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Word on the Web:

Keishon, Avid Book Reader, C

Jane really didn’t deserve Chase. No, seri­ously, she didn’t. He was too patient while she fig­ured it all out. Bot­tom line is that Jane annoyed me roy­ally hence the C grade.

Dear Author, Jane, B+

It’s really beautiful to see Jane gain her courage and embrace her confidence at the end of the story.

Monkey Bear Reviews, Sarah, B+ (see this link for links to more reviews)

I love Victoria Dahl’s signature style. Her characters are flawed and she doesn’t provide moonlight and roses at the end of her books. For fans of hot contemporary romance, I can highly recommend Lead Me On.

All About Romance, Jean Wren,  B-,

Chase is as much therapist as he is comfort food, friend, and blow-up doll, and the book is all about Jane’s problems, Jane’s prejudices, Jane’s insecurities. … I’m pretty sure their relationship will even out, but the journey towards the happy ending is too unequal for my preference.

Babbling About Books, Katiebabs, B

There are some moments of humor in Lead Me On, especially when you find out what Jane’s true name is and the way Chase tries to understand Jane’s desperate need for physical love. Chase refuses to be a stud service for Jane and he confronts her every chance he can get. Their encounters are steamy even though I would have liked a bit more of them over the investigating they do together in regard to Jessie.

Racy Romance Review:

Readers of Dahl’s Tumble Creek trilogy have met Jane Morgan, administrative assistant Quinn Jennings, the architect hero of book two, Start Me Up. Jane appears to be a very straight laced young woman. As we meet her in LMO, she is at dinner, unceremoniously dumping her high profile attorney boyfriend. In short order, she meets and becomes attracted to William Chase, a demolition expert doing some work for her boss. Chase is the opposite of the kind of professional, conservative man Jane wants to date: big, brawny, tattooed, jeans-wearing, working class. But she can’t help but be attracted to him, and they begin what she views as a no strings one night stand.

Jane has a background she is embarrassed by: her trailer park upbringing, her mother’s marriages to prison inmates, her rough and tumble motorcycle riding family, her step father’s rap sheet, and her brother’s brushes with the law. Jane suffers from a paralyzing fear that her background will be discovered — she’s even changed her name from the hysterically amusing one her mother gave her — and it’s prevented her from accepting her own past mistakes, her imperfect but loving family, and from developing honest, deep relationships, platonic or otherwise, with the people in her new life. At one point, Quinn comforts her and she thinks, “If he knew the real her—the brash, angry girl who’d grown up in half a dozen trailer parks—he wouldn’t be so sure of his opinion.”

There are some very funny bits in this book, although it’s more serious than the first two in the series. Here’s an example of the humor:

“Why is there a heavy bag in your spare bedroom?”
Jane looked up from the book she was reading to try to take her mind off her worry. The book wasn’t working. Neither was the movie playing on television.
“I box for exercise.”
“Really? Boxing? That’s kind of hot.”
“You say that about a lot of things.”
“Seriously, you sweating and half-naked while you beat the shit out of that big red bag? That’s hot.”
“Why would I be half-naked?”
“Er…Because you like me?”

As the AAR review suggests, Chase is darn near perfect. He has to be, with so much going on in Jane’s life — not just her personal issues, but the legal trouble her brother is in, and a related suspense plot (as many other reviewers have noted, the suspense aspects of Dahl’s trilogy are the weakest). I find that the more messed up one character is, the more it makes sense (although it’s not required) to have a really centered, mature partner with boundless patience and empathy. Like Elle and Dan in Dirty, or Zadist and Bella in Lover Awakened, or Lily and Alex in Kleypas’s Then Came You.

I especially love it when it’s the male partner in a heterosexual romance who is called on to be the port in the storm. I was reading LMO, and thinking about what I liked about Chase, and about this book. Take this scene:

“I’m sorry. I can’t do this. I need to break it off. Completely.”
“Uh-huh.”
Jane stopped in her tracks and spun to face him. “What does that mean?”
“It means I don’t believe you.”
“Why?” she huffed.
“I’m not sure. Maybe because we just made love?”
“No. We had sex, Chase.”

Intellectually, Chase knew that should have hurt, but it was so obviously a lie that his heart didn’t even twitch.

She’d meant to break it off when he’d shown up, just as she’d meant to break it off several other times in their short relationship. But she couldn’t do it. Not when she wanted him. She liked him, and she needed his body, and Chase knew that eventually those two things would mesh together and create something much more intense. Just as it had for him.

Chase is very strong without being domineering. In another book, a Big Misunderstanding would have ensued after Jane said “I can’t do this”, as Chase’s ego forced him to throw up a wall of macho and play Jane’s game. Chase had the kind of strength that needs inner resources, not outward force. It’s quiet, and it’s aimed at Jane’s good, not proving his masculinity to himself or the world. He doesn’t force her to believe him, either through emphatic seduction or a verbal tongue lashing. She’ll come around, and his challenge is to find the line between understanding and being a doormat while she does. I got the sense that the AAR reviewer thought he crossed into doormat territory, but I wonder if she would have felt the same if Chase had been the heroine?

I think Robin’s DA review mentioned how surprising this book was, and I agree. I could not have predicted how it was going to go — in a good way, not in the erratic were-unicorn-sprouts-tentacles romance way. The most surprising thing to me was that a book that veered into one of my most hated “tropes” in the genre — the association of socioeconomic class with morality (see below), generated most of the conflict. Dahl ends up complicating Jane’s family in interesting ways — how do you forge adult relationships parents whose “best” was frankly not good enough, and caused psychological harm? And how does your ability to forgive them intersect with your own harsh judgments of your teenage promiscuity?

I went from being really irritated with Jane for being ashamed of her “trailer trash” upbringing, to feeling a good deal of sympathy for her — not because she was poor, but because she had no balance, no perspective on the good things in her life. (Although I did wonder why, if she was so determined to put her life behind her, she only moved 10 minutes away from her childhood home. I know there’s some brief cover in the book on that point, but it wasn’t terribly convincing, IMO.)

I have been thinking a lot about the association of class status with morality, especially sexual morality, in this book and others like it. Jane likes sex, she likes er- vigorous sex, and she likes manly men, and somehow this gets associated in her mind with the unsafe and promiscuous sex she had as a teen, and then with her class status. She keeps referencing her “true nature” and I occasionally got weird Social Darwinist vibes when she did. She worries at several points that she is “turning into my mother”, and her mother’s faults came off to me as much about her chasing men and lack of sexual self-control as the choice of incarcerated and therefore poor men, faults that were again connected in the text with low socioeconomic class.

In the US, the phrase “trailer trash” [is supposed to] say so much more about a person than how much money they have: it’s a catch all for a lot of classist moralistic judgments about the supposed sexuality or other morally significant, and blameworthy, practices of the poor (such as, paradoxically, wastefulness with money — especially the state’s money, theft, vice, etc.). My own experience so far is that contemporary romance as a subgenre is saturated with middle class (yes, bourgeois) morality, and its portrayals of the poor and super rich are very entrenched in the middle class perspective.

So, for example, old money in US families, or professionalism in protagonists, is often associated with conservatism, in dress, sexual morality, manners, politics, etc. When Jane dumps her well to do, successful boyfriend int he opening scene, there’s a reference to his lack of sexual prowess. Chase, being the earthier, seemingly working class type (we find out later he is college educated and, despite humble origins, comfortably middle class) is the sensualist who knows how to handle a woman with the same class-based urges. Obviously, a narrative about what it tales to be a “real man” is part of the story, too.

Oh, I know, there are books (I just read Morning Glory, for example, which fits this bill), where extreme poverty is given a patina of sainthood, but from my point of view, this is, again, reflective of a middle class tendency to romanticize the poor whenever they are not being demonized. Also, there are books in which the born-very-rich are the heroes, morally and in every other way, but, in keeping with middle class suspicion of unearned wealth, I find that in such books there is typically emphasis on what that wealthy character has done to deserve his money.

I think this is very complicated, a kind of bizarre overlapping of often contradictory ideas that don’t make logical sense (for example, the idea that there is more crime among the poor. There may be more imprisonment among the poor, and there may even be more arrests among the poor, proportionately, but that doesn’t tell us much about law breaking and class).

While there were moments in the text that made me squirm, this isn’t a criticism, so much as an observation I wanted to record. It’s just interesting to me to see how gender norms, class assumptions and morality interact in books like this. I’m sure someone smart has written on it, and I’d be interested to know what they’ve said.

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