Her Sister’s Baby is a 1995 Harlequin SuperRomance by Janice Kay Johnson. It is about Colleen, a recently divorced mom of two, who has just moved to a small town in eastern Washington, and Michael, a newly widowed banker. Colleen, a warm, loving woman, is dealing with the divorce, which was amicable enough, but has been very hard on her children, ages 8 and 11, and she is struggling financially with her new quilting shop. Michael is a classic old school contemporary hero: tall, dark, handsome, inscrutable, aloof, awkward, and hurting inside, not only by his wife’s recent death, but by childhood neglect that has turned him into a man afraid of emotions and human connection.

Sounds like your typical contemporary conflict so far, doesn’t it?

Except … Michael’s dead wife? The one who dies in chapter 2? Is Colleen’s sister, Sheila.

Not enough conflict yet? How about this:

Colleen is carrying Michael baby, thanks to her agreement to act as full surrogate for her infertile sister. She wants to keep it, but Michael wants to hold her to her oral agreement to hand the baby over once it’s born.

This is the second book by Johnson I have read, and although she has written about 40 books, I feel confident in stating that I have found a pattern: her books are depressing. Ok, not depressing exactly, but so true to real life in its messiness, that they are not escape reads at all. The depiction of the hardship of divorce on Colleen’s children, including the fact that their father is not working very hard to stay in their lives, was very well done, which is to say, painful to read.

I can read paranormals or romantic suspense in which there is enough mayhem and carnage to reduce the world’s population by a third without batting an eye. But give me an 11 year old girl who can’t make a single friend in her new school, or an 8 year old boy who can’t get his father to return his phone calls, and I am a puddle of tears.

And little relief is given by the courtship of Michael and Colleen, who are not only wary, mistrustful, and outright hostile towards each other, but wracked with guilt over their growing attraction, having both loved Sheila very much. OTOH, this makes for some terrific sexual tension.

It made me wonder, though … does this cross over into women’s fiction? Do we need not just an HEA but some romance to call it a romance?

In order to make room for the growing relationship between Colleen and Michael, his marriage to Sheila must be cleared away in some fashion. This is very delicate for any writer. While other authors, like Susan Elizabeth Phillips in Dream a Little Dream, keep the dead wife perfect but have the hero love his new woman “in a different way”, and others demonize the dead spouse, Johnson has walked a more complicated road. Michael reassesses his marriage, and discovers truths about himself and his late wife that are hard to face.

They must also grasp one horn of a dilemma: if Michael and Colleen were never attracted to each other in the past, then is their current attraction merely a reaction to Sheila’s sudden death? Can they trust it? On the other hand, if they were attracted to each other in the past, aren’t they awful people? Were they just subconsciously waiting for Sheila to go away? What would Sheila have wanted for them? is it Sheila’s voice they hear in their heads, or their own selfish desires rationalizing what they are doing?

I think there are many readers who wouldn’t care for this book, particularly readers who like their heroes and heroines to be morally perfect. I know there are many readers who would never accept this relationship between a sister and her brother-in-law, I found it really fascinating.

The pregnancy was a way to both bring Michael and Colleen together, as well as create conflict. Washington state surrogacy laws do recognize surrogacy contracts (many states do not), as long as payment is not made. Since they are both genetic relations to the child, I am guessing that had they not worked it out by falling in love, custody would have been granted to Colleen (who is both gestational and genetic surrogate) with visitation to Michael. On the other hand, Washington is very big on the written contract in surrogacy arrangement, and they had only a verbal one.

I think viewing surrogacy arrangements as akin to other kinds of contractual arrangement neglects important human, emotional aspects of conceiving and carrying a child. It’s just not like housesitting or selling a used car. The product of the arrangement is a human being, whose interests are paramount in my view. On the other hand, parties to the contract need protection, and women who agree to serve as gestational surrogates should be compensated fairly (it’s amazing how, when women donate eggs or act as surrogates, everyone says we can’t commercialize the arrangement. Women are only allowed to do things for free.).

I thought Colleen’s character arc was surprising and interesting. I really liked the way the pregnancy was handled. Colleen became very attached to her fetus, and had to question whether she would have ever been able to give the baby up to her sister. She wondered if the promise to give the baby to Michael was still in force now that Sheila was dead. Was she a bad person to change her mind, or a bad mother not to? Through her relationship with Michael, she came to reassess her first marriage and her part in its failure.

I haven’t given you much of a sense of the writing, and it’s because Johnson’s writing doesn’t stand out for me as much as the complex moral psychology she explores. But it is good writing, I think. Here’s an example of the characterization of Colleen’s attorney as she meets him at court:

Of course, he looked completely relaxed.; his hair was damp, as though he’d come straight from the health club. She could picture him playing a hard game of racquetball, maybe lying afterward in the sauna, dressing, leisurely, taking his time to get to the courthouse. Half of her fiercely resented his casual attitude; the rest of her was comforted that he apparently regarded this as routine.

One drawback to the book was that the conflict was so intense that the romance was not allowed to grow as much as I would have liked. Their sexual attraction was very believable, but there were very few scenes when Michael and Colleen just enjoyed each other’s company. They were never at peace together, until the very end.

Overall, though, I really liked it. My first Johnson was a free Kindle download, and this one was fifty cents at a charity book table. For twenty-five cents a book, I’ve gotten about 8 hours of enjoyment from this writer. I’d say that’s a more than fair bargain.