by SB Sarah • Thursday, May 05, 2005 at 07:07 AM
The age debate going on downaways on this page has made me ponder. And that’s pretty much the pattern here -Candy fires off with opinion, but as I am a hormonal mess of emotions, I sit and ponder - ruminate, even! But I may make an opinionated pronouncement. Be wary!
In terms of age and difference, I know it’s the norm for historicals, particularly Regencies, to have a good amount of age difference between the hero and the heroine. Usually the hero is older, in his 30’s, and has sown his wild oats, served as a lordly rake in said oats, and experienced the world, gone on the Grand Tour, etc. The heroine is usually much younger, and is often a recent deb who has just had her first, or second, or maybe fourth season. I am well aware that this is the standard - and I was surprised to re-read a Julia Quinn recently wherein the hero was 29. That’s my age! What?! He’s supposed to be much older than that!
But I do know that when I’m reading, unless there’s some significant disparity in experience that reminds me constantly of the differences in age, I tend to equate the heroine and the hero in age in my mind, and don’t see her at a disadvantage, age-wise, to the hero. Eventually, as their relationship reaches some level of equilibrium, so do their ages in my mind. They partner in my imagination in every sense.
There have not been many books in which my perception of the relationship between the hero and the heroine was affected by my opinion of their age difference. As I said, if the hero is still young enough to be part of the social scene, a 10 to 15 year age difference is not so big a deal. But I can’t remember ever reading an historical romance where the hero was ages older than the heroine, to the point where I was squicked out.
Likewise, I don’t remember a historical with an older heroine, though I have read a few contemporaries where the heroine was older - in one case, she had been the hero’s baby sitter. There was a measurable squick factor when they went from talking about old times to hopping into the sack. In my mental organizational tree, they could all be housed under the heading of “Stella’s Groove Is Back Romances,” or, if you’re feeling the squick in a major way, “LeTourneau Romances.”
Candy mentioned that older hero and heroines give her the jibblies along the same lines of “old people doing it” that give many of us the jibblies. My husband’s grandmother used to speak openly about her amorous life at the dinner table and I was ready to hide under the table and wish for death during those moments. But I have read a few romances, historical and contemporary, where older, often parental secondary characters find romance to parallel the hero and the heroine. I suppose if the main couple gettin’ busy is young and nubile, the older farts gettin’ their groove on in the background is ok - after all, you can ignore the secondary characters if you want to. And certainly they aren’t the most prominent elements of the story.
Off the top of my head, the only romance-esque book I’ve read recently about older people as romantic leads was the first book or two of the Mitford series, about a small town priest in North Carolina. I read the first two when I found them in the lending library of a resort we stayed at in Mexico. Not bad, and not solely romance, but there was a romantic element for the main character, who was older, and a new woman in town, also older. However, since the Mitford series certainly doesn’t feature sex scenes, there was no older-people-mattress-boogie factor.
For some of you, though, is age difference sexy? Is there something fiesty in the differences of age between a hero or heroine that gets your motor cranking? I have to admit some level of recent fascination with the idea of Guardian/Ward historical romances, and am thinking of trying a few out - though much like Candy, I bet this request will turn around and feast on my petard in short order. Any suggestions of good books with that element employed?
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by Candy • Wednesday, May 04, 2005 at 01:33 PM
Our Grade:
Title: Smuggler's Bride
Author: Darlene Marshall
Publication Info: LTDBooks 2005, ISBN: 1553165519
Genre: Historical: American
Lady Julia Delerue is going over the accounts for the Florida branch of Delerue-Sanders shipping after the death of her uncle when she discovers that somebody is stealing cargo right from their ships. In an effort to find the culprits, she decides to disguise herself as a grubby cleaning woman and work at Ganymede’s Cup, a local tavern belonging to Richard and Robin, two former pirate cohorts of her mother’s. (Ganymede’s Cup is also known locally as the Greek Boy, and given the kinds of pirates Julia’s mom had on her ship, you KNOW what sort of Mediterranean lad they’re referring to.) With its strategic location and less-than-savory clientele, Julia hopes to overhear enough to figure out what’s going on. Her only lead so far is a name but nothing else: Rand Washburn.
Then a couple of dimwits nab her, toss her onto a wagon and drop her off in the middle of nowhere. In the middle of nowhere with possibly the only backwoodsman around with all his teeth and nose left. (Apparently Cracker fights involved a lot of nose-biting. How cool is that little historical factlet?) In the middle of nowhere with, coincidentally, the Rand Washburn she’s been hearing about at Ganymede’s Cup. Figuring that this opportunity to solve the mystery is too good to pass up, she pretends to be Richard’s English niece and offers to cook and clean for Rand.
Rand still has several functional brain cells, so of course he’s suspicious of Julia—that woman is a liar if he ever met one. He assumes she’s probably a spy sent by one of his competitors, and he’ll just keep her close until he figures her out. Hey, the woman can sure cook some good possum. OK, it’s kind of annoying when she keeps following him on his clandestine meetings, but she also saves his hide from some particularly unscrupulous smugglers, too. Who knew that impoverished scullery maids from England knew how to shoot? And Julia’s not the only one who’s hiding something; he has a few big, big secrets of his own.
Candy’s Take
Just so you know: if you’re on a diet, don’t read this book. It often goes into excruciating detail on what Julia’s cooking for Rand—buttermilk pancakes, persimmon cake and orange-vanilla pudding are just some of the more memorable items—and I’d feel hungry after putting the book down. This is despite some graphic descriptions of what brined possum looks and feels like, so Darlene, if you ever feel the urge to go into writing food columns or become a commentator for Iron Chef, GO FOR IT.
Overall, Smuggler’s Bride is a pretty decent read. I’m not sure I’d call it a Big Misunderstanding romance, but let’s just say that there are a couple of Big Secrets that do lead to misunderstandings, and Marshall is skillful enough in her execution that I never questioned the necessity of Julia and Rand keeping mum.
Rand himself is pretty yummy. He’s flippant and lazy and sexy, but there’s a nice little bit of depth to him because he used to be in the Army fighting Indians, and like nice, sensitive girly-men who were ordered to do all sorts of unsavory things to the various tribes he dealt with, he has some inner scars that haven’t quite healed properly.
Julia, on the other hand, is a pretty standard feisty romance heroine. I wouldn’t exactly call her Too Stupid to Live, but she does take some pretty big risks with her personal safety out in the wilds. Ever since our discussion about TSTL double-standards, I’ve learned to be more careful about judging heroines as such and Julia does know how to defend herself, thanks to her piratically-inclined mother. But at one point all her goings-on made me stop for a second and think: really, what aristocratic, gently-reared Englishwoman from the nineteenth century would offer to cook and live alone with a criminal whom she’s never, ever met before? Then I remembered: DUDE, it’s a romance novel. Fuck realism. This crazy impulsiveness to Have Adventures Come What May is part of her character (probably inherited from her mom, heh), and the book would’ve been a whole lot duller without it.
Some of the secondary characters are pretty awesome. The two men who initially kidnap her, Ben and Frank Ivey, are pretty funny, but their mother, Ma Ivey, is a regular caution. I giggled out loud when she tried to show Julia how to chew tobacco juice and spit it on the plants to keep the bugs off.
So a qualified recommendation for Smuggler’s Bride. It’s fun and the setting is refreshingly different for a historical, but it doesn’t quite pack the oomph I look for in a keeper.
Sarah’s Take
Look for a star in the east, for again, Candy and I have agreed on the grade for this book. If one looks at the author’s progression as a writer, this novel has much more character development, backstory, and personal relationship development on the part of both protagonists than the previous novel of Marshall’s that we read. I knew why Rand and Julia were into each other; there was no, “Hey! Suddenly we’re in love! Let’s get it on!” moment. They were forced into odd-yet-close quarters with one another and despite the multiple secrets between them, I knew why they fell for each other.
The multiple secrets is one of the two features of this book I must praise the author for, as it’s a fine line to walk between Big Misunderstandings and Hiding Secrets For the Sake of Intrigue. Intrigue is fabulous when done well, but Big Misunderstandings are rarely if ever done well - particularly when you have the characters living in the back woods of nowhere county with no one else to talk to but each other. Big Misunderstandings can hardly flourish in such an environment, but intrigue and secret keeping can, and the challenge of keeping such a story line moving forward lies in the fact that, in this case, the reader knows almost all the secrets, but has to sympathize with the characters who are lying and the ones who are being lied to. The reader knows who Julia is from the beginning, and has a good amount of damning evidence against Rand, though one never wants to believe the hero of a romance is Up to No Good. So what kind of No Good is he up to? And is she going to be able to choose her family over him if he turns out to be indeed Up to No Good? Sustaining the tension is hard, and Marshall does quite a job.
Rand himself, I thought he was quite the dreamboat, but I have a big thing for men who are held to their code of honor, even if that code conflicts with what they find they want more than anything. He’s a confident, self-assured and very smart and crafty man, whose experience in the Army has left him with a very clear and weighty sense of right and wrong that he must at all times live up to. Given the situation he finds himself in with Julia, that moral code is often pressed for testing, and I get all kinds of enjoyment out of watching a noble hero struggle with his own nobility.
Julia was likeable, equally confident, and this may be a sexual double standard on my part, but I found her often to be stunningly, bafflingly, and sometimes stupidly brave. Like Candy said, I can see, from having “met” her mother in a previous novel, where she gets her stone ovaries, but woo damn, does that girl do some astonishing things, and I have to chastise myself for having a harder time accepting Julia’s bravery than Rand’s.
But the most wonderful aspect about this book is the rare find of an author who, when crafting a secondary character who is in all points unique, refuses to fall back on the convenience of stereotype and make that secondary character a one-dimensional caricature. Ma Ivey is a backwoods, rural, roughly educated, far-from-high-class woman, and there are stereotypes of such rural individuals all over the country. She spits, chews tobacco, makes possum stew, teaches backwoods cooking, and generally speaks in such language that in lesser hands she would become a poor shadow of the character she actually is. It would be simple for the author to swing a phantom arm around the reader’s shoulders and snicker in her ear, “Possum soup? Gross. What a nasty woman, ha ha ha,” and allow the reader to believe she’s in cahoots with the author in laughing at such a strange and low-class creature.
But Marshall doesn’t allow her character to be dismissed: Ma Ivey is also a mother, and a mother who lost one of her children. She’s generous, kind, and thoughtful, and her genuine regard and caring for Julia makes her a terribly fun character to read about. She isn’t just a rural hick who eats possum and probably can’t read. She’s a woman who survived in a harsh land living a sad life on her own, who deserves respect and admiration, even if the entire idea of stewed possum makes me want to gag. I always got a case of the giggles when Ma Ivey’s wagon came rattling onto Rand’s property.
There are so many “forced to live together” “she isn’t who she says she is” “he isn’t who he says he is” stories out there, and I can usually find one that takes place in just about every time period. What’s different about Smuggler’s Bride is the twists applied to the intrigue, and the side characters like Ma Ivey that almost overshadow the main protagonists. It’s as fun and light in tone as Pirate’s Price and a pleasure to read. But I think I’ll remember the characters more than I’ll have an urge to revisit with them.
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by Candy • Wednesday, May 04, 2005 at 11:45 AM
I was re-reading the “What’s Hot in Black Romance” entry on Monica’s blog when this line in the interview with author Maureen Smith caught my eye:
“SMITH: Unfortunately, there are many people who won’t read multicultural romances because they don’t think they can identify with the protagonists.”
If this is true, that’s pretty damn sad because many romance readers enjoy historicals, and I think the average middle-class white (or in my case, light khaki) woman has a hell of a lot more in common with the average middle-class black woman than an aristocratic English girl living in 1811. People snapped up Memoirs of a Geisha when it came out, and man, talk about immersing yourself in a foreign culture, right? And The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is told from the perspective of somebody with Asperger’s Syndrome, ferchrissakes. And let’s not even get into how popular SF/F is, with its preponderance of characters who aren’t even HUMAN.
So the whole “I won’t read black romances because I won’t be able to identify with the characters” excuse doesn’t sound quite right to me.
I wonder why black genre fiction tends to be invisible? Actually, why is genre fiction so WHITE in general? I mean, I can name several literary lions who are Not Lily White: Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Chinua Achebe, Ralph Ellison, Rita Dove, bell hooks. I can also think of other authors of literary fiction who come from various ethnicities, and these are names just off the top of my head: Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, Amy Tan, Maxine Hong-Kingston, Gail Tsukiyama, Banana Yoshimoto, Arundhati Roy, V.S. Naipaul, R.K. Narayan.
For romance authors, Marjorie M. Liu is the only recognizably Asian name of the lot that I can think of. Wait, hang on, just remembered: Karen Harbaugh and Shana Abe are part Japanese. And then there are a host of black romance authors, of course, most of whose names I’ve learned of through Monica’s blog: Donna Hill, Reon Laudat, Leslie Esdaile, Brenda Jackson, etc. Can’t think of a single black, Asian or [insert ethnicity of choice here] SF/F author, nor any for mysteries and thrillers, though I haven’t read extensively in the last two genres.
Anyone have any good theories on why minority authors (and characters, for that matter) seem drastically under-represented in genre fiction? If they’re not under-represented, why are they so low-profile? Any recommendations for good genre fiction (not just romance) by authors who are Other Than Anglo?
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by Candy • Tuesday, May 03, 2005 at 11:25 AM
Yesterday was all about the wonderfulness of lovin’ the virgin heroes and friends who eventually boink, so today I’m back to bitching and moaning. Here are the plot devices that, in my opinion, suck muchos cojones de los burros.
Secret Babies
E.D’Trix brought this up in the Comments, and oh my, I am reminded of how very, very much I hate this plot device. Hatehatehatehate. Beth hatin’ on Gaelen Foley kind of hate. I can sort of understand it in a historical, because having a baby out of wedlock was something most people tried to keep quiet and hidden, but the majority of secret baby books are contemporaries. Most of these books make me go “What the FUCK are you thinking, you stupid cow?” much more often than is conducive to a pleasant reading experience. Because first of all: Raising a child is hard. There is no shame in asking for help when you need it. FUCK that pride, there’s a new life to take care of. And most of the heroines raising these secret babies aren’t exactly Paris Hilton (financially, at least; there is definitely more than a passing resemblance to Paris in the IQ department), so add financial hardship to everything. Bottom line: if the heroine is not all that well-off, alone and pregnant and she doesn’t make an effort to track the babydaddy down and at least inform him that he’s about to be a dad, much less get him to help her on child support, she’s not heroine material, she’s a dumb whore who needs to learn that Planned Parenthood offers free condoms and Ortho Tricyclen at only $17.00/pack.
There may be the occasional secret baby book that’s worth reading, but most have made me actively wish the heroine had an abortion instead. The worst is when the heroine acts all pissy because the hero finds out he’s been a father lo these many years and wants to be an active part of the child’s life and she uses that as an excuse to act like a psycho hosebeast while humping him without birth control YET FUCKING AGAIN. That just makes me wish the heroine’s mom had had an abortion.
Big Misunderstandings
Much has been said about this. Let’s just say I’m not fond of books in which the conflict could’ve been resolved with a simple query, like: “Hey, is that your long-lost half-brother I saw you hugging in that garden the other night? Oh, cool. Whew. For a moment there I had the crazy idea that you were cheating on me.”
That said, I’m pretty sure quite a few of my favorite books feature Big Misunderstandings in one form or another. The Windflower, for example. I mean, Merry has a pretty good reason to perpetuate it, but still, at one point I did fervently wish she’d confide in Devon, except he WAS an asshole to her on more than one occasion....
Older Couples
This isn’t any fault of the books or the plot device, it’s strictly a personal prejudice. If the couple is older than 45 years old or so, I picture my parents making out and kissing. I can’t help it. Buzz. Kill. I’m sure as I grow older I’ll stop being such a stupid bitch about this type of story, but until then, I generally like my protagonists to be between 18 to 40 years old.
Enemies Into Lovers
I’m talking blood enemies, not merely pointed sparring like, say, Jessica and and Sebastian engage in in Lord of Scoundrels. I’m talking “He killed my father and I’m a sassy Scottish lass who will hate his piggish Sassenach self forever and ever, nyah!” kind of stories. These stories usually feature some truly appalling behavior on both the hero and heroine’s parts. But again, some of my favorite books and authors feature this sort of story. Shana Abe does them quite well, for example, but that’s because she doesn’t have the hero or heroine acting like assheads all the time.
The Sudden Realization of Lurve™
This well-worn plot device was utilized in older historicals and is still somewhat frequently used in certain types of category romances. This plot device is frequently used in conjunction with Enemies into Lovers. Hero and heroine fight, fight, fight, fight and hate, hate, hate, hate right up until page 398 of a 400-page novel. Then all of a sudden, one of them realizes: they’re fighting because they LOVE each other. This revelation typically comes out of nowhere and makes me wonder what kind of crack the character was smoking. Everything is then resolved at warp speed. I close the book fully expecting more insane fights in the couple’s future and a host of poor little crack-babies being born to the heroine.
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by SB Sarah • Tuesday, May 03, 2005 at 05:52 AM
I’m re-reading Julia Quinn’s The Viscount Who Loved Me, which is the 2nd of the Bridgerton series, and among my favorite of the Quinns. And I noticed as I read, mild spoiler alert, that the marriage element of the happily ever after happens almost midway through the book - leaving the characters to resolve whatever conflicts they have to address as a married couple.
I realized, partially related to Candy’s thoughts on romance cliche, that when the characters get married in the middle of the book, it’s almost a let down for me. I find myself...disappointed. I have to ask myself why: is it because I think the illicitness of sneaking around for clandestine snogging in a Regency is half the fun - the danger that they might get caught - although only rarely is a moment where boobs are free and pants are undone interrupted, so once the hero has gotten to 2nd base and is rounding to 3rd, I kind of know they aren’t going to be discovered and have their naughty naughty escapades cast in the public light of shameful gossip. Adding overt shame to the protagonists’ sexual exploration isn’t a hallmark of many Regencies I’ve read.
So do I get bummed out because the risk, the chance of discovery, no matter how remote, is gone once they are married and in each other’s company so frequently? Is it that the author no longer has to come up with clever scenarios to bring the hero and heroine together? Or is it that the conquest is won, the rake has been tamed, and the bliss of marriage and ever-frequent sex makes for a boring finish to the book, regardless of the conflict being addressed by each character or both?
I will say that this is an issue I have with historicals, not contemporaries. I don’t know that I’ve read too many contemporary romances where the hero and heroine get hitched halfway through and then fight the forces of evil for the rest of the book.
But I have to wonder if my disappointment is evidence of my own compliance with the Disney-fied Happily Ever After ending, with wedding bells seen or implied serving as the ultimate culmination of the romance. Maybe I have learned to expect the story to end at the nuptial canoodling and am bothered when it violates my expectations.
I do get bored with recurring characters from prior novels popping up into later stories, bedecked with wedded bliss and all the fire and spark of vanilla yogurt. Do I expect the same of newly-married couples who are also the protagonists of the story? Or is it the loss of the attraction phase, and the beginning of the attached phase, that loses my interest? I know my favorite element of a well-written romance novel is the attraction between the protagonists, so maybe it’s the end of the zest and the beginning of the rest that tends to let me down a little. (As a married person myself, it’s not like I think the attraction ends after marriage. I’m plenty attracted to my husband!)
Am I the only one with this peculiar expectation? Does marriage take away some of the zest for any of you? Or are there well-written examples that you remember fondly?
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