Leisure, $5.50, ISBN 0-8439-4930-9
Historical Romance, 2001
Apache Destiny is crammed with annoying preaching and worst of all, it has so much potential. Sigh.
Take heroine Abby Madison, for example. She’s a widow, but she has a great marriage with her late hubby. She even missed the sex! Wow. She has a son and she and son live in the Flying M Ranch. Her husband was killed by Apaches, so when Apache hero Chino Whitehorse wanders into her ranch one day…
Well, nothing happens. No conflict here, believe it or not. Then again, Abby is a modern-day Ms Schoolgirl Playing Adult. For example, she claims to hate Apaches, but when her son adopts her ways, she reprimands him, because, well, it’s not nice to be biased, you know? Excuse me? Is this woman even human? That’s the way this story goes. Abby says something not nice about Chino’s people, Chino blusters in self-indignation, and Abby immediately apologizes. Because it’s not nice to be biased, you know.
I’d think a woman whose beloved husband was brutally murdered by Apache warriors would not know the concept of the word “bias”, much less “political correctness”.
At the same time, the author just have to shoot herself in the foot by letting Chino claim hatred on all white bastards for the few who murdered his people. I don’t believe this, really.
This story is filled with misguided, blind, and sometimes braincell-free apologia for Native Americans, done with all the skill of an overly earnest sixth-grade kid shrilly screaming “We all must love and care for everybody!” in way that makes my ears bleed. This story is all about how Native Americans are always right, in that silly way that makes this story one of those inadvertently racist supremacy crap – you know, a race being all superior and always right because it is the “correct” race – that just cannot hide its agenda under its clumsy, schoolgirl-like prose.
And the saddest thing of all must be this impression I get that Ms Harte’s story is actually a result of an authorial misfire. This isn’t a deliberate racist pamphlet – it’s a badly written story which, by luck, ends up being something more provoking than it actually intends to be.
