Setting: This contemporary is set in a city in the US. It doesn’t matter where.
Heroine: Lucy Fairchild, Esq., heiress, 30 years old. Lives at home with her domineering father.
Hero: Jake Dalton, former abused boy, self-made contractor
Plot: Not much of one to speak of. Lucy needs to get out from under the thumb of her controlling father.
Conflict: Lucy’s father thinks Jake is beneath her. Jake has self-esteem issues. And there are some misunderstandings.
Word on the Web:
Dev’s Good Reads, Very Good
Racy Romance Review: I have read one other Burton book, Riding Wild, a year ago. I bought it at a bookstore adjacent to campus while in the middle of the most grueling 3 day interview I have ever experienced, and recall feeling terrified that one of my potential future employers would see me with it (I’ve gotten more mature about this since I started blogging). That enjoyable book got me through one of those long sleepless nights and I made a note to read another one by this author someday.
I knew I was going to have trouble with this book 5 seconds into it. Lucy is catcalled by Jake’s employees. Instead of taking their picture and putting them up on HollaBack, Lucy has a polite word with them. Jake enters the scene, defends the men, and call Lucy a snob for not feeling complimented. And Lucy is chagrined. But not so chagrined that she fails to notice how handsome Jake is.
There were some sweet moments (the first trampoline love scene I have ever read) and some humor (Lucy gets drunk at Jake’s house and he teases her about what they may have done the next morning), and the characters were quite honest with each other, but overall, this one did not work for me. I’ll do my best to explain why.
I had a hard time figuring out who Lucy was. Lucy is vulnerable, passive, etc. as you would expect from a 30 year old woman who lives at home, has no life, and has a father who has always pushed her around and who realistically thinks he can get her to marry someone of his choosing. When Lucy feels sexy, it’s a “feminine delight”, or a “tiny feminine thrill”. We’re told that she is a Fearless Fairchild, but we never see this in action until the very end. In fact, Lucy doesn’t want to be a lawyer, she wants to be a kindergarten teacher. Lucy holds a baby for the first time in her life and she feels “a maternal urge to protect this child unlike anything she’d ever experienced. Was this a natural feeling? Did all women feel this way?” In short, Lucy goes from being Daddy’s girl to Jake’s woman, and this is just not my kind of heroine.
Jake is characterized mostly by his status as self-made. He has a manly bedroom and a natural look: no girly hair gel for him. His masculinity is signaled by his class status (jeans and BBQ) and his unfemininity. This is a typical Jake thought: “He never got mushy. That was for women, or men who were too weak to hide their emotions. What the hell was happening to him here?
Later, Jake thinks:
There it was again, that tugging on his heart. Oh, man, he needed a drink. And maybe a stiff dose of some testosterone before he ended up dropping to his knees in front of Lucy and begging her to marry him and bear his children.
Luckily, Lucy shares Jake’s view of her own gender, making them a good match:
Ugh. She was such a … woman. Damn estrogen anyway.
Jake’s conflict at first was his need to work really hard to grow his company, rather than fall in love, but that sort of disappeared. Then it was that Lucy was “way out of his league”, “him, the lowly toad, and her, practically a princess.” Jake had some self-esteem issues stemming from an abusive childhood, but rather than being addressed or resolved, I felt they, too, just faded away. So, his character arc felt to me like more errand day than a narrative journey I could believe in.
The major conflict was generated by two things: the class difference and Lucy’s father. I felt that the portrayal of the class issues was done in very broad strokes that threw me out of the story. For example:
“How many times had [her father] tried to drum into her head that the Fairchilds were the elite? The elite who did not, under any circumstances, mix with the lower classes.”
My experience with the very rich is that they pay no attention to class differences, because they don’t have to. But YMMV. Mr. Fairchild was the evil father who wants to use his daughter as a pawn in his scheme to merge with another company. He had no other motivations or character traits. I prefer a little more dimension in my villains.
There were also some little things that bugged me. For example, Jake compares Lucy’s hair to butter, which stuck in my mind because it was so unusual. But then, a few scenes later he compares her skin to butter as well. I started to wonder if he had a dairy fetish. Another example: they are dancing and Lucy says, “You really can dance”. Then, a page later the dance ends and she says, “You really can dance”. If I had been Jake, I would have immediately retorted, “I know. You just said that five minutes ago.”
I guess I felt like some shorthands were being relied on to move the story and develop the characters.
- Upper class men = snobby/effeminate/artificial/conceited
- Working class = humble/masculine/natural
- Career/assertive woman/childfree = unfeminine/unfulfilled
- Vulnerable/traditional female occupation/mother/smallness/delicateness = feminine.
Since I don’t believe any of those things personally, those linkages only work for me when I really believe in the individual characters, that they could be sitting next to me. That didn’t happen here.
If you enjoy those kinds of romances, you might really like this one. For me, the next Burton I read will be another in the Riding Wild series.
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#1 by RfP on April 27, 2009 - 7:36 pm
Errand day? As in a day on which one writes down all sorts of specious things, only to cross them off the list for a bogus sense of accomplishment?
BTW, on the cover the heroine looks oddly tall. The strange up-skirt shot does her no favors. Looks like another case of cover art designed for the male gaze.
#2 by Jessica on April 27, 2009 - 8:22 pm
RfP wrote:
You’re right! Everyone knows that the penis has to press into the woman’s belly! I read this on my Kindle, so I never even looked at the picture.
#3 by RfP on April 27, 2009 - 9:36 pm
But, but, but then how can his masculinity snuggle perfectly against her femininity as if made for one another? (Srsly, I swear I’ve read that scene, and more than once.)
#4 by Ann Somerville on April 27, 2009 - 11:00 pm
“If I had been Jake, I would have immediately retorted, “I know. You just said that five minutes ago.””
Ugh. A good editor would have caught that. And how can hair look like butter? (Yellow and greasy? Hello, not sexy!)
I don’t read het as a rule, and this book reminds me of all the reasons I don’t. Stereoptypical gender roles and female authors reinforcing the patriarchy, I can really do without.
#5 by Janine on April 27, 2009 - 11:52 pm
I haven’t read this book so I can’t say whether I would feel the same way about it, but this type of categorization is another reason why I tend not to read as much contemporary romance as other subgenres. I’ve noticed that these types of messages come across more strongly to me in contemporaries, on average that is. There are exceptions, of course.
#6 by Laura Vivanco on April 28, 2009 - 3:46 am
“BTW, on the cover the heroine looks oddly tall. The strange up-skirt shot does her no favors. Looks like another case of cover art designed for the male gaze.”
Lucy is on her tiptoes, in high heels, while doing a complicated tango move with Jake. You can tell it’s tango because of the raised knee. There is no other possible explanation. Why else would Lucy repeat that Jake “really can dance” if it’s not of vital importance? It must be. And that’s why they’re dancing on the cover, too.
#7 by Jill Sorenson on April 28, 2009 - 10:17 am
Why would anyone design romance cover art for the male gaze?
#8 by RfP on April 28, 2009 - 11:25 pm
I have no idea.*
To be fair, maybe it’s the gay female gaze. Or the 22% of readers RWA says are men. Or the female-reader-who-self-inserts-into-the-story-and-has-exhibitionist-urges demographic? Regardless, I’ve never understood all the up-skirt shots on contemporary covers. (E.g. in this common cover shot the skirt is sometimes made shorter, sometimes longer.)
OTOH I don’t really get the man-titty covers either. So maybe it’s just me being unexpectedly prudish.
* ooh wait, I do remember reading the (possibly apocryphal) story that romance buyers were originally men, so the covers were designed to appeal to them. There we have it: the reason for all the cleavage shots on historicals and up-skirt shots on contemporaries. And shoe-fetishist shots on chick lit covers. And… where to stop?
#9 by Jill Sorenson on April 29, 2009 - 2:19 pm
I like sexy lady covers.
#10 by Kate on April 29, 2009 - 4:25 pm
Janine wrote:
Agreed. I get hyper-critical of characters in contemporaries while I don’t necessarily in the historicals. Irrational, yes, though I think my mind can justify the milksop doormat feminine heroine-type in the occasional historical. Granted, I don’t like the gender stereotypes that Jessica listed anywhere, but I have a much harder time swallowing them in contemporaries.