newfound love on the line. 

Guns and the Girl Next Door, by HelenKay Dimon is a Harlequin Intrigue contemporary romance mystery.  It is a part of the Mystery Men series, this being the first of that set that I’ve read.  HelenKay Dimon has written at least one other book in that series, Gunning for Trouble.  Because it’s a part of a larger set of books, there are a lot of details left out about the larger mystery that the “mystery men” are trying to solve.  The reader gets to see Mia’s portion of the mystery solved, but there are a lot of questions left over.  Also, there was a lot of description of Agent Holden Price’s friends, i.e. the other agents, presumbably because each of them has their own love story that dovetails into the larger story, but I felt that having so many characters distracted from the time given to Mia and Holden and their love story.  That said, I really enjoyed this book.  The action was intense and interesting, the descriptions lively and the dialogue humorous and believable.  Although there was a lot of shooting and explosions, things calmed down frequently enough that Mia and Holden were able to spend some time together and move forward in their relationship, although they didn’t get the opportunity to talk about anything more long-term than their present life or death situation.  Mia is snarky and smart, and Holden is a skilled military operative with a secret weakness that only Mia knows about and can help him sort out. 

I will definitely look up HelenKay Dimon’s other books – my main complaint about this one was that the characters just didn’t have enough quality time together, so when they invariably fall in love at the end, it seems a little too early to make a lifechoice like that.  However, given the constraints of belonging to not just a series but one with an overarching plot that takes up a lot of page space, I actually think she did a great job with this and I’m looking forward to reading some of her standalone books.

Book Review: Montana Royalty

It was cold, they were trapped…and Rory Buchanan had made love to a perfect stranger and enjoyed it way more than she should have.  But how was a regular girl from Whitehorse supposed to know the royal protocol for dealing with a fantasy one-night stand?

It soon became clear that Devlin Barrow would slay any dragon for local girl Rory — a court full of nobles had even descended on the small Montana community.  But this relationship was no fairy tale.  Because someone was willing to kill to keep Devlin’s secret past from toppling the royal hierarchy.  And with Rory pregnant with his surprise heir, her life was at stake as well.

This contemporary romance novel by the talented B.J. Daniels is being offered as a freebie in bookstores right now (or rather, the price on the one I picked up at Borders is $.01, which should fit nicely into everyone’s book budget this month).  I was unable to find any pictures of the current cover, the picture attached here is of the 2008 cover.  The current cover is, for lack of a better term, a crotch shot.  “This one’s for the ladies.”  It’s a guy in jeans and a dress shirt but only from navel to knee, mostly focused on his big, gold belt buckle.  I sure wish I could find a picture – it makes me laugh.  [Edit: I found it!]

Montana Royalty, by B.J. Daniels is an offerng from Harlequin Intrigue which attempts to bridge the divide between historical romances and contemporary romances by importing a European castle, complete with its princess, prince, ladies in waiting, and full stable with assorted stablehands and groomsmen to rural Montana.  Rory Buchanan is a local rancher, struggling to maintain her family’s ancestral ranch while all the local ranches have sold out to the princess, who has been buying up all the property to build her little Montana empire.  Rory sneaks onto the royal property to scout out the competition and gets caught in a snowstorm with a hypothermic and ruggedly handsome man who she assumes is a royal groomsman.  They spend the night in a line cabin, she warms him up, they make passionate love, and she slips away before the sun is up.  The reader then learns that poor Devlin Barrow was drugged and doesn’t remember the previous night at all and is, in fact, a royal groomsman.  Which was odd, I thought, since it seemed like the author was creating a big setup to reveal that he was a prince.  And then he’s not.   

Maybe I’m the wrong audience, since I’m not a Regency fan, but I found the setup to be ridiculously farfetched.  I suppose I would have been willing to accept the royalty aspect if it had furthered the romance between the two main characters, but Devlin being stuck on the grounds of the castle, catering to the prince and princess’s whims while trying to solve his mystery, and Rory being on her own ranch and not knowing a thing about his mystery or being asked to help him in any way meant that the two of them barely had any scenes together until she created some harebrained scheme to break into the castle for something she probably didn’t even need in the first place.  No spoilers, I promise.  I actually think B.J. Daniels is a good writer, but the pomp and circumstance of the royalty and the evil machinations of the princess, told from the princess’s point of view, did not even slightly advance the main story, i.e. the romance between Rory and Devlin.  I am too lazy to do a page count, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the B-story (mad-for-power princess wants a baby) and the C-story (Rory’s crazy deputy stalker) have more pages than Rory and Devlin do.  And the C-story isn’t a spoiler either, I promise – that mystery is revealed to the audience on page one!!   So much for Intrigue. 

NOTE: As I am in the process of writing our first romance novel, I obviously assume that I will make none of the mistakes made by the highly respected authors that I am reviewing.  The craft that has taken them years to stretch and hone and perfect will take me no more than three months.  (Dear Trolls: This is sarcasm, used to imply that I am fully aware of how difficult it is to write a good novel.)