Yes, I’ve noticed that sex studs tend to come from the working class in romance novels and TV shows.

I think that varies enormously by publisher’s line and by author, and sometimes within a single author’s oeuvre. Look at all the Harlequin Presents heroes who seem to own half the planet and zip around in limos. But then look at Nora Roberts: her Roarke probably owns several planets, whereas some of her other heroes work in the trades.

I haven’t read this book, but I find it interesting that Jane is “trailer trash,” as you put it, simply because I live in Colorado and there’s really no such thing as trailer trash here. Not that we don’t have our own socioeconomic classes OR that people don’t live in trailers, but the two don’t really go together. I know where my mom grew up in Illinois they definitely did, but around here it doesn’t make that big of a dif.

Maybe what I am craving is this: for someone to pick up the Edith Wharton strain of the social novel (the strain that is always an undercurrent in Austen as well) – the painstakingly drawn idea that economic realities are actively shaping, or even determining, the emotional lives of the characters, even to the extent of threatening their happiness. This is a very hard note of urgency to sound sincerely in modern novels, it seems to me, where we read with bourgeois assumptions that love is a sort of emotional free will that trumps any other considerations. Hmm. I will have to think more about this.

But I squirmed a bit at her prejudices, even though I understood them.

Yes, this is how I felt as well. Thank you for sharing your perspective.

@April:

I feel as if Dahl was winking at all sorts of stereotypes in this book. She presented the standard naughty librarian type in this novel, and flipped that stereotype on its head. Jane is a good girl in glasses and a bun, but a very BAD girl when she lets down her hair. Too cliche not to be purposeful and funny.

I hadn’t thought of this aspect of Jane’s portrayal. Great point. I guess, for me, like for Jill, at times the narrative felt too close to assenting to some of the stereotypes. I don’t feel like this is how it ended up, at all, but I did feel this way at the beginning, and it cast a bit of a shadow over the book, which I otherwise really enjoyed.

Janet — thanks for the connection and the rec. I am always thinking, ” I need to read more Nora Roberts”. I feel like I am missing a crucial part of my romance education otherwise.

@Victoria Dahl:

But I think you’ll find from my previous books that I don’t intend to equate any socioeconomic status with earthiness or sexual prowess.

I most emphatically do NOT want to leave that impression and I’m sorry if I did!

Thanks for chiming in. When I write reviews, they are really never about the flesh and blood author, although I understand that if you are the flesh and blood person who wrote the book, it’s hard to see it this way.

I think certain narratives get uptake in our culture, by writers and readers alike. Some narratives are too strange or beyond the pale to occur to an author or to work at all for readers. We’re all sort of pulling from the same cultural soup, although we put our own spin on interpretation. But we live in a society that is unjust in many ways, so some of these narratives will be implicated in that. It’s not anybody’s fault, or rather, it’s everybody’s.

You’ve written three books I spent several hours with this year and really enjoyed. even my nitpicky analysis is part of the fun for me (kind of value added). So thank you!

@katiebabs: Thanks, KB.

@Magdalen:

One thing seems pretty obvious to me (middle-class my entire life, barring a brief stint on food stamps in my 20s) and that is that poverty reduces dramatically the feeling that people have options. You need options to feel like you have choices, and you need to feel like you have choices to take responsibility for your life and bask in the sense that you’ve done well.

This is a great point, and I totally agree. even though you haven’t read the book, your points have helped me to understand Jane’s motivations. Thank you.

Economic origins can be part of that youth, so that a constellation of experiences more or less connected to being poor is the very thing the protagonist is trying to escape while still fearing may be an indelible part of his/her character. But there are other childhood situations completely unrelated to economics: violence, alcohol abuse, emotional abuse, enmeshment, neglect — none of those is limited to families living in poverty. (Sorry for all the psychobabble buzz words, but I’ve read romances where a protagonist was struggling to outgrow and recover from an upbringing marked by one or more of these situations.)

As a court-appointed attorney in a poor county, I have represented clients who might be dismissed as “trailer trash.” I found a wide range of character traits (good and bad) among the people I’ve met in those cases. One thing seems pretty obvious to me (middle-class my entire life, barring a brief stint on food stamps in my 20s) and that is that poverty reduces dramatically the feeling that people have options. You need options to feel like you have choices, and you need to feel like you have choices to take responsibility for your life and bask in the sense that you’ve done well.

Flip that over, and a character from a poor family who doesn’t feel like she’s got options may still feel “poor” regardless of how much money’s in her bank account. So — is it the economics at work, or the powerlessness? And while money buys options and opportunities in many situations, there are a lot of financially secure people in romances still acting as though their past is “this close” to catching up with them.

Fascinating topic — thanks for getting me to think about it!!

I most emphatically do NOT want to leave that impression and I’m sorry if I did! After all, in the previous book, nerdy, white-collar Quinn does his girlfriend against a wall in an alley while whispering dirty thoughts into her ear.

Thanks again. I hope you don’t mind my joining in!!! I love, love, love it when people make me think about my own books.

Enjoyed the review!

You said:

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.

Yes, I’ve noticed that sex studs tend to come from the working class in romance novels and TV shows. Almost as if it requires a man who employees himself through physical labor for the sex to be wonderful (although, in my experience, that’s not necessarily true). Yet, Chase ended up not being exactly what she thought he was–a base-born blue collar worker with no thought in his head for anything but sex.

I feel as if Dahl was winking at all sorts of stereotypes in this book. She presented the standard naughty librarian type in this novel, and flipped that stereotype on its head. Jane is a good girl in glasses and a bun, but a very BAD girl when she lets down her hair. Too cliche not to be purposeful and funny.

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

That’s why I loved this book. There was so much potential for that “ugh” moment when a romance novel begins down a path of most resistance. When there are obstacles that are unrealistic and contrived and make my chest hurt from apprehension for the characters and annoyance with the author.