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Pillow Talk reviews are taken from books I love, and books I heartily recommend you should read. Every month readers discuss the current Pillow Talk on the Bulletin Board - it's my own Book Club! Please feel free to join in. ~ Eloisa

 

Lost & Found by Jayne Ann Krentz

~buy this book~

There are days when one wants to read about a truly heroic type of guy — a swashbuckling cowboy who sweeps women off their feet and dashes villains into the sides of buildings and generally breathes testosterone.

Cue Jayne Ann Krentz! I adore her muscled explorers, especially the men in her futuristic paranormals. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but the future (like the past) is a great place to play out an un-pc, not-quite-so-feminist-as-one-would-want type of scenario. The men are big and strong, and the women are smart, if not quite so strong. These are relationships I wouldn’t want to be in (the men are by definition no good at dishes, let alone grocery shopping), but they’re huge fun to read about.

When Krentz writes contemporaries, she can’t reproduce that particular scenario, as her readers would likely end up despising the heroine for being a weak little twit. But Krentz is wonderful at getting enough of the dangerous gun-slinger into the present so that the thrill is there. So, if you like an alpha male who’s not insanely aggressive (ala J.R. Ward and Feehan), definitely try one of Krentz’s contemporaries.

Lost and Found is a good place to start. Krentz’s contemporary heroines tend to be artistic and not particularly practical (though very talented and intelligent). This allows the hero to be a strong, fairly silent type without going head-to-head with the heroine on an hourly basis. In Lost and Found, Cady Briggs is an expert at finding missing antiques. But a death in her family lands her in charge of a prestigious art and antiques gallery, Chatelaine’s. Typically, Cady doesn’t want to be CEO of the gallery. “I’m happy with my little art consulting business,” she moans. She ends up hiring the ultimate CEO type, Mark Easton to help her figure out the problems at Chatelaine’s — and incidentally, whether there’s a murderer lurking in the background.

Mark has alpha stamped on his forehead, with all the coding of the strong, silent hero: “He was a compelling if enigmatic figure, his expression unreadable in the darkness.” When Cady interrupts an antiques robbery in progress, he takes out three robbers in a page or two. Naturally, he’s annoyed by the desire he feels for Cady, since guys like this generally envision themselves striding alone into the sunset. Delicious!

Krentz turns to a similar match-up in other contemporaries: Falling Awake pairs a dream interpreter with a strong-willed, powerful investigator; Grand Passion puts together the owner of a small inn and a former CEO of a huge hotel chain. Dependable is not a word that any of us want applied to ourselves and our work (let alone our children). But think about it: isn’t that what we really want in a spouse? And isn’t that what we want in a favorite author too?

 

Private Arrangements by Sherry Thomas

Private Arrangments by Sherry ThomasIf you’ve read even half my books, you’ll guess that I find marriage a far more fascinating human condition than courtship. During courtship a couple knows little of each other and hopes for much; passion, dislike and affection all sprout in varying amounts. That can be interesting. In a marriage, a couple generally knows a great deal more, and the usual threesome, passion, dislike and affection, are deeply ingrained. That can be fascinating.

To my mind, a romance about a marriage starts out best when dislike is at the forefront. Engaged couples dislike each other on such puerile grounds. Often they mistook their beloved’s character. Thinking her future husband was a spendthrift gambler, the heroine throws away her ring, only to find that her fiancĂ© spends his afternoons tenderly nurturing orphans. Right. Problem solved.

But a married couple? They know each other. They really know each other. And consequently, they can truly dislike each other. Look what a challenge that is for the romance writer: how to bring back together a couple, when neither is fooled about the other person’s worst character trait? How to overcome what might be years of active dislike and - perhaps worse - indifference?

A novel of mine that fell most clearly in this category was Your Wicked Ways. I hugely enjoyed writing that novel. From the moment I picked up Private Arrangements, I had the sense that the author enjoyed writing the book: relished the challenge, took it on, and succeeded! Did I mention that this is a first book, a debut?

They Tremaines live on separate continents. Camden Seybrook, Marquess of Tremaine, returns to England when his wife (after ten years’ separation) demands a divorce. He announces that he’ll give it to her on one condition: that she grant him an heir. If not, he’ll expose every sin she ever indulged. And do these two dislike each other? Check this out:

“You produce an heir and I will allow the divorce to proceed. Otherwise I will name parties to your adultery. You do know that you cannot divorce me on grounds of adultery if you happen to have committed the same sin, don’t you?”

Her ears rang. “Surely you jest. You want an heir from me? Now?”

“I couldn’t stand the thought of bedding you before now.”

“Really?” she laughed, though she’d have preferred to smash an inkwell against his temple. “You liked it well enough last time.”

“The performance of a lifetime,” he said easily. “And I was a good thespian to begin with.”

Yup, that’s the kind of fight only a married couple can have: no holds barred and straight to the jugular.

 

The Memory of Water by Karen White

I have a weakness for gothic romances. I used to love them when I was in high school. Back then, they were published as slender paperbacks featuring a girl in a nightgown, her hair whipping behind her. She was usually leaning into the wind at an odd angle, turning around to stare back at the huge house behind her, looming like a big, huge….um…phallic symbol.

What those books did brilliantly was bring into play the creepiness that accompanies a truly alpha male. The truth is that most American women love to read about Christine Feehan’s and J.R. Ward’s wounded warriors, but they go home to nice men who know their way around the dishwasher. We love alpha, but that kind of uber-alpha? OK for fiction. In gothics, there’s the serious chance that someone you love - someone you’re falling in love with, perhaps - is crazy. Really crazy. Murderously crazy.

Gothics take that distrust and put it squarely in the middle of the picture. Then gothics disappeared. So where did that slightly creepy, falling-in-love, weirded out sensation go? I think it went South, literally. Southern novels seem to be able to skirt the edges of normal, and suggest that fear and love sometimes go hand-in-hand.

I just finished reading Karen White’s The Memory of Water. It’s creepy, all right. This is from the first page, when the heroine is thinking about the Atlantic Ocean:

I tried to forget the sting of salt water in my eyes, the slippery feel of the tide pulling the sand out from under my feet. Of being underwater and not able to breathe as water rolled over me, cascaded around me in a watery rug, sucking the air from my lungs. And the feeling of my mother’s hands slowly letting me go.

Ooooo! I read this at night. I should say: I kept reading this most of the night. This is a love story that wades right into the question of craziness. The heroine, Marnie, has come back to her childhood home for the first time in ten years. In that time, she hasn’t even spoken to her sister Diana. But once she comes home, secrets start unraveling…

The Memory of Water is a beautifully written book, in which the ocean sings throughout - as a dangerous force, as a place of beauty, as a monster to conquer in a sailboat. Like any good gothic heroine, Marnie falls in love with the wrong man (her sister’s ex-husband), and also like those heroines, she learns to control her own fear. There’s a lot here about mothers and their ability to injure their children; there’s also a lot about mother’s love, and its enduring, fierce nature. Once this book starts racing toward the end I challenge you to put it down!