Mills & Boon, £3.49, ISBN 978-0-263-90000-2
Contemporary Romance, 2013
Sometimes I imagine writing for Mills & Boon is like lying on a cold slab of stone waiting to be violated by Yog-Sothoth. I hear the money is good if you were writing for certain popular lines, but I sometimes wonder whether years of churning out diarrhea-spiked swill like Maisey Yates’s Heir to a Desert Legacy can cause damage to one’s psyche over the long run. I personally can’t do this, and I suppose I have to salute the fortitude and productivity of authors such as Ms Yates here.
This one has a heroine that is a virgin mother. Yes, really! Chloe James became the surrogate mother of some ruler of some place called Aruba or something, all the while having never had sex before. The rulers of Ali Baba Land died on the way to seeing Chloe squeeze out little Aladdin, and now she hides in some security-free apartment to protect the little turban with legs.
Our hero Sayid al Kadar is the regent of Ali Baba Land, and he locates Chloe at last, to bring Aladdin back to his minaret. Our heroine refuses, because she’s become very attached to the brat despite having signed a contract to give up that brat to their rightful owners.
Since Chloe can’t be paraded around as the birth mother of Aladdin, Sayid reluctantly brings her along with him and introduces her as the nanny. She is also hailed as a heroine because everyone believes that she protected Aladdin from great harm or something.
If you ask me, she is the biggest potential threat to the baby. I know, I know, stupidity is a celebrated, even desired, trait in romance heroines for reasons that I still can’t fathom in my years of reading that genre. but this brain-damaged nincompoop takes that word to new heights.
Chloe is dumb. Horrifyingly, terrifyingly, frighteningly, ghastly dumb.
Sayid is—surprisingly, for this line—not too much of a boor or an ass, probably a good thing as this means that he is far more patient with the horrifyingly stupid heroine than any sane person would ever be. Considering that he claims to love Chloe, though, I guess he likes them very, very stupid—all the easier to control, I’d imagine.
Chloe doesn’t seem to get the idea that maybe having not even an ounce of security while caring for the heir of the royal throne of a faraway land is a bad idea, especially when she’s technically in breach of a contract.
She also doesn’t know what birth control is, believing that that breastfeeding is a surefire way to ensure that she will never get knocked up while breastfeeding and offering her rear end to Sayid at the same time. Yes, I am taking it very personally that the author made me write that last sentence.
Oh, and surprise, Chloe gets knocked up.
Ms Yates naturally tells me that Chloe has a PhD in physics. I hear that the education system in America is suspect these days, but oh dear, I never suspected that it is that bad.
Our heroine also spends the entire story veering around like a crash test dummy in a test vehicle. Her issues with men are so painfully cringe-worthy, 80% of these issues arising clearly from her complete ignorance of male anatomy and psychology as well as her own weird ideas about men and dating in general. I mean, she claims that Sayid is the first man to tempt her to think of sex outside of an intellectual context. That’s not normal.
The author keeps driving home that Chloe’s virtues are that she is selfless, selfless, and oh, she had a bad childhood. When do all of these become synonyms for “bloody, freaking stupid”?
In case you are wondering why I am calling the place Ali Baba Land and the brat Aladdin, well, the setting is very vaguely drawn and hence it’s not worth my time bothering to remember their proper names. Sayid is said to be a sheikh type, but he thinks and acts like a white guy. The heroine never encounters any cultural shock or experiences challenges adapting to a culture that is very different from hers. The setting is Generic Ali Baba Land, and the hero is a rich and powerful white guy in a hot Middle-Eastern skin suit.
Also, in case I miss it, the author also reminds me often that the heroine is a virgin mom. The unfortunate implication that the Virgin Mary had been a braindead imbecile like Chloe aside, I wonder if this thing were some kind of effort by the publisher to transform the book club into a cult. If that were the case, which primordial deity would the publisher, its authors, and its cult members be actually worshiping, hmm? Pennywise? Ronald McDonald?
Is there a story out there about a romance publisher that is secretly a front for the worship of some creepy, tentacle-y Outer God? I suddenly feel an itch to read such a thing. God Satan Cthulhu Heaven knows I will need something like that to cleanse off the frightening aftereffects of having encountered an intellectual void that is the heroine.
