~ buy this book ~
I feel as if this Pillow Talk is a bit unfair: Rainbows and Raptures isn’t in print. And Rebecca Paisley isn’t writing romances anymore. But there are copies out there - and if you can find one, snatch it up. Rainbows and Raptures is that very rare beast, a book of genre fiction that breaks cardinal rules, and still manages to stay primly within its boundaries. Just think of all the silent rules that govern romance as a genre. A lot of them have been broken down in the last decade (interracial romance used to be a no-no-now interspecies romance is commonplace). But some are holding firm, and Rebecca Paisley boldly went where few writers go, and did it brilliantly.
Russia Valentine is a prostitute. Yes, she has a heart of gold. And yes, she’s managed to stay remarkably innocent. But she’s a prostitute and the book opens with a scene in which one of her johns gives her such a hard-luck story that she ends up charging him nothing. In fact…she gives him all the money she has.
You know right there that we’re in Julie Garwood territory, by which I mean those lovely early Garwoods, in which a medieval heroine would embroider a tapestry in one afternoon, while calming the hero’s untameable stallion and seducing her unwilling husband. Garwood and Paisley get around pesky details to do with reality by creating such terrifically charming heroines that we succumb and “suspend our disbelief,” as T.S. Eliot had it. I’m not saying that Paisley makes the life of a sex worker (the politically correct term for a soiled dove) to be all roses. Russia’s scarred childhood put her where she is, and she needs a prince charming. But she makes Russia so funny and lively that we don’t think too hard about the tough nature of her job.
Paisley challenges herself when it comes to the Prince Charming too. Who does Russia get? A scarred, nasty, gunslinger named Santiago Zamora. He hates prostitutes. Actually he hates almost everyone.
It’s a classic romance set-up in terms of opposites - but this plot can only work if the author makes Russia into the reader’s best friend. The prostitute next door. And Paisley does it, brilliantly. Russia has more personality than fifty regular romance heroines; she’s given to descriptions that made me laugh aloud: “I’m hungrier’n a woodpecker with a sore pecker.” Even a brooding hero like Santiago has to start laughing with Russia shrieking at him: “You could shoot the balls off a flea, and he wouldn’t never even know he’d been gelded!” There’s been a lot of sorrow in Russia’s life, and yet she never succumbs, but pulls herself together. When Santiago says he doesn’t want to deal with her tears, she bites back: “Well, let’s do something fun, then. We’ll play horse. I’ll be the front end, and you jist be yourself.”
Eudora Welty would envy some of these metaphors. For me, I was just sad when the book ended. In fact, to put it in Russia’s own words, my heart was heavier’n a bucket o’hog livers. I can’t think of a better way to spend a lazy summer afternoon than by getting your hands on this book, by hook or by crook, and gobbling it up. I’ll leave you with a brilliant bit of Russia:
Look, I ain’t never rided a horse in my life, and I feel like I been chewed up and spit out. I’m so thirsty I’d suckle a she-bear, and my stomach’s emptier’n panties hang’ on a clothesline. I ain’t had me a bath in four days. Lord, I prob’ly smell like I got sheepherders’ socks and dead fish in my back pocket. And worstest o’ al, you meaner’n-a-cornered-cottonmouth varmint, I miss my ox.
