Silhouette Special Edition, £1.10, ISBN 0-373-48628-6
Contemporary Romance, 1984
The romance genre is fixated on the heroine’s virtue. It still is today, albeit in more subtle ways, but back in the 1980s, those stories rub it hard into the reader’s face like Marco Goecke smearing poop over that ballet critic’s face.
Basically, if a heroine lets even a stray penis within ten feet of her, she is officially a whore and she doesn’t deserve love but instead a wretched life devoid of a judgmental asshole’s true love.
If the heroine, like Jennifer Wellesley in Pamela Lind’s Echoes of the Past, is thought to be a whore, then yikes, that’s almost as bad as being a whore, and she must spend the entire story proving to the judgmental asshole hero that she’s actually a really good girl worthy of his love, respect, and trust.
As a romance reader, I have accepted this as a, uh, “quirk” of the genre, but I still wince when this “No whore, no whore!” premise is done in a manner devoid of signs of intelligence. Unfortunately, I wince a lot while reading this thing.
Now living as Jennifer Bromleigh, our heroine makes her living as a bestselling author while residing in the Cotswolds. Actually, she doesn’t write much in this story, because she spends far more time trying to be a selfless doormat to all her friends and neighbors when she’s not finding ways to make herself a martyr because her mother was a whore.
That’s right, her mother was an infamous prostitute that was attached to our hero Michael Bradford’s father, and then, later on, a compromising photo in the tabloids lent to people speculating that Jennifer, then 17, was also the man’s mistress.
That was then. Today, Michael comes back to this place for a break after getting himself nominated to be a senator, and he bumps into her. Recognizing her but can’t really put a name to the face, he stalks her—remember, it’s never creepy when the stalker is hot—and finally gets her to confess that she’s the infamous J-Ho of his past.
Because she looks so sweet and innocent, and we all know whores can never be like that, he soon begins to revise his opinion that she’s the whoriest whore of whores in Whoreville. Then, he suddenly kisses her because the author needs him to be in love with the heroine, and he decides that he must have her.
Predictably, the heroine begins to find ways to sabotage her chance at happiness. Why? Because her mother was a whore, you see, and she was thought to be a whore herself, so she must never, ever ruin Michael’s life and political future by letting him marry her.
Isn’t this woman noble? That’s SOP for a typical ninny heroine in such a situation in this genre. She will go extra lengths, very stupid lengths, to demonstrate how extremely selfless and virtuous she is as evidence that she is actually a good, good woman.
This is so dumb.
Just once, I’d love to have a heroine that says something like: “My mother was a whore, but she was a popular well-loved whore that your father certainly approves of, so she was awesome and you can go suck an egg if you think otherwise. Also, if you can’t tell the difference between me and my mother, you can go dry hump her headstone because that’s the only humping you’re going to get in this part of town!”
After all, what happened to dignity and having some pride in oneself?
The idiot heroine aside, the romance is devoid of chemistry because the hero just decides to suck face with the heroine abruptly, and the heroine never stops to examine her own feelings for him. Oh, he wants her, so she’d just accept that and immediately goes into “I’m not good enough for him, so I must do dumb things to escape him!” mode—seriously, this creature is pathetic, as she seems to base her entire self worth on a man’s opinion and feelings for her.
As a result, the romance never feels like one. Rather, the whole thing is just an excuse for the author to roll out the tedious melodrama of the idiot heroine’s self-flagellation over something that she didn’t even do, for heaven’s sake. The whole thing is so freaking stupid!
It’s a good thing, therefore, that Michael is for the most part a forgettable character that is far more reasonable than I would expect a hero in a romance novel from the 1980s to be. Jennifer is already spiking my blood pressure up, so I may end up in the ICU if Michael had been any worse.
The greatest saving grace to this absurd story is that the author has a lovely way with words. Ms Lind has a graceful, evocative way with words here, and the descriptions of places and atmosphere can make me feel like I’m right there in the story. Okay, being right there with Jennifer isn’t exactly a pleasant place to be, but the author’s phraseology and narrative style is above average and enjoyable to read. So that is good, very good.
Then again, I find myself reading on anyway, despite my best intentions, because of this, which leads to me subjecting myself to way more of Jennifer’s stupid clown show of one than I’d have liked. So, maybe this isn’t such a good thing, heh.
At any rate, this story is well-written, but oh my god, the heroine and the whole premise of this thing are classic “Why am I reading this? Why am I reading this?” wet rear end gas leak material.
