Hers Forever

Title: Hers Forever (1995)
Author: Wendy Garrett (Zebra)
Period: American-Jacksonian (1847 St. Louis)
Grade: D-

Hers Forever represents two things that used to be true about romances. Riverboat romances set along the Mississippi once held a place along side Native American and Antebellum/Civil War locales as the most common in the American genre. Also, romances novels used to have plots that resembled entire season of Melrose Place complete with amnesia, kidnappings, secret babies, and spouses back from the dead. Melodrama can be sweetly sentimental or hilarious campy. Hers Forever is neither of those. It is a giant cliché sandwich with a healthy side of trite.

Cari Fremont's late husband and brother-in-law have used her as a pawn in their (unexplained) power plays against each other. After her husband and son's (alleged) deaths her evil brother-in-law is determined to make her his mistress. Cari thwarts his plan by becoming the mistress to his arch business rival, Dominic Saxton. The brother-in-law schemes, an annoyingly plucky orphan girl is adopted, people rise from the dead, and it all ends happily in the end. At least it would if the reader gave a rat's ass about any of these people or their tired, predictable romance.

Yawn.

Lady Hellfire

Title: Lady Hellfire (1992)
Author: Suzanne Robinson (Bantam)
Period: European Historical-Victorian (1854 England)
Grade: B+

Lady Hellfire is a very good fish out of water European Historical. I love stories about brash Americans finding love and adventure in the stuffy Ton. The Victorian historical elements are strong, particularly when Robinson explores restricting female fashion with the growing popularity of bustles and crinolette.

Kate is a true bluestocking. She is a fanatical reader, as well as being responsible for her maintaining her family's fortune after her father's death. She is outspoken and informal with little regard for the conventions and hierarchy of British society. I adore Kate. She has agreed to take her English mother on a trans-Atlantic visit to lift her spirits after her father's death. Her forthright manner and unconventional beauty made her open to ridicule from her cousin's neighbor the Marquees of Richfield on her previous trip to England. Alex, the Marquees, is complex hero. He was a war hero in the Crimea and he feels tremendous loyalty to the wounded veterans he cares for at his Estate. After his father's death, he was raised by his despicable mother and his sermonizing women-hating uncle. He suspects most unmarried women of trying to catch him in marriage for his wealth and title. Alex has issues.

When he and Kate are caught in a compromising position they announce a fake betrothal to save face. He attempts to educate Kate as how she can be more "ladylike" (i.e. boring) during their engagement. Kate, young and in love, goes along with the plan hoping to win his affections. She later realizes that Alex isn't worth losing herself. Happily, in reverse My Fair Lady fashion, he understands that he's rather have Kate as she is. The mysterious deaths around the castle (!) protract there HEA and the reader isn’t automatically certain of the murder.

Lady Hellfire isn't a perfect romance. Kate falls victim to a romance heroine's traits of crying and running away. She is conveniently in position to overhear just enough to create a Big Misunderstanding, but not long enough to understand what is really afoot. The villains are cut a bit too black. And one wonders when Alex will stand-up to his crazy family not just for Kate, but for himself. Very nice work with strong character development and excellent historical detail. I'll look for more Suzanne Robinson in the future.

The Perfect Lover

Title: The Perfect Lover (2003)
Author: Stephanie Laurens (Avon)
Period: European Historical-Victorian (1835 England)
Grade: C

My new historical romance pet peeve is author's who write suspense/mystery novels marketed as romance. To be fair, I'm sure the fault lies with Avon rather than Laurens.

The romance, minimal as it is, occurs between Simon (a Cynster) and his brother-in-law's sister, Portia Ashford. For Laurens, and one presumes her readers, being a Cynster is a personality trait in and of itself. The reader is to presume Simon is all things brave, virile, honorable, and wise. They both claim a long standing dislike. Laurens writes as if every reader has committed On a Wicked Dawn and its record of Simon and Portia's relationship to memory. One of the weaknesses with romance plot is the author continues to reference the conflict between the hero and heroine. Despite that as soon as we meet them in The Perfect Lover they are practically simpatico. They've conveniently both decided to embark on marriage hunts at the same time (and at the same house party) so one sees no real evidence they aren’t compatible.

The Perfect Lover is part of Laurens' Cynster series that like cockroaches and Rasputin just won't die. The success of this series in particular is, in my opinion, the cause of the explosion of familial romance series we see today. I'm not sure if that is an accolade or a rebuke. The book takes place at country house party with a lengthy and monotonous cast of Ton characters that would do the Illiad proud. The vast majority of these tertiarry characters are superfluous. Most have no role in the central plot whatsoever. There is a lot of tea drinking and escorting ladies to dinner, so only a handful of characters serve to advance the plot. Meanwhile, the eventual murder victim is so loathsome that one is left wishing all the guests conspired to do her in Murder on the Orient Express style. Laurens offer vagaries about the hero and heroine's shared sense of justice that leads them to solve the murder. I couldn't muster any interest in the victim, the investigation, or the romance.

Captive Rose

Title: Captive Rose (1991)
Author: Miriam Minger (Avon)
Period: Medieval (1272 Syria/England)
Grade: D+

Reading Captive Rose I immediately noticed how much of the plot it shares with one of my all-time favorite romances, Tamara Leigh's Pagan Bride. Minger wrote her book four years earlier, but it is by far the weaker of the two. Her lyrical description of Damascus is beautiful and offers great insight into the Islamic history of female physicians. However, her witless and uninteresting characters sink this romance.

Leila, English by birth, has been raised in the harems and cultures of Damascus. Her step-father purchased (and later married) her mother at a slave auction after her father death during a Holy Land pilgrimage. Leila is engaged to her step-brother and has trained to be physician by her step-father. When assisting at the prison she encounters injured Crusader, Guy. Eve, Leila's mother, dupes him into abducting her daughter and returning her to England and the care of her older brother. The same brother who was Guy's former childhood friend and now is his mortal enemy.

Leila is furious over being forced to leave the only world she's ever known. And in bad romance heroine fashion she attempts to escape and endangers herself repeatedly on the journey. Guy falls in love with her anyway and becomes a doormat for her poor behavior and temper tantrums. She drugs him. He rapes her. But he also buys her pretty clothes and likes poetry so he can't be all bad. Right ladies? They marry to thwart her brother’s evil schemes, but she still continues an ill-conceived plan to return to Syria despite having no funds and no escort. It is hard to believe someone as naive and dopey as Leila could be a physician in any era. On the historical romance heroine intelligence scale she falls somewhere between cocker spaniel and potted plant.

Captive Rose is bad, but it is still the better of the two Minger's I've ever read. If this is her best effort I'll be avoiding her like the plague in the future.

Song of the Willow

Title: Song of the Willow (1993)
Author: Charlotte McPherren (BMI)
Period: American-Western (1881 Arizona Territory)
Grade: B-


I've been in the romance doldrums for quite awhile now. I haven't read a great romance in so long that even an average romance looks good to me now. So I'm acknowledging that I'm grading on a curve here.

Song of the Willow is pretty standard Old West fare that involves cattle rustling, a government agent hero from back east, and a tomboy heroine. Rider Sinclair masquerades as disrespectable Army officer/ranch foreman in an effort to uncover a robbery and smuggling ring. He's been ordered to infiltrate the Vaughn family's cattle rustling operation and its connection to the mysterious boss man. Rider's orders involve seducing Vaughn's beautiful, but unconventional daughter. Rider falls in love and marries Willow in short order never telling her about his role with the government or his original seduction scheme.

Willow herself is the book's saving grace. She is a smart and thoughtful young woman who has been raised more as a boy than a girl. She doesn't reject the norms and conventions of womanhood like so many central casting romance heroines; she just simply doesn't understand them. Miriam, a widowed boarding house owner and town busybody, takes Willow under her wing and offers her instruction in dress and deportment. The strength of Song of the Willow is that she chooses to undergo the transformation for herself to increase her standing in the community, not to impress the hero. She is a smart heroine who doesn't take foolish or needless risks until the book unravels a bit at its conclusion.

The book struggles when Willow character metamorphoses from a smart and tough heroine to a typical space cadet who needs to be saved from disasters of her own making. The book also telegraphs that big reveal about the identity of the mysterious boss man. On the bright side, that the boss man shares his names with that spastic nut from American Idol gave me a chuckle. Song of the Willow is one of only two McPherren books in print, so sadly there will never be any resolution to the shotgun romance of Willow's brother and his Mexican lover. Song of the Willow was an enjoyable read with a generally above average heroine. I’m on the look out for her other book, Love and Fortune.

Dangerous

Title: Dangerous (1993)
Author: Amanda Quick (Bantam)
Period: European Historical-Regencyish
Grade: D

I'm that last romance reader alive who still enjoys Amanda Quick's formulaic not-quite Regencies. So why was Dangerous so bad?

Sebastian, Earl of Anglestone has decided to entertain himself this season by courting "Original" Prudence. "Original" appears to mean a heroine with bad fashion sense. He wants to humiliate her foppish younger brother for reason's that are never made clear other than a deadly case of ennui. She attempts to dissuade him from the false courtship and a potential duel with her brother, however the two become entangaled in an investigation that is either criminal (Sebastian's theory) or spectral (Prudece's theory). They wind up betrothed and married amid the investigation which is a third rate who-cares who-done-it.

He is Quick's standard alpha hero. Brodding. Mysterious. Dangerous. Prue sport the antique name and curious hobby (spectral phenomena) that is the mark of all Quick off-beat heroines, but something is off. She doesn't have Harriet's intelligence, Pheobe's vulnerability, or Emily's determination. She is the kind of heroine who complains the hero won't allow her to rush into dangerous situation because "he doesn't want her to have any fun." Usually when a hero berates the heroine as "a little fool" it feels dated and weird. In Dangerous it feels apt.

Quick's writing lacks the zest and humor that signifies her early work here. In one telling example, Sebastian, an amateur criminal investigator, compares picking a lock to making love to his wife. When her character points out this oddity he offers a bizarre monologue comparing his wife (or perhaps her vajajay) to a lock. Quick offers the kind of lines that would have gotten any guy an elbow to the chops in high school as if they are clever, sexy, and romantic. They aren't. And neither is Dangerous.

Highland Velvet

Title: Highland Velvet (1982)

Author: Jude Deveraux (Pocket)

Period: Medieval (1501 Scotland)

Grade: C

The second book in Deveraux’s Velvet Series is, by her standards, average. It isn’t awful or campy or ridiculous. It’s just there. I’ve heard it is the weakest in the series and hope the third book returns to form. I’ve always been a fan of classic medieval romances. They offer more depth of character and place than your typical romance, which is to say, your typical Regency. Difficult settings and experiences make for richer romances than the standard ballroom fare.

There is nothing new about Highland Velvet. And that’s okay. I don’t need a romance author to reinvent the wheel. If the characters are smart and funny and the setting feels authentic I’m okay with rehashing a well worn plot. Instead Deveraux confuses physical attractiveness with character development when she crafts two pretty, but petty and boring leads.

The forced marriage by King’s decree is to medievals what goofy will inspired marriages are to European historicals. The English king has commanded a marriage between Stephen Montgomery and Scottish laird Bronwyn McArran to solidify English control in the Highlands. Stephen is late to his own wedding inspiring no degree of ill feelings in his prospective bride. The cultural conflicts between the newlyweds over ethnicity and gender aren’t given any depth. One almost feels they only fight to have something do in between sex. Bronwyn particularly hold onto her bitterness toward the English, and by extension Stephen, for far too long to make her likeable. The novel is chock full of medieval Scottish adventure from kidnappings to cattle raids for those who love that stuff.

Highland Velvet also suffers narrative from a Bronwyn-heavy point of view. This is particularly troublesome in the final chapters where Stephen’s prolonged absence is only viewed from her perspective. It makes the HEA ending ring false when the reader isn’t given more than a terse explanation for his departure and return.