![]() ![]() THE LOVING TRAP reminds me of early Elizabeth Lowell Silhouette Desire novels – the heroine was psychologically scarred from a prior event and the insensitive man tries to get her past it – with mixed results. Suspension of disbelief is all well and good, but jeezy kreezy, you know what I mean! A really good scene was when he and Glenna were in the honeymoon suite and he felt sheepish at being caught out – you know – in the “honeymoon” suite. Thank you to Carole Mortimer for keeping his arrogance tangible but not overwhelming, so that when Glenna fell in love with him, it was logical. In LIFELONG AFFAIR, I love the hero! He’s awesome. Then 1978’s THE MATCHMAKERS had a sequel – THAT CAROLINA SUMMER (1982). ![]() Her first Americana novel NO QUARTER ASKED had a sequel: FOR BITTER OR WORSE. ![]() And yet, again Dailey was at the forefront. Series were not the thing in the late 70s/early 80s. Funny, though, when she showed up in SS, there was no indication that she would get her own novel. In fact, LaRaine Evans shows up an unprecedented 3! times in Dailey novels: A DANGEROUS MASQUERADE, SONORA SUNDOWN, and DESERET. For example, in A LAND CALLED DESERET, I like to read the references to the heroine’s “nice” cousin from A DANGEROUS MASQUERADE. I like to enjoy certain scenes, the banter (such as it is). And now, it still takes me 3 or 4 hours to get through one. I spent way too much time as a teen reading these. It’s funny how I can get through the book in a few hours. And let’s face it, you’re more likely to meet a Janet Dailey-type man than an Violet Winspear-type man or Carole Mortimer-type man. She also introduced a more human, more gentle gentleman without the aristocratic arrogance that goes hand-in-hand with old money. Most of the men in her Americana novels were not wealthy, but they were men of power or consequence. I’ve mentioned before, I think, how Janet Dailey changed the playing field. He’s more Elizabeth Lowell than Harlequin Presents. He’s a rancher, not wealthy, no luxury to speak of. The hero is an inconceivable departure from the norm. ![]() A LAND CALLED DESERET is in the same vein as SEA MASTER – where the heroine learns to be a useful person instead of a pampered hothouse flower. It was super unusual for a commonwealth author to write anything about America. The only reason I stuck with it is because it happens on a boat in the ocean. The girl gets a hard lesson in growing up and not being so self-absorbed. No big deal according to the writer’s logic. THE SEA MASTER is older guy with older teen. The story has a romantic plot – a man decides that he wants his wife to live with him after years of living apart. Seriously, that’s the only thing this story has going for it. SENSATION would never have caught my interest if it had been set anywhere but Paris. When people were leaving Germany in 1939, they converted money to Meissen porcelain because it’s valuable and could easily be converted to cash outside the country. I learned about Meissen porcelain from PAGAN ENCOUNTER. It takes place over several years, but everything that happens is logical and even the problems make sense. A WILDER SHORE is #2 in the logical plot winners list. Everything in the plot makes sense and has a logical continuity. She sees how her husband is awful and the man she loves is wonderful. A man and woman fall in love, but the woman’s married. The “happiest” one has to be FROZEN FIRE. How is that romantic?Īnd yet, these books are the ones I remembered 30-40 years later. He’s mean and judgmental, but he’s nice to his mom, so she falls in love with him. The guy is in absentia for a hundred pages but she falls in love with him. Even now, a couple of decades later, the logic of it still escapes me. The one thing that ties the Presents together that I never could grasp is how the women could fall in love with men with whom they exchanged maybe a half dozen words and most of those barked by the men while the women were stunned into silence. The men are all little better than paper dolls, whereas the women undergo psychological overhauls of Shakespearean proportions. How sad that the authors had so little sense of what makes a man. Not so easy when hot guy starts kissing you. It’s easy to fight back when you are arguing with a hot guy. I hesitate to call them heroines because they are not heroic. The only variety that you see is with the female characters. The other element that ties these books to their times is that the men are wealthy owners of corporations. I want to say that it’s a coincidence that the males are overbearing, arrogant, abusive, and violent, but that was de rigeur in 1970s romance. With very little effort on my part (the best kind), I found several of my old Harlequin Present favorites from when I was young. Paperbackswap is better than eBay for finding books that you’ve loved and lost. ![]()
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