Short Reviews for Harlequin Readers: December 6, 2020

Ahhh…category romance. Short, easily digestible books that great straight to the point. I used to look down on ’em, but now I can’t get enough. I love their to-the-point titles, their professional packaging, and their variety.

As we speak, I’m on a little bit of a binge of category romances. Here are mini-reviews for four that I’ve recently read:

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This book was NEARLY perfect. (*sobs*)

Kathy Douglass’s writing and characterization are top-notch, and the “wholesome small town” vibe was really comforting. I loved the story and the way there was just the right amount of tension without things getting dramatic or stressful.

That being said: I’m uncomfy about the pairing. There’s a ~15 year age difference between the two leads, and the 25-year-old heroine eventually becomes step-mother to the hero’s two daughters: aged 8 and 14. NOT TO MENTION that throughout most of the book, the hero (a police officer) has a very rigid, uncompromising worldview and literally blames the hero for his wife’s death due to a drunk driving accident. He’s also set up the house as a shrine to said wife, and just…ick. Only in the final chapter does he begin to process his grief, and that’s waaaaay to late (after he used the heroine as an emotional punching bag and pseudo-gaslit her for 20 chapters).

I know this doesn’t sound like a good book. But Douglass is SUCH a good writer, and the characters were so well-drawn and believable. The male protagonist here is a dick, but everything else truly shone.

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This is a very well-written, tightly plotted category romance. And if you like the marriage of convenience trope, it hits all the right beats. I liked Their Marriage of Inconvenience particularly because both characters absolutely loathe each other at the start of this—usually, marriage-of-convenience plots have the protagonists start on a more neutral footing with each other. Not so here.

This book’s big failing—and it’s pretty large, is the way James approaches sex, virginity, race, and the Dark Moment in general. The entire final act of the book revolved around the protagonists consummating their marriage and then thwarting a big bad villain immediately after. I just…blech. Fetishizing of “purity” + ableist portrayals of mental illness as the reason people are evil. Additionally, there was some weird fetishizing of the heroine’s very pale white skin and equating it (as well as her intact hymen) with purity. Her skin is compared to the hero’s “brown” skin, and there’s a one-off comment that he might be mixed race (although this is of course not explicitly dealt with). Nope.

Overall, a good book with a major caveat.

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Cinderella’s Royal Secret takes everything that’s GOOD about HP: fancy clothes, whirlwind romances, secret babies, surprise royalty, $$$, but leaves out the crappy alpha male misogyny and other weirdness. Like, when the heroine here finds out that she’s pregnant after a one night stand, she immediately jumps on a plane to demand monetary support (usually, they just raise the baby alone because of pride, or whatever). The “sheikh” in this book was a quiet, respectful young prince whose strong presence never once verged toward domineering or assholish. There isn’t much drama here, and instead it’s just a story of two people trying to figure out co-parenting in some truly unique circumstances.

Just, yes. HP is one of Harlequin’s most successful lines because of the high fantasy of it all, and this book delivers that without creating a stressful environment for the heroine.

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Yeah, no.

I understand that the concept of a POW American soldier helping Assyrian refugees travel from Iraq to Armenia sounds like a great idea, but: (a) a category romance is not the best place to unpack the extremely complicated politics and history of the Middle East and (b) notwithstanding that, the author didn’t have the range. I also found it extremely difficult to tolerate the meathead Navy hero’s ignorance—he’s special forces and routinely deployed to Syria and Iraq, but doesn’t speak a word of Arabic, and LITERALLY says to the heroine that he can’t tell the difference between an Assyrian, a Kurd, or an Arab because they “all look the same.” He also questions why she covers her hair if she’s not Muslim, and complains about her unwillingness to remove her headcovering in public. I just…no. The vibe at the end was very much “I have rescued this poor backwards girl from her conservative country and now she can wear a bikini on the beach like a Liberated Lady.” *screams*

This is not to mention how dismissive and derogatory the text is about the Yazidi people and religion.

Aside from that, the romance was boring as hell.

Also, isn’t it kind of like…hella insensitive to have a heroine who wears modest clothes and a headcovering in public and then put a model without a headscarf on the cover??? Um.