I do love reading Harlequin romances from time to time. I will even admit to subscribing to Harlequin Superromance. Okay, and Luna. You get a free wine glass with each shipment and everything. It’s awesome. Anyway, I like Harlequin romances because the story is often very simple: girl has always been in love with guy, guy has major issues and can’t have a relationship with girl, girl decides she will have ONE SPECIAL NIGHT with guy, guy is intentionally mean to girl to push her away, guy and girl have a giant misunderstanding, guy is made to feel guilty by his friends and relatives about his shoddy treatment of girl, guy and girl get back together. Cue sappy epilogue complete with girl being pregnant with twins and everyone else around her being pregnant too. There are no vampires, wizards, werewolves, aliens, and the stories seem to revolve around characters of 1950’s Nick-at-Nite Americana. Consequently, there are no people of color to be seen, unless it’s the heroine’s sassy sidekick and one of the hero’s henchmen. But you guys know how I feel about that. I will go ahead and tell you now (spoiler alert) that the baby in question, specifically the baby on the cover, is nobody’s secret baby. He is, however, a rather creepy child who, at two years old, can speak in complete sentences and already knows how to matchmake, but that is how it works in Harlequin romance novels. Shut up. I was surprised at how much I actually liked this book. The heroine is a bit of an idiot, but likeable, and the hero is a little bit of a drama queen, but kind of hot. Maybe midterms have fried my brains, but this book is really not that bad.

Our heroine, Julia Adams, is a war widow. Her husband, a hotshot helicopter pilot in the Army, died in a crash while fighting that STUPID SENSELESS WAR IN THAT COUNTRY I’M NOT GOING TO MENTION. Julia is aggrieved not because she was madly in love with her husband, but that she has a two year old son she must now raise on her own and there is no one to help her. Oh, boo-hoo. My mother did it for twenty years with three kids. Unlike my mother, however, Julia is not a strong womyn. She wasn’t very good in school, doesn’t have any job experiences, and the one person she has always depended on, her mother, is career-military and jets from one exotic country to the other trying to save the world while neglecting poor Julia. In short, Julia is alone, distressed, and poor, especially since she had maxed out her credit cards trying to pay off her dead husband’s gambling debts. She just wants a place where she could settle down and raise her son because as a child growing up as a military brat, she never had a place to call home. Out of sheer desperation, Julia decides to accept an invitation from her dead husband’s parents to go live with them in Hot Springs, California. Sure, her mother-in-law never liked her and affectionately refers to her as “gold-digging whore,” but Julia is willing to set their differences aside, so that her baby can finally have a home and they never have to be displaced EVER AGAIN. It is not too long after Julia sets down the diaper bag and takes a load off that her mother-in-law’s control freak habits come to the surface and she is suddenly telling Julia how to live her life and raise her baby. But Julia is an invertebrate, a spineless creature who refuses to fight back in fear that she and her son will get kicked out to the streets again. As if that’s not enough, the man she has always loved and is quite possibly the one responsible for her husband’s death, lives only a hundred yards away. What ever will she do?

Our hero, Jesse Filmore, was a Special Forces soldier in the Army. His actions in the war may have caused the death of three people, most notably that of his best friend, and he returns to his hometown a sad and broken man. Growing up in Hot Springs was hell for Jesse, especially since he was known for being the town’s bad boy. With an abusive drunk for a father and a mother who was too weak to defend him, his childhood wasn’t exactly filled with warm, fuzzy memories captured in Kodak moments. In fact, Jesse only goes back to Hot Springs because his mother inexplicably left his childhood home to him when she died, so Jesse’s one plan is to fix up the house, sell it, and move to San Diego to start up a construction company with an Army buddy. As he expected, he doesn’t receive a friendly welcome when he arrives in Hot Springs. People give him dirty looks, whisper about him behind his back, or accuse him outright of killing Mitch Adams, the town hero. Of course Jesse believes he deserves the derision because deep down, he doesn’t think he did enough to save Mitch’s life. The accusatory voices in his head tell him that he may have killed Mitch on purpose because he has always been in love with Julia, Mitch’s wife, and wanted her for himself. Unbeknownst to the townsfolk, Mitch was the REAL bad boy and Jesse was the one who took the blame for every single one of his sins because… I don’t know. It’s not clearly explained. Maybe Jesse just likes the punishment. Anyway, things don’t work out the way he wants them to because complications arrive in the form of: 1) the annoying matchmaking niece who is eerily wise and prescient in regards to Jesse’s internal demons 2) the sister he blames for the shitty childhood he had because she deserted him when he needed her most 3) Julia Adams, the widow of the man he killed. All Jesse wants is Julia to himself and perhaps a nice little place he could call his home, but doesn’t think he deserves it because he’s A KILLER, DAMN IT, DON’T YOU PEOPLE UNDERSTAND? YOU DON’T KNOW HIS PAIN! NO ONE DOES!

This story is really about two people damaged by their mutual love of one person. Sure, that person was a total dick and a shitty human being, but for some reason, these two morons feel compelled to protect him and keep up the lie that he was the Golden Boy that everyone believed he was. At the beginning of the story, both of them are too emotionally raw and a little too damaged to have a happy ending together, but contrivances and familial intervention will fix all that! Don’t you know that nobody is allowed to mope around and act all tortured in Happy Harlequin Land? Jesse’s older sister and niece will meddle, Julia’s mother-in-law will be ridiculously evil in order to drive Julia into Jesse’s protective arms, and the baby will say and do cute things, so that Jesse and Julia (dear God, that’s too precious) can “ooh” and “aww” together over him. That’s how it works, folks. Hey, I don’t write it, man. I just read it.

Anyway, Jesse’s (physical and emotional) pain is believable. He may have made a bad call that caused the death of three people and is totally entitled to torture himself for as long as he wants. That’s not the kind of shit you can heal with some sex and a cute baby (not sex with a cute baby, mind you). It takes years of intensive psychiatric help to fix that shit. If he wanted to hermitize himself in his mom’s house and be the weird, creepy guy that everyone crosses the street to avoid, it would have been totally fine. Me, I bought Jesse’s pain. I was right there with him. What pissed me off about Jesse is his stupid, stupid belief that he doesn’t deserve Julia because she was Mitch’s wife and Mitch was his best friend. It’s stupid because Mitch was a total dick who cheated on Julia and caused her a lot of pain. Hell, when Mitch was alive, Jesse made a move on Julia and told her she deserved better. Now that Mitch is dead, Jesse thinks it’s a betrayal if he got it on with his widow? What a spaz. Shut up, Jesse. As far as tortured heroes go, however, Jesse is top-notch. He can mope like the rest of them and look really hot doing it. I think he may have taken a class in How To Brood and Mope and Look Really Hot Doing It. I do believe it’s a pre-requisite for romance heroes.

Julia, on the other hand, is an emotional vampire. She’s needy, desperate, and totally clingy. Her husband just died and what does she do? Hunt down his best friend and try to seduce him, of course. Creepy. Bad shit happens to Julia, but Julia never does anything about it. She blames her mother’s neglect, Mitch’s shitty treatment of her, and her mother-in-law’s high-handedness for why her life is in the toilet. She’ll cling to anyone who expresses interest in helping her and her son because she is unable to stand up on her own (hard to do that when you don’t have a backbone). Julia is just pathetic. She’s wishy-washy about the decisions she makes, often second-guesses herself, and yet she cannot understand for the life of her why she has a shitty life. Grow a vertebra, Julia! Yet for all of that, Julia is surprisingly likeable. Though she tends to make stupid decisions, she acknowledges it immediately when she fucks up and learns from it. Sure, it doesn’t prevent her from making stupid decisions, but some of us need to get smacked on the head a few times before we actually get it. She’s also not stubborn to the point of obstinacy, which seems to be a requirement for heroines in romance novels, and knows when to ask for help when she needs it. And she needs it a lot. Julia ultimately redeems herself by being able to stand up on her own two feet and defending herself to her detractors, but this comes a little too late in the story and is a little contrived. I would have bought it if we actually saw Julia growing a spine and learning to do things for herself and I think a longer redemption arc would have done a great deal in accomplishing this.

The romance of Julia and Jesse is kind of sad and pathetic. Jesse thinks he deserves the shitty things that happen to him and ergo doesn’t believe he deserves Julia so he pushes her away. Julia wants another man to take care of her and her son and believes that Jesse is the man who can do it, so she forces herself on Jesse. At first, it’s an old song and dance that’s a little painful to watch, but watch it you will because it’s like a train wreck. The two of them are too messed individually up to get together, much less settle down together to raise a family, but somehow they seem to be good together. It is Jesse’s nature to protect and serve and Julia needs a lot of protecting and being served. With each other, they seem to find that “something” that works out for the both of them. God bless them both.

All and all, I thought it was pretty well-written and believable and I enjoyed reading it. Sure, it’s vintage Harlequin cheese, but there really is some true emotion to be found here. O’Keefe wrote the shit out of Jesse’s pain and call me a sick freak, but I dug it. Jesse skulking around in the shadows, Jesse sitting in the dark and moping, Jesse allowing himself to get beat up by the town drunks ’cause he thinks he deserves it… that shit was sexy. Me, I wanted to reach in and give him some sexual healing of my own. Sure, he would probably have been a little more messed up afterwards, but I bet it would be a lot of fun. For me. There are some wacky matchmaking antics to be found here, but the friendship that Jesse develops with his teenage niece was actually kind of cute. As for Julia, I would have liked if she were able to stand on her own feet a little sooner in the book and didn’t depend so much on the people around her, but I found herself cheering for her, because damn, I had to admire her tenacity in pursuing Jesse. Go girl. Anyway, it’s gotta be a testament to the book’s readability that I finished it in three hours and didn’t put it down once. Make of that what you will. C+

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 at 9:59 am and is filed under Books, Grade: C, Romance: Contempo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.