Harlequin have recently begun a new romance sub-genre. Teenage Romance tells youthful stories of teenagers who have yet to acquire the neuroses and resentments toward the opposite sex that twenty and thirty-something characters are constantly thwarted by. When a thirty-two year-old divorced male, with rugged sexiness and a weary attitude towards relationships because of his previous fruitless and bitter marriage, meets a twenty-seven year old lady with shoulder length curly hair and bottomless emerald eyes sparks will naturally fly. When their instant attraction turns to emotional attachment the reader knows she is only one hundred and eighty pages away from the couple finding love, after some shenanigans known technically as the, We-can't-do-this-for-infuriatingly-unidentifiable-reasons-that-would-be-the-result-of-our-personalities-had-we-any-personalities conundrum.
Teenage boys can't be rugged, or divorced. Teenage girls can't have built-up mistrust of men because of a previous failed love affair. Teenage romance cannot end with marriage as that would be unrealistic. Pregnancy, maybe. Finally, for now, teenagers don't have characteristics and haven't been screwed over nearly enough to justify two hundred pages of dithering. Modern kids want everything immediately because of the instant gratification of MTV, Facebook and microwave cooking. Twilight was canny enough to add the supernatural element to undercut the noticeable lack of credibility to every one of Bella's decisions, but Mills & Boon authors face a tough battle in bringing honesty to teenage romance fiction. Fortunately for quality, September's releases include Past Midnight, the story of a teenage ghost-hunting girl. There is also Unraveled, a new mini-series from Gena Showalter about a teenage girl recently moved to Crossroads who falls for a werewolf whose girlfriend is a vampire. To further distance itself from a popular franchise no one is comparing it to the supernatural beasts of Unraveled have the ability to time-travel, raise the dead, possess minds and tell the future. For pity's sake, the world.
Still, it is a major achievement of this little web-log that as soon as we suggest a teen romance genre the Mills & Boon website claims to have had one all along, which no one would have seen if they hadn't been actively searching for it. Coincidence? Proof that people are starting to listen to Bewildered Heart? A mistaken belief that the genre only appeared after it was mentioned on the back of an article written about a successful book series that was first published years ago? Well, perhaps we were misguided with a slight sense of self-importance, but wait. There's more. We have, on many occasions, criticised the structure of a Mills & Boon for the limitations it puts on the author, and the harm it does to a novel when things such as challenging plotting are removed for the sake of minimizing word count. In turn, this causes a particular problem most of the books have. They are needlessly long and poorly edited, because complex narratives work against their ambitions. The story is reduced to its most basic simplicities and then stretched out interminably to the detriment of the characters' supposed intelligence and the reader's supposed sanity.
And so, there has been a call of sorts for the potential of romantic novellas. Appropriate names include Tight Shorts and Revealing Briefs. Scarcely had this rallying call been rallied than a Harlequin short story collection been published only a year before these words were first read by you, our only reader. This isn't so much coincidental as it is stealing ideas and the food from the mouths of Bewildered Heart's children. Tori Carrington is the pseudonym used by a husband and wife writing partnership, named Lori and Tony Karayianni, and this couple is merely the invention of a super-computer based inside a hollow mountain in West Virginia. The Sofie Metropolis series is also by Carrington and perhaps you know what that is. At this site we are more interested in their numerous Harlequin Blaze novels. One of their more recent attempts is A Few Good Men (Love that cover!), a linked set of four short stories, each concerning a male soldier on leave from whatever war the United States currently fights. In the prologue Cyprus is mentioned, and why not, there is probably an American military presence on Cyprus.
A helicopter brings the boys home for some R & R, which stands for relaxation and something else beginning with r. The men include Eric, Eddie, Matt and Brian. The book is then broken into four fifty page chunks, each dedicated to a male hero. We begin with Eric Armstrong, who has been communicating electronically with a mysterious gal who goes by the name Samantha, and Samantha has been leading Eric on a sexy dance until she learned he was returning home, at which point she vanished from the internet. Now safe on American soil Eric learns the name of his dream woman from an army computer whiz, and to his horror it is the one woman he could not believe it could have been, even though it seems entirely predictable that it could only have been her. Yes, Samantha is in fact Sara, the widow of Eric's best friend, Andy, who had died saving Eric's life during a war. Eric always harboured feelings for Sara, but could never act upon his urges. Now with his best friend dead and Sara freshly single, there is nothing to stop him except a moral code. Still, seeing Sara in the flesh, wearing a jumper, pushing strands of blonde hair behind her ear, patting a dog on a beach he is infatuated once more and determined to make her his.
Sara, widowed and doted upon by Andy's parents, has a little more to risk by beginning a steamy romance with Eric, but you wouldn't know it from the purple prose. They kiss within ten seconds of Eric's arrival and shortly after have fallen into bed, fitting into each other's bodies like it was meant to be and exploding with pleasure in ways left up to the reader's imagination. The next day guilt has returned and Sara and Eric cannot face their exploits or even themselves. Nevertheless, that evening they mate, their words, again only to break up when Eric asks Sara to follow him to Texas for the brief period before he returns to a battlefield. After a few days the narrative thankfully skips over, Sara does arrive in Texas and Eric's story is laid to rest, with merciful succinctness. There was bad dialogue, there were unlikeable characters with severe emotional dilemmas that were quickly overcome through the use of bad dialogue, there was a dog, there were two sex scenes and there was a happy ending where woman in car meets man on horse and they stare devotedly at each other, finally able to submit to domesticity. All over and done with after forty-nine pages, leaving the reader time to get on with the rest of their day. The rest of their day presumably involves reading the next part of A Few Good Men, entirely defeating the point of the short stories saving them time.
No comments:
Post a Comment