It always starts with the first page. The heroine moves from her old school where she was lonely and unpopular, she's bored in her castle, or what have you, and my mind invents what could be...and its always science fiction. I beg for science fiction. I only keep reading because someone said something about knife fights and lasers and vampires and I know that somewhere in this book is science fiction.
I'm always wrong. Because science fiction is buried under layers and layers of unnecessary kiss scenes. I notice that the passages for knife fights and lasers and vampires are pretty short next to the unnecessary scenes where they stare awkwardly at eachothers muscles and lips and describe, in depth, how the delts wrap sinuously around the biceps. For instance, boil Twilight down to the bare sci fi necessity and its about five pages long and actually has nothing to do with vampires and has more to do with reject X-man Mutants with the special ability Marvel threw in the trash--along with the ability to read minds but only use it to gossip about Jacobs girly love life. (FREAK-NOT-REALLY-A-SPOILER SPOILER)
So don't take it lightly when I say I found a few Romance Novels that I absolutely loved and recommend to anyone into that sort of thing and not into that sort of thing.
Its not for the passion inherent in the book, because that apparently goes right over my head in literature and Robert Pattison and the Cyclops X-man who just happened to star in the Notebook (and didn't play a Vampire. I think.)
It all started when I had to take an advanced writing class, and the only one open was all about Persuasion by Jane Austen.
At first I was perturbed. But then I got over it because I thought it would be a great chance to write my mind about the position of women and how we're degraded by most romances, but I found out just the opposite. It's a fascinating story about finding love when no one else thinks you can have it. Unlike most Romance novel heroines, the main character has to work it to get what she wants, and as she does it's a marvelous social commentary on women and their interaction with men.
It takes some knowing about that time period to love the book, but now that I do I can see all of the work that Jane Austen managed to fit into such a short volume. Yeah the book really is entirely about marriage, but asking the big more mature question: is it better to marry when you first love him, or to wait until he makes his fortune and still loves you and therefore won't leave you in a hole when he gets bored? The question is never really answered, but the book gets to the point and while the more sinister characters are almost annoying, they've got a funny side to them that Pride and Prejudice lacked.
So after Persuasion I found a kinda-sorta classic, Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. At first I was appalled by how much language she uses to talk about the flora and fauna, but by skipping a few pages I was pleasantly surprised on how she handled the romance. I was expecting an overblown passage of staring into eachother's eyes (may I never read that phrase in print ever again) and blissfully retelling their first meeting over, and over, and over, and over, but instead it was shockingly accurate. The main girl is about 19, marries a 30 year old with a past, and it starts off this creepy story of this twisted love where you aren't really sure if he loves her and visa versa. It's what, in my mind, Twilight, should have been and I found myself sucked into it even though the front cover consisted of deep red drapery and a sweeping gold font.
I only picked up the book because I started reading it at Mom's house and it was leatherbound and had no jacket. If I knew it had this all over it...
...but the ending--I won't say anything to ruin it for you but this is all sorts of good book for the Romance haters in the room.
I think I like these books for the same reason I loved Memoirs of a Geisha, because it was really about women instead of being about Romances. Seeing how Woman are treated in literature has always been an interesting thing to me, especially since to talk about us apparently requires a lot of talk about love. Yet these books happen to stick a very interesting feminism vs feminine voice that shows woman as they are at the time they were written.
I love stories about that because honestly, the lives of women are far from perfect, and so any books about us--especailly those romances--need to declare it. It is an exciting time because we can talk about those things and because we do live at a crossroads, where the world and our culture and who we are tell us so many different things about who we should be when we can only be one thing. It's such a hard thing to describe how we stretch ourselves that when I find it has been done well it is absolutely beautiful and I have to recommend it.
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