Loveswept, $2.79, ISBN 0-553-44378-X
Paranormal Romance, 1993

Mary Kay McComas’s The Trouble With Magic is… really special.

It begins, predictably, with the heroine being heavily in debts and coming up with hair-brained plans that only work in romance novels, and they work only because a loaded hot guy steps in to solve her problems in spite of her efforts to screw things up even further.

Oh no, the mean capitalists are going to foreclose Jovette Island, and our heroine Harriet Wheaton will not have it! She will convince Payton Dunsmore to leave her home alone!

Now, the details behind this foreclosure are left vague, perhaps by design because silly romance readers are not supposed to care about these things, so I’m not sure how targeting one man alone will stave off the impending foreclosure.

Still, romance heroines will do what romance heroines do best, so she pesters and pesters him through calls and letters until he shows up.

You may be thinking, cool, now she will impress him with her business plans for the next 10 years and how she intends to generate this certain amount of profits for herself and Payton’s company.

What, you do? Oh you silly thing, you don’t know romance heroines that well, do you?

No, when she’s not berating him or sassing him like she’s some creature that takes pleasure in acting superior over others, she is ordering him to just keep an open mind and she will somehow pay back all the late rent and taxes that she owes god knows who.

She also deliberately maroons him on the island. Now, he will have to listen to her and… obey? I am starting to feel my brain cracking open from all the painful pressure building inside.

Okay, so now you think: maybe she’s at least try to seduce him into being her sugar daddy, so that she can use his money to pay off the bills?

Oh, dear, you are such a sweet summer child when it comes to this genre.

No, she immediately, without any prompting mind you, tells him all her sob stories, insecurities, and just plain weird stories, such as how she is scared of the dark and roamed around night, so she and her parents had some kind of code so that young Harriet will not open the door when the parents were going at it, and I don’t know why I have to read all that.

She also tells him upfront, again without much prompting, that she has had him investigated by a private dick. No, that’s not a guy-on-guy romance thing, so get your mind out of the gutter.

Why is she doing all this? What is the point of all this, as it’s definitely not something any sane person would say to try to change the mind of someone that’s going to close down their property?

Mind you, Payton is just a bit better: he’s horribly intrusive, asking her about sex and what not so quickly into their acquaintance.

Now that I think of it, the characters here aren’t conversing like human beings. Rather, they are trying way too hard to be quirky-funny, only to end up being creepy and inappropriate all around.

Eventually, it is revealed that the island has some woo-woo stuff, and Harriet’s grand plan all along is to expose him to it so that he will change his mind and leave her be.

I don’t know if it’s intentional on the author’s part, but this suggests to me that the heroine intends to do a magic mind rape on the hero into doing things her way, and for a few seconds I actually start to respect the heroine for being such a naughty, cunning evil witch.

Then my respect evaporates when Harriet starts wailing that they have fallen in love, and that is clearly due to the magic and that is wrong so she must break up with him.

So let me get this straight. It’s perfectly fine for magic to brainwash him into letting the whole island be—although given that there will be a long trail of papers about this, especially when taxes are owed, I’m not sure how Payton alone can just waive away all the IOUs—but it’s a big no when her own mind is likely to be messed up as well by the magic?

Of course, the hero eventually convinces her that love transcends magic, and since he’s loaded, our heroine gets to have her cake and eat it too without having to account for her non-stop rampant acts of stupidity in the entire story. Ah, the perks of being beautiful, I guess.

It’s too bad that the magic of Jovette Island isn’t real and hence can’t mind rape me into thinking that I’ve had the time of my life reading this perplexingly dumb thing.

Then again, it’s more likely that there is no amount of magic powerful enough is to hide the fact that this story is a dark void where intelligent behavior and reasonable motivations are concerned.