Jessica

Note from Natalie: I am absolutely delighted to have another wonderful guest post here at the Radish from Jessica at the newly revived (!!!) Read React Review.

There was something unusual about Sandra Antonelli’s debut contemporary romance,  A Basic Renovation besides the “older” characters (in the romance genre, forties is definitely considered older): a semi-serious rival for the heroine’s affection who was actually a good guy. I enjoyed Antonelli’s debut, and was delighted to learn that the rival, Los Alamos Detective John Tilbrook, is the hero of her second book, For Your Eyes Only.

Both books are set in Los Alamos, and both feature a pair of forty-something protagonists, one of whom is a physicist who works at the famous national lab, as well as several of the same secondary characters — friends, colleagues, and family members. But A Basic Renovation is more of a domestic romance (literally, since the heroine was a home renovator), while For Your Eyes Only, thanks to its detective hero, physicist/undercover FBI agent heroine, and murder/stolen classified documents investigation, veers towards romantic suspense.

Willa Heston is a quantum physicist, a widow with an angry teen step-daughter who blames her for her father’s death, a shock of white hair, and a mission to protect her old best friend, Los Alamos resident Dominic Brennan, from an innocent mistake he made with classified information at the lab years ago. In order to help (illegally) divert an FBI investigation away from Brennan, Willa has to conduct it, and she also has to come clean to her old friend that while they worked together, she was an undercover agent. Dominic (platonically) helped Willa through her grief after her husband died suddenly, and she wants to help him now. But Dominic doesn’t like knowing his BFF was an undercover G-woman, and the reconstitution of their friendship on new and more honest terms is a major subplot of the book.

Willa certainly isn’t looking for love, but she meets Detective Tilbrook on her way in to town, when he helps her with a flat tire (she knows how to change it, but the lug nut is stuck), and instant attraction flares.  When she rents an apartment across the way from his, additional opportunities for sexual tension and witty banter arise, and despite all the secrets Willa has to keep, she gives in. It’s been too long since she’s had a man, and she finds John incredibly attractive.

John is a nice guy, and he knows it. While his ex-wife used “nice” as an epithet, John is pretty secure in who he is. He knows “nice” doesn’t mean “boring”, he knows he wants Willa, and he’s pretty sure she wants him, too. He asks her out, he shows up at her house with pizza, he even accepts a quick grocery store date when she tells him she doesn’t have time for a longer outing. John represents calm, security, home, and everything Willa needs in her life, but his true beta hero status doesn’t mean For Your Eyes Only is lacking in the sexual heat department:

She’d assumed a kiss from him would be as nice as he was, but nice was an understatement.

He’d kissed her.

The instant his mouth was on hers and his fingers slid into her hair, she’d dissolved then regenerated as if the beam-me-up-Scotty science fiction of Star Trek had become reality. Unbalanced, lightheaded , long unaccustomed to the feeling of a man’s hands touching her, it had shocked her empty system. John had kissed the shit out of her and kissed life into her half-dead body until she was dizzy with it. In a rush, passion had burst from her skin, desire pooled in her belly . Exhilarated, frightened, she’d wrapped her hands around his tie, pressed against him, and held on as the Earth spun underfoot and revolved around a sun about to go supernova.

This scene did not end in any kind of sexual satisfaction for either partner, due to an inopportune event. In both A Basic Renovation and For Your Eyes Only, the first several attempts at sex are interrupted by wacky and unlikely events. I hope the author relies less on untimely interruptions to build sexual tension in future books.

The above passage also highlights Antonelli’s frequent use of pop culture references in the book. Sometimes they serve the story really well, as in the passage above, perfect for a pop-culture loving physicist. I also thought the use of Bugs Bunny cartoons was great. They are what Willa uses to relax, and they are sometimes the way she sees the world, herself, and her problems:

What she wanted, what she needed were cartoons— a Martian searching for an illudium 36 explosive space modulator, Bugs Bunny square dancing with gun-totin’ hillbillies.

The fact that John and Willa are both pop culture junkies gives them a way to banter and bond, although sometimes the pop culture references felt a little too frequent or heavy handed, taking the conversation on distracting tangents.

For Your Eyes Only is definitely more Willa’s story, in terms of the emotional work she must do to put her late husband behind her, reconcile with her step-daughter, and make amends with Dominic, all while solving an FBI case, but John is not one dimensional: his relationship with Willa forces him to find the line between being nice and being a doormat, between his genuine concern for her relationship with Dominic and outright jealousy of it, and between taking a risk on love at first sight and being a foolish old(er) man.

I really liked Willa — she’s funny, smart, resilient, interesting, and vulnerable — and I especially liked that her sexual attractiveness (i.e. low self-esteem about her looks) was not her main concern in life, or a barrier  to her relationship with John. I did wish for a fuller fleshing out of her life pre-narrative. I also found her response to the inappropriate “crushes” not one, but three of her co-workers had on her (inclusive of ass-pinching) to be surprisingly passive. I suppose her effect on men was meant to combat the idea that a middle-aged woman is “on the shelf” as they say in Regencies. But was Willa’s reaction to some pretty overt sexual harassment a long-term strategy she adopted being a woman in two “men’s worlds” — of physics and the FBI? Just a temporary strategy due to her “greater fish to fry” situation with Dominic? Either the narrative wasn’t totally clear, or I wasn’t reading carefully enough.

If this review makes it sound like there is a lot going on in FYEO, there is. Maybe too much. Leaving space for all of these other subplots meant that the relationship had to go from zero to sixty pretty fast, and without a lot of time — either page time or narrative time — together. But interestingly, and refreshingly, rather than being a huge burden or barrier, the fact that John and Willa are “older” is used as an explanation for why they don’t want to waste time getting together. Still, the romance plot verges on being just another subplot, and I think the boundary between women’s fiction and romance fiction is pushed a bit with this book.

The writer Antonelli reminds me of more than any other is Jennifer Crusie. A Crusie hallmark is snappy, witty, “romcom-esqe” dialogue. As I was reading, I was picturing many of the scenes on film. Another Cruise hallmark is humor, especially physical humor, and this book is full of spills, trips and splats. Also like Crusie, there are some ongoing food motifs (peanut butter) and a few oddball characters. Thanks to intelligent writing, deft plotting, and fully realized protagonists, I really enjoyed this mature-yet-zany romance.

Note from Natalie: I am absolutely delighted to have another wonderful guest post here at the Radish from The Hypeless Romantic‘s Jessica.

Anna Cowan’s historical romance, Untamed (May 2013, Destiny Books, Penguin Australia) was reviewed here on the Radish by Natalie, who called it Magnificent and Flawed. For a somewhat obscurely published debut, Untamed has been read pretty widely, probably because Romanceland is full of seasoned (not to say jaded) readers on the lookout for something truly unique, and Untamed‘s “cross-dressing duke” is certainly that. The book’s popularity was also helped not a little by the sincere championing by popular authors who know how to use social media (especially Jo Bourne and Ruthie Knox).

To me, one of the most interesting things about Untamed is the reactions it provokes in readers. Some readers praise it to the skies. Others hate it with the passion of a thousand fiery suns. And even reviewers who give it a good to fair grade (B to C in blog lingo, or 3.5 to 2.5 stars in Goodreads/Amazon terms) tend to say it has a mix of the terrific and the terrible. I thought it might be fun to look at some of the reviews to see what romance reviewers were looking for, what worked for them, and what didn’t. Note: there are spoilers in what follows.

Lynn at All About Romance praises Untamed because it is unusual and “plays with gender.” She also likes Cowan’s “distinctive voice,” revealed in “poetic language” and imagery. Finally, Lynn appreciates the setting, both somewhat unusual and well-realized, of the early nineteenth century rural manor house. Similarly, over at Dear Author, Janine says it is “something different, and deserves credit for taking a great many risks, especially with the gendering of the hero,” and praises the “thought-provoking and often beautiful” language. Dabney at Dear Author doesn’t talk about the writing, per se, but she mentions being “transported” by the novel.  She actually doesn’t “give a damn about this book’s sexual politics,” but rather appreciates the hero and heroine as “fascinating, sensual … fabulously unlikely.”

For every reviewer who praises Cowan’s strong voice and the loveliness of her prose, someone disagrees. Over at Badass Romance, Pamela says the writing is uneven:  “At its best, it is sparkling and precise; when it falters, it can be frustrating. Artisanal, yet unruly. … There’s a choppiness when the POV switches unevenly to secondary characters.” Similarly, Kelly at Insta-Love deplores the “random and unsustained POVs from secondary characters popping up at odd times throughout the story.”

A recurring theme among reviewers is the feeling that at times the author was just too opaque, the motivations of the characters too hazy, the plot too full of ellipses. Kaetrin of Kaetrin’s Musings writes, “I felt, for most of the book, like I was playing a particularly elaborate game of cat’s cradle – it had the potential to be anywhere on the scale from a beautiful and magnificent creation to a crazy tangled mess.” Pamela writes, “The writing is at times so oblique that I had to re-read passages…” And over at Karen Knows Best, Willaful says, “I had trouble getting into this at first, because it’s the sort of book I find intimidating – one in which there are many complicated plots and undercurrents, and everyone seems to understands them except me.” Finally, this from GrowlyCub: “For a long while (till about p 270 of 320) I was convinced the cats must have mixed some opiate into my Michelina dinner, because, damn, I had NO clue who all these people were (Sophie? WTH is Sophie? oh, it’s Ma) and what all the allusions and illusions were supposed to tell me.” But RR’s Natalie, while agreeing that the writing was sometimes work, found herself “caught up in and having to unravel her prose to get at the meaning more than once (for some people this is a bug–for me, it’s a feature).”

Looking at reader reactions to the gender experimentation in the novel really gives you a sense of the diversity in Romanceland. Some romance readers, like Lynn Spencer and Janine, enjoyed Untamed in part because of its unusual take on gender. One gets the sense that such readers hope for more of this type of experimentation in the future. But others, like this reader on an All About Romance message board, appreciated the experimental gender politics, not because she hopes the genre moves in that direction, but as an occasional diversion from the norm: “I would not want to read books like this all the time because the traditional gender roles are one of the things that, for me personally, is a central part of reading romance (masculine men, feminine (which can still mean strong) women) – but this book turned it all on its head and I was entranced.” Some readers didn’t care at all about the gendering of the hero and heroine, while others felt its importance (especially the significance of the “cross-dressing”, which was really, to a disguise more than an identity) has been overstated.

Some readers did not appreciate it in the least. Here’s a comment from an Amazon reviewer: “The hero dresses in drag. I’m sorry it’s hard to fall in love with a dude wearing hoop skirts, a giant powdered wig, and makeup.” Sara of At the Window Seat on a Rainy Day, writes, “I know this will make me sound like the biggest square out there; however having Kit and Jude so far outside of the standard roles didn’t work for me. Granted, I was completely engrossed in their story, but the traditionalist in me kept waiting for both characters to do SOMETHING within the normal outlines of Hero and heroine.”  Yasmin M’s one line, one star review at Goodreads — “What in the name of fuck?” — is perhaps the most succinct dismissal of Untamed on this basis.

Some did not feel Cowan went far enough in her experimenting, noting that by creating a feminine hero and a masculine heroine, Cowan merely swapped genders, rather than deconstructing the gender binary. As Pamela puts it, “I’m not sure it’s entirely the swapping of roles that makes this book subversive, since one could view this as reinforcing heteronormative archetypes, even if they are ‘worn’ by the opposite gender.” And as put by Alexis Hall at Goodreads:

…Darlington identifies quite explicitly as unmanly man (and suffers for it, as his father’s hands) but … since his non-manly behaviour seemed to centre around passivity, weakness, fearfulness etc. it just reinforced the notion that masculinity = strength, effeminacy = weakness. Which is, of course, nonsense, as well as being problematic.

However, this reviewer disagrees, praising

how gender neutral both Kit and Jude are written, even so far as their names are interchangeable for the sexes (hers in the abbreviated form). As a reader I come into a story with ideas about what defines a hero or heroine’s role in the story, allowing for very broad interpretations about how those roles will fall under the rules of Man and Woman. Ms. Cowan seemed to throw that rulebook out the window and reformed both her leads into something in between, with both of them having masculine and feminine traits.

One of the most interesting differences of opinion is how warm or cold the story is, how connected emotionally the readers feels to the central love story. Lynn Spencer writes that “while I found the interplays between Kit and Darlington intriguing, I also at times felt disconnected from the story. Darlington uses his words to push people away and this applies to readers as well sometimes.” And in the comments in the Dear Author review, Kay writes, “What does make a difference is whether the novel strikes a balance between being cerebral and moving the reader. UNTAMED, one can say, is cerebral, whether you think that quality is muddy, or clear. But it did not move me; it is, for me, a cold novel.” The five star reviews on Amazon tend to focus not on the experimental nature or the writing, but on how moving this book is: “I laughed with them, cried with them and felt my heart break a little for them at times.” and “Prepare to be so moved that you won’t be able to move” are typical. In her Tumblr, Brontides and books, Daisy-Mai writes, “I really have to commend Cowan for her writing in Untamed. This style was simple but beautifully executed, evoking so much emotion from me that it had in tears at many stages of the book.”

Anyone who liked the book at all tended to like the heroine, Kit. But there is a lot of disagreement over the hero, Jude/Duke of Darlington. Many reviewers loved him as that beloved type of romance hero, the tortured yet vulnerable man with Something Awful in His Past. Others could not get over the fact that Jude’s charm and power were so often described but so rarely in evidence. Still others found his immorality, his selfishness, and his manipulativeness impossible to reconcile with an HEA.

Of the secondary characters, the heroine’s brother-in-law and his relationship to the heroine’s sister are the subject of most readerly disagreement. For DA’s Dabney, the portrayal of BenRuin and Lydia’s relationship was “deft and moving”, and for Pamela, “This secondary hero, the ‘great Scottish lummox,’ nearly overtakes Kit as my favorite character.” But AAR’s Lynn felt that “naming Kit’s brother-in-law Lord BenRuin was just hilariously bad.” For Dear Author reviewer Sunita (who did not review the book but commented on it), BenRuin “was almost a parody of the Highland Scot who is not the hero in a Scottish Historical, and he is described as ‘large and brutish’ early on.” GrowlyCub blames the author more than he character when she describes BenRuin as “1 big lummox of a husband, who desperately loves his wife, but for which we are supposed to detest him…” And Alexis Hall, on Goodreads, admits to the stereotyping, but “really liked” him, despite feeling his reconciliation with wife Lydia was rushed.

As for historical accuracy, reviewers have tended to agree that Untamed takes some serious liberties. Janine writes, “There is no explanation, despite the Regency setting, for why a woman who being publicly divorced would wield tremendous social clout nonetheless. There is no explanation for why a gay couple can show affection to each other in front of others without fear at a time when men were hanged for being homosexual” (although her latter concern is addressed by Maili in the comments, who contends that “Men (and women) can and did show physical and emotional affection towards each other in public including sitting next to each other in a loose embrace, sharing a bed, dining together intimately and such.)”.  And Dabney writes, “The society they best is one that even I, who rarely cares about historical accuracy, found jarringly dubious.” At Femdom books, the anacrhonisms took the reviewer out of the book: “The weakest part of this book is definitely the historical aspect. It seems to be set in a sort of regency-esque world, but it’s never at all clear when (I think this is deliberate). It would have been better set later, maybe late Victorian, as some of the things that the women do in this book (particularly Kit, but also Lady Marmotte) are so anachronistic for the regency style setting, it makes them a little difficult to believe.” But RR’s Natalie says, “Honestly, I don’t care. I often read historical romances as a particular type of speculative fiction, so deviations from what actually happened or how things worked tend to not bother me. Similarly, Lord Rose on Goodreads says, “There were some problems in the historical accuracy that bothered me-the divorce being the largest-although the book as a whole had such a weak sense of time that I could mentally transpose bits around in time and it would hardly change a thing.”

Almost everyone who endeavored to write an actual review of Untamed agrees that summing up this book a single grade is difficult to impossible. Lynn writes, “This book has burned itself pretty far into my memory, but I still found it wickedly hard to grade.” Janine says, “I’ve been wrestling with what to grade this book during the writing of this review, and my failure to come to a firm conclusion has brought me to a split grade.”  Pamela says, “Overall, I’m calling Untamed perfectly IMperfect — by which I mean this debut novel is uneven; flawed in many of the the right ways, and subversive in interesting ways, too.” And at FemDom, “Overall, it’s a difficult book to grade. … I’m conflicted. I didn’t always enjoy this book but it is outstanding – it stands out.”

I am one of those readers who really enjoyed Untamed, although I agree it is a kitchen sink full of  plots, characters, and tropes not entirely consistent with each other or fully fleshed out. Several reviewers say they had one experience reading it and another reviewing it, and I agree this book is very subject to the post-read hangover: the more you think about it, the further away its unique charms subside, the larger its problems loom

Reviewing the reviews, three things stick out.

The first small point is my surprise that no one complained that the hero of this novel had a recent sexual relationship with the heroine’s married sister. Maybe any reader willing to try a cross-dressing duke isn’t going to blink at that?

The second is how deep the level of difference and disagreement goes in romance reading and reviewing. For example, some readers picked this book up hoping for a genre-buster that detonates the gender binary while others were expecting a traditional Regency romance. Both readers read the blurbs, the jacket copy, and knew full well what the book was about. Explaining the difference in part is the fact that some readers viewed the cross-dressing duke as subversive while others felt that since heroines have dressed as men in many a romance novel, this wasn’t so much subversive as broadening a well-used trope. To take another example, some readers could not get into — or even pick up –  Untamed because they want to imagine the hero as their own. There are a lot of websites in Romanceland that feature book boyfriends, with pictures of good looking men who may resemble the heroes as described in romances. They focus in their reviews on how hot a hero is, which often translates to how traditionally masculine he is. None of those websites have reviewed this book yet, despite the major press it got from AAR’s review and Dear Author’s joint review and feature on Cowan. This point just reminds me the many different reasons romance readers might pick up a particular book.

The third is how variable reading and reviewing is. You can take a reader — say, me — who normally doesn’t care a whit for historical accuracy, but if you put a woman of no social consequence in tight breeches with a pig in matching silks on a leash at a ball and have everyone in attendance in awe of her, you’ve lost me (at least at that moment). Or you can take a reader who normally does care about historical accuracy, but give her a love story so moving or writing so beautiful that she can’t be bothered to complain.  So many reviewers resorted to metaphors to describe their complex experience of reading Untamed: a spider web, a jigsaw puzzle, a many-branched bush, a cat’s cradle.  That’s very much how I feel about romance reviewing after writing this post.

Note from Natalie: Donna and I are absolutely delighted to have our very first guest post here at the Radish, by the inimitable Jessica from The Hypeless Romantic. Enjoy!

I had never heard of Bonnie Dee’s New Life, until a gift link appeared in my inbox, courtesy of a friend who thought I would like it. Well, she was right. New Life (Jan. 2013, self-published) is the love story of twenty-somethings Jason Reitmiller and Anna Stevens who meet in an office stairwell where new attorney Anna has taken teary refuge after a disastrous court performance. Jason, the building’s janitor, takes out his earbuds, turns off the floor buffer, and asks her if she’s ok. They have a sweet, funny, promising conversation, each aware of the other’s attractiveness. Later, they invent reasons to run into the each other — not easy, since Jason works second shift — and soon they are dating.

New Life has a somewhat unusual narrative structure: alternating first person perspectives. I happen to really enjoy first person, and this format gave me first person without the downside of never getting inside the other protagonist’ s head.  It’s not gimmicky: no replaying scenes from one point of view and then another, and I enjoyed viewing the development of the romance from two different, but complementary angles.

There’s no good romance without a good conflict or three, and you can probably guess at one of them: differing class status. Early on, Anna refers to Jason dehumanizingly as “the janitor” and fears her employers’ discovery of her growing friendship with him: “The last thing I wanted was for anyone to see me flirting with the janitor.” Although Jason works for a janitorial service, not directly for the law firm, Anna’s colleague orders Jason to do a menial chore that isn’t within his job description. And, later in the book, Anna hesitates to introduce him to her parents as her boyfriend: “Everything about him from his appearance to his job proclaimed ‘underachiever’— the biggest taboo possible in my parents’ book.”

Jason has internalized the low status of his occupation. He can’t seem to tell anyone he is dating a lawyer without seeming to brag, and, mirroring the incredulous response this apparent romantic mismatch elicits, he frequently asks himself “Why in the world would a successful career woman be interested in a janitor?” But Anna’s romantic interest in Jason has, at the same time, the opposite effect: it helps him to see himself in a more positive light, to feel good about himself. And now we’ve come to a second barrier closely connected to Jason’s class status: he experiences a host of cognitive and physical disabilities as a result of a traumatic brain injury he sustained in a car accident.

If having a hero who is a janitor isn’t unusual enough, here’s a list of the challenges Jason faces: aphasia (difficulty finding the right word), motor (stiff hip and leg), memory (both short and long term), impulse control, vomiting when anxious, depressive episodes, headache, fatigue, sensitivity to light and sound, and self-image issues due to scarring on face and torso. It’s not hard to see how these challenges generate smaller conflicts, for example, when Anna suggests a loud dance club for their first date, or when Jason is reluctant to disrobe during sex.

If this were a less ambitious book, Anna’s love would fix all of Jason’s health challenges, and his class status would amount to a temporary barrier, much like “surprise nobility” in a historical romance. But Jason’s accident occurred three years prior to the start of the novel, and his disabilities are unlikely to disappear.  Recovery is not the road his character needs to travel:

Anyway, that’s not the story I want to tell. Who really needs to hear about comas and thousands of hours of rehab? My story begins the night I was cleaning black shoe marks off the floor, which could be any night since my life became all about industrial cleaners and swabbing toilets. This particular night, I was buffing the corridor floor of the office building where I clean. I remember the Naked Farmers blasting through my headphones, when I saw a woman sitting in the stairwell, head down, shoulders hunched and shaking.

A third thing about Jason that is unusual in romance is, sadly, a potential deal breaker for many romance readers. He can behave badly. Without putting in a spoiler, I’ll just say quite badly, and you can picture both of my eyebrows raised as I do. I liked this, because the tendency to hold disabled heroes up as paragons of naive virtue is one not all romance authors have managed to avoid. Jason has little memory of his life prior to the accident (perhaps the least medically realistic feature of this portrayal of TBI, but very consistent with the literary genre), but discovers that he was not exactly a prince. One of the big challenges of recovery from TBI involves personal identity: is Jason the same person he was before the accident?  If not, which Jason is the “real” one? If he acts impulsively, is that “Jason” or “Jason’s disability”, and how would he know? Questions of personal identity, and especially the question of his moral character, preoccupy Jason:

I can admit when I’ve been a dick. I just can’t seem to stop doing crap like that. It’d be easy to call it part of the impulse control issues brain-damaged people are prone to, but my little sister, Katie, will tell you I’ve always been a douche.

Later, he wonders, “Maybe I’m a jerk at the core.” But New Life raises the question, not just for Jason but for Anna, and for the reader, what is anyone’s “core”? Is acting out of character a sign of our hidden “true self” or a deviation from it? What part of any of us are the unique circumstances, luck, and other aspects of our lives we don’t fully control?

Although Jason’s disabilities are made manifest throughout the text (and, actually, that is one criticism I would make: he rarely acts without being described in a way that brings to light the challenges he faces), the novel consistently normalizes them, or at least places them on a continuum with the challenges anyone without a disability might face. For example, in their first meeting, Jason evidences his halting speech pattern, while Anna describes how she lost track of what she was saying in court and babbles. Jason has his lists (“repatterning”), but Anna engages in “life mapping”.  Jason was only a 21 year old college student who had yet to shed his adolescent selfishness and lack of empathy when his life became focused on mere survival, then recovery. And although New Life is not marketed as “new adult”, the protagonists are younger than I tend to see in recent contemporary romance. They are both just starting out, experiencing their first intense adult romantic relationship, finding a career, and dealing with new financial and emotional independence from their parents. Although in some ways Jason’s journey is very unusual, in other ways his challenges are similar to Anna’s (especially apparent as Anna herself makes some impulsive and hurtful choices) and to any other 24 year old.

Eventually, the question of what part is core personality versus what part is brain injury becomes moot. Jason has to adapt, grow, and change if he wants to live a fully human life, which in a romance novel means developing a deep, meaningful romantic relationship. Many survivors of trauma would object to the way I framed the identity question in the last paragraph, insisting that identity is fundamentally relational, and that therefore rebuilding a self after trauma requires others to bear witness and to actively co-construct  a new narrative.  The way Jason’s relationship with Anna helps him grow in his other relationships — family, friends — is a testament to that idea.

Although there is a fairly high amount of conflict compared to happy moments in New Life, I think the author does a good job showing the attraction Anna feels to Jason.  If the development of her romantic feelings aren’t portrayed as fully as I might have liked, that may be because in general the character of Anna takes a back seat to Jason. The first chapter gives hints of some of Anna’s solo struggles: imposter syndrome, the worry that she’s become a lawyer merely to get to the next rung on the ladder of her parents’ expectations, etc., but none of these bear fruit, and as a result, her character was developed almost entirely in terms of her relationship with Jason. Because I didn’t have as clear a sense as I wanted of who Anna is, I did feel that the HEA while believable, was not, as Jo Beverley once put it at a conference, triumphant.

But New Life was a very rewarding read, with interesting facets I have not even touched upon in this already too long review. True, New Life is not a light fluffy romance. And although the bedroom door stays open, those who seek a lot of sex scenes in their romance should look elsewhere. I often think there is a line of “realism” romances just can’t cross and still work as romances. New Life pushed this line further than I would have thought possible.