Read React Review

My take in brief: Riddle me this, Batman: How can the same book have both too many words and too few?

Cover comment: Does drool pose a threat to a keyboard?

Series? Yes, this brings together Jackson’s many Westmoreland and Steele family titles. List of all the Westmorelands at here.

Hero and Heroine: Quade Westmoreland, age 36, member of a wealthy Atlanta family, former Presidential Security forces, recently retired and planning to open a security firm. Cheyenne Steele, age 23, model and Secret Service agent, from loving and wealthy Steele family of North Carolina.

Plot: After a one night stand in Egypt with Quade, Cheyenne becomes pregnant with triplets. She keeps this a secret from Quade, whose last name she doesn’t even know, and whom she had not seen since. Quade finds out, and travels to NC to marry Cheyenne, then divorce her on the QT in a few months.

Why I decided to start reading African American romance: I watched a hilarious video at Karen Scott’s blog. That led me to the Top 10 Reasons White People Should Read Books By Black People at White Readers Meet Black Authors. If those don’t convince you, nothing will.

Distinctive feature: Hero has a panty fetish, about which I learned while writing this review (I swear). Apparently, things have gotten tougher for panty fetishers since EBay banned the sale of used underwear, but the panty-challenged can still buy used underwear online, from folks like these guys (NWS).

Word on the Web:

Romance in Color, 4+ (very positive)

E-harlequin, Christa, good+

Amazon.com, 4 stars after 21 reviews

The Racy Romance Review:

Brenda Jackson has published over 40 romances on the Silhouette Desire, Kimani, HQN, St. Martin’s Griffin and other lines. Yet, as Karen Scott’s undercover investigation reveals, you can find her in Borders in the African American Literature section.

I really liked the premise of this book.  The chance of conceiving triplets naturally is 1 in 8,000, but multiples run in Quade’s family. It’s also believable that two beautiful strangers can meet in an exotic setting, and have great no-string-attached sex, that she can conceive thanks to a contraception malfunction, that she would not want the father involved, that the father could, in fact, find out, especially if the mother is a model who appears pregnant on the cover of a magazine, and that he would attempt to establish a relationship with his children.

Unfortunately, I found Jackson’s style of writing not to my taste. I kept wanting to eliminate words as I read, thinking, “Ok, you’ve only got 175 pages to get this done. You don’t have a letter to spare!”

Here are a few examples from the first 30 pages. Let me know if you think I shouldn’t quit my day job for a career in romance editing any time soon (i.e. that I am full of beans). I bolded what, in Jessica’s Kingdom of Editing, would have been deleted, and italicized the words that make the bolded material redundant:

I just met you barely five minutes ago.

Her hands, the ones he was was still holding, felt warm.

He heard her moan, and likewise, he moaned, too.

I’ve hired a nanny for the babies to assist me.

Typically, Taylor was the one known to stay out of everyone else’s business.

Also, I think a reader would get more out of this book if she had read some other Westmorelands or Steeles first.  So many times, Quade explained his motivations in terms of his membership in the Westmoreland family. It was like his entire identity was based on being a Westmoreland. And at least 12 characters from those families are introduced. It’s hard to tell them apart since every one of them is incredibly rich, beautiful, talented, loving, warm, and fertile.

The main conflict in the book is that Cheyenne wants to raise the kids alone and Quade wants to marry her to “give them all a name”. But within a few hours of reuniting, the conflict becomes: Cheyenne loves him and doesn’t want to accept Quade’s marriage proposal unless he loves her too. This all happens, and is resolved, within a day or two of their reuniting. I think I needed about 50 more pages for all of that.

I believe that love can happen very fast, but the part that doesn’t work for me is the one night stand. If the sex was that mindblowing, then why didn’t they so much as exchange last names or cell numbers before splitting up? Even if only to have more sex when they both returned to the States? And never seek each other out afterwards?

Something I did really enjoy was the scene when Quade comes to see Cheyenne for the first time after the babies are born. In another book, Cheyenne would have done something stupid, like tell Quade they weren’t his kids. They are incredibly straightforward and honest with one another. And their attraction was also very compelling and believable.

I’ve read a few Silhouete Desires, and I liked this about as much as the others, which is to say, not too much. Was there anything about this book besides the black cover model and one or two descriptions of skin tone that made this different from those other categories? Not that I could tell. I bought this one at Target and there it was along with all the other categories for December.

One distinctive feature of this novel was frequent references to the potency of the hero’s sperm. A lot of myths about the connection between penis size, vigorous sex, and likelihood of conception, as well as about the relative activity and passivity of the male and female contributions to conception, were perpetuated. For example, in one scene, “his engorged member actually broke through the latex”.  I found this unusual in my romance reading, but I doubt it’s related to the fact that the author and characters are black.

So, I got interested in the question of what does make a book an example of African American romance. I found a very interesting article (circa 2001) about this by Gwendolyn E. Osborne here, She quotes another article by Gwynne Forster at Affair de Coeur here, who opines:

What makes characters uniquely African American is their perspective of the world around them; their optimism, and tenacious pursuit of dreams and goals in the presence of towering social impediments; and the ability to laugh at awesome obstacles, or to ignore them and, often, climb over them.

This definition doesn’t work for this book, since Quade and Cheyenne dealt with no social impediments.

Probably every African American romance counts as such for different reasons.

One more link: Laura Vivanco of Teach Me Tonight has a Short History of the African American romance, with links to important discussions (circa 2005) at All About Romance on finding African American romance, shelving it, etc.

I have in hand Jackons’s latest Kimani, Fire and Desire, a Madaris Family Novel, and am looking forward to reading this longer work by her.

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