Contining the theme of Book Rants, books that really, REALLY pissed a reader off, I bring you Leslie, who picked up a re-issue of a book originally published in the 80s, and found it to be jaw-dropping horrible angry-making. Sometimes it’s the nonsensical plots, and other times, it’s sexism, racism, stereotypes, and complete asshattery. When a romance lets a reader down, the result can be epic.
Book: The Bronzed Hawk by Iris Johansen
Originally published: 1983, Bantam Loveswept
Reprint edition: 2011, Bantam Loveswept
And now: here’s Leslie. Grab a drink and settle in, y’all.
Iris Johansen wrote the second historical romance novel I ever read – The Magnificent Rogue [Goodreads | Amazon | BN | Sony | Kobo | All Romance eBooks]. And I freaking love that book. Love that book, like, its permanent home is on my nightstand.
Other than my Kindle free downloads, my other favorite place to find books is browsing the library shelves. And when I saw what I figured was a reissued contemporary romance by Johansen, I WAS SO EXCITED! Something just clicked (because other than her historicals, I’ve not read any other genre by her). I saved that book, waiting for the * perfect * time to read it.
Damn. Dammit. Damn.
I was wrong.
A shitty day got a lot shittier by the time I finished.
This book is bad. It is bad on so many, so very many levels.
Here are some highlights of the low lights:
- Hot air balloons
- Blatant racism
- Child prodigies
- Banditos
- An aqua blue shirt paired with black suede pants
- Malaria
- Not knowing how to swim.
How could all these features possible fit together? After finishing, I myself am still asking this question. But perhaps if I give you the lay of the land some connecting themes will reveal themselves . . .
Of course the story starts with an uppity young woman hell-bent on making her professional stamp on the world. By twenty-three Kelly McKenna is already a well-known photojournalist (never mind how truly difficult of a field that is to break into (I know because I’ve been living with a professional photographer for ten years)) and she’s going to scoop the true story behind the inventor/child prodigy, Nick O’Brien. Using the sexual know-how of all petite, doe eyed blondes out there (I’m assuming as I’m as swarthy as she is faeryesque) she weasels her way into his office armed with photos to blackmail him, and is met by a tall man with a chiseled torso and towel.
Right. In his high rise office. He had been doing “yoga exercises,” which, considering this book was first published in 1983, is kinda cool. She’s off guard immediately by the chemistry between and he invites her to sit and plead her case for why he should allow her exclusive access to his story. But he doesn’t have any real furniture. They sit on pillows on the floor. Why? Because as O’Brien puts it, “It’s a little like going back to the womb.” That’s right. The WOMB. Sitting on the floor is like being a fetus in the WOMB.
And yet she stays.
Through some bantering the most important of plot devices emerges her for Johansen: no matter the circumstance, everything that Nick does from here on out is motivated by innate jealousy of Kelly (aka Goldilocks, not demeaning at all) getting with some other man. He must have her.
And to save her from the clutches of her evil editor, he invites her to take a hot air balloon ride. But of course they must leave immediately.
They fly from San Francisco to Brownsville, Texas where they pick up the balloon. He’s never actually piloted one, let alone one that is debuting a new type of fuel (because he is a prodigy, inventor, playboy AND daredevil), and off they go – TO ACAPULCO. Of course!
Based on my sketchy internet research, they would have to travel a distance of 850 miles in a hot air balloon. Which begs the question, how fast do hot air balloons travel? This is important because Kelly only packed an extra shirt, jacket and film for her camera. And he packed two sandwiches and some coffee. That’s it! So my even sketchier research told me that hot air balloons average 30ish miles per hour (and other sites said that they go as fast as an air current goes, which begs the next question, is there an air current that moves southwest from the Gulf of Mexico, over the country to the Pacific Ocean?
I don’t know the answer to that one – too many words to type into Google.
But I do know simple math. 850 miles divided by 30ish equals 28.333333. That is well over a day spent in a tiny basket hanging from a balloon with a hot yoga womb man and upstart photojournalist with two sandwiches to share.
Of course, you already knew, they don’t make it that long.
Nope. While they are busy grinding on each other, unbuttoning clothes, my favorite romance novelism – exploring eachothers’ mouths – that new type of fuel doesn’t prove so safe – the balloon turns into a giant ball of fire in the sky somewhere over Mexico and they must jump to safety. So he straps on a parachute – after buttoning his shirt REALLY!?! – , she connects herself to him with a “mountaineering snap link” aka a carabiner, wraps her legs around him in a nonsexy way and they jump. But before the free fall she says, “I’m not afraid. I’m just ruing the day I decided to blackmail Superman. I don’t think I’m cut out for flying without wings.” Because if that was you with a giant fire ball overhead, your belt clipped to a parachute operated by a man who keeps demeaning you by calling you “Goldiocks” and “Little Girl,” you’d really be voicing how much you rued that day. Right.
You’d probably be screaming at what a dangerous asshole he is or screaming because you just peed your pants. Damn that Superman!
Yes, of course they survive, and that nylon parachute does not provide much warmth in the cold desert Mexican night. To pitch in she wants to collect firewood, he says no at first then capitulates when he detects “the signs of women’s lib surfacing.”
Iris – WTF? Yes, the romance genre thrives on gender roles and playing with those lines, but to have such a sexist hero? Was it because this was written in 1983? Was it so different then? Inexcusable to have such a condescending hero. Shame.
Yet, of course, I kept reading.
They survive the night, huddled together to keep warm. They awake to find a tribe of banditos – ALL WEARING SOMBREROS – holding them at gun point. Because that is totally what I think of when I think Bandido. Yes, I suppose the Three Amigos (1986) supports this stereotype, but these days when I think of “bandido” I think more of a drug cartel member or a Zapatista with a ski-mask. Maybe I’m just a product of an overly politically correct upbringing. There is an argument to be made for the shade providing properties of a sombrero, especially when you are an outlaw living off the grid in the desert.
Iris – WTF? As your book unfolds in Mexico, you refer to Mexicans as “wetbacks.” Twice. The first time I had to show my husband because I couldn’t believe it. Then he judged me when I kept reading. The second time? How is this okay – even in 1983?? And shame on you, Bantam Books , why wouldn’t you give this book a polish in political correctness? Shame on you.
But really, shame on me. I kept reading even when I knew it was wrong.
Lucky for Nick and Kelly, Nick speaks Spanish, can be a guys’ guy and he’s rich. So with promises of compensation, they are released to a small village where they find some baths and clothes. And there they wed.
Yes. They must marry. Why? Because the old school priest in the village, who happens to be driving to Acapulco in the coming days, won’t give them a lift unless they are legally wed. There really is no other way out of this situation, is there?
They have a lovely wedding night.
Since they are now wed, they get a ride to Acapulco where Nick’s got business connections. They get new clothes, a sweet hotel suite, and she gets a surprise – her beloved camera back. Somehow it survived the balloon crash, the banditos scavenged and then Nick bargained to get it back. Now she can take pictures again because that is what she loves most. Smiley face. That and sleeping with Nick who has blown open her virgin mind.
While they are waiting for the red tape around their lost passports, they take in the sights of the beautiful resort town. She learns to swim because despite following her journalist father all over the world she never had learned – this perhaps being the most outlandish idea in the whole book! If you grow up going to exotic locations, there is zero chance you’d actually learn to swim? Really?
Things get a bit complicated when his ex-lover shows up in all of her sophisticated womanhood, Kelly almost gets kidnapped when she shoots a picture of some Arabs doing some type of shady deal (more love from the ‘80’s right there) and despite all the hot sex, she feels like the relationship is lopsided. She loves him, and he just loves having sex. So she fires up that independent streak, contacts her editor and within hours is on a plane to SFO. “She’d be dammed if she ended up as one of Nick O’Brien’s heartbroken discards.”
Her editor and good friend, Mac Devlin, was hoping her stay in Mexico would be good for her health – she is recuperating from malaria after all. She caught a nasty case of it on her previous assignment in the “Mideast.” He welcomes her back with open avuncular arms and drives her out to his little cabin on the coast so that she can lay low and he can keep an eye on her.
But who braves the twisty coastal roads in the dense fog? Who is hot on her heels as soon as he learns she has left him? Right. Nick. The child prodigy (which is only ever mentioned once), father issues (brought up once), inventor (only alluded to, and that was once), insanely jealous (main character feature) shows up pounding on the door ready to murder Uncle Mac! And he’s wearing an aqua blue shirt with black suede pants. God bless you 1983.
“I’ve come to retrieve my runaway wife!”
Damn right.
They fight, then end up making out on the beach. And when she asks why did he come after her, he responds, “Because you belong to me.” But not in that sweet emotional soul mate kind of way that we all love. More in the overbearing I’m jealous and might start physically abusing you soon kind of way. The scary way.
But for Kelly, it was a dream to hear him say that and they live happily ever after.
Does it really end here – the most outlandish romance I’ve ever read? No. Because the title “The Bronzed Hawk” has zero relevance to the story, I’ve no idea where this comes from. At least the balloon could have been christened the Bronze Hawk. Also, on the back synopsis, it says her name is Kate. But that is wrong. She is Kelly.
In the end, reading this book was an endurance of shame. Shame on my second favorite book’s author for writing this pile of dookie, shame on her for including clear racist and sexist content, shame on me for actually finishing it.
The Bronzed Hawk is available from Goodreads | Amazon | BN | Sony | Kobo | All Romance eBooks.
I see this was originally published as part of the classic Loveswept series – I thought these were all supposed to be higher quality romances….
Your comments remind me of my reaction to Sandra Brown’s Chill Factor, which I gave one star to on goodreads. The only reason it got that star is they don’t let you give half stars or minus stars! Here are my reactions re: sex with the (maybe) murderer:
Listened to this book on the drive to and from SC at Thanksgiving. It was a way to fill up the long and empty miles, but as a piece of literachoor – it was an enormous piece of feculent nonsense.
Where to start? How about the part where Lily, the heroine, convinced she is snowed in with a serial kidnapper/murderer, has hot monkey sex with him, despite the whole HE’S A FREAKIN’ MURDERER thing.
Or how about the fact that the hot, monkey sex happens between a woman who is weak from a nearly-fatal asthma attack and a man who has:
a concussion
bruises all over his body from being HIT BY A CAR
an open head wound
a sprained ankle.
Plus, the HMS takes place in a freezing cold cabin where the two people are marooned. So cold that normal people would just be curled up INSIDE the fireplace, not getting naked in front of it. Jeez. I realize it’s fiction, but couldn’t there be some sense of ‘this could really happen?’
Thank you. “I’m as swarthy as she is faeryesque”…awesome.
That jumped out at me too. Having lived in the Middle East for ten years, malaria was pretty low on my list of risks…
I enjoy reading the reviews of books from that era much more than I would ever reading the books themselves!
Okay, first, I freaking LOVE these book rants! Thanks Leslie for such a smart and hilarious rant.
Second, I was a teen in the eighties and a book nerd. I worked my way through the small public library in my small (pop. 5,000) hometown. Kids section (remember Betsy, Tacy, and Tib? The Hardy brothers? Nancy Drew?); historical fiction, biography, and then there were the series romances. And here I’m gonna paint with a broad brush but, after inhaling 20 or 30 of these over a two-yr period, I didn’t pick up another romance until 3 years ago. Why? For all the reasons Leslie and others have pointed out here. The forced sex that always led to true love. The racial stereotypes. The blatant sexism. The plots all seemed one dimensional: through the love (read: sex) of a strong man, the heroine blossoms into a fully realized happy woman (read:happily married and making babies with no other goal but to be a good wife for her man). It was not lost on my teenage self at the time that, athough my parents would’ve been severely disapproving of my reading romance, the sex aside these books basically preached very conservative views on women and their roles in the world.
I think I read a very similar book, a Harlequin romance. They were in a plane crash (rather than a hot-air balloon), landed in a country where the women wore some kind of sari (jabella sp?) and had to get married, she contacts her boss to get her home, then hero follows her because “you’re my wife, you belong to me”. And I enjoyed it. Granted, I was only 14 at the time, but now I’m very embarassed.
Wow. Just…. wow. Given how far romances have come in about 30 years, I wonder how we will view today’s romances 30 years from now.
Amanda, Linda Howard’s “Up Close and Dangerous’ is like that. I thought it was so stupid that she based the story around a plane crash, open head wound, freezing temperatures, and two people getting bareassed naked on a mountain because they couldn’t contain their lust.
I find it easier to believe that every lord and lady in the United Kingdom during the 1600’s had nightly baths and perfect teeth than I do après airplane crash sex.
Okay, maybe I’m hung up on minutiae, but from what I know of hot-air ballooning, you wouldn’t have to wait for the crash in the mountains to be freezing cold – it gets very cold as soon as you reach a good height. They would both have been suffering from hypothermia, and the only thing they’d have been exploring each other’s mouths for would be a warm place to hide.
LOL!
Great post! I’ve been burned, too, by the cover changes. I love getting cheap and free books for my Kindle, but in many cases it’s buyer beware. The books look modern and have been “published” within the last 2-3 years, there’s a handful of good reviews, then I find out they were originally published 25-30 years ago. Yikes! I cut my teeth on dreadful Harlequin and Avon romances in the eighties when I was a teen. The virginal doormats, grunting he-men (ME TARZAN! YOU JANE!), and paper-thin plots annoyed me. By the time I was in college I had given up on the genre and didn’t read another romance novel for over a decade.
Since I am capable of rational thought, I do like my novels to have a strong plot and interesting, multi-dimensional characters. And I avoid rapetastic romances and arrogant, masochistic heroes like the plague. I like alpha male types as much as anyone, but they have to be KIND. And respect the women they’re interested in. Rapey/sexist asshats just aren’t sexy. Neither is racism. Blech.
I love me some Georgette Heyer romances, but there be some BS in her books. Jews … OMG! … I’m not Jewish, but I’d like to think that’s not required to be disgusted by her Jewish characters/descriptions. Big people are either jolly, florid, or placidly useless. The Spanish are indolent, lazy, and self-centered. I could go one, but you get my point.
Also, I was called wetback plenty of times in the 80’s … that and brazer. Doesn’t really matter to the sort of person who would even use the term wetback whether it’s being used appropriately. You’re Mexican looking, therefore, you must be a wetback.
You realize that now I have Neil Diamond playing to my head, don’t you? “There’s love in the air/ blah blah blah blah blah blah/There’s love in the (hot) air (baloon)/bu blah BLAH….
“…We’re sailing around the Horn of Love, TO ACAPULCO!”
Icky song for the icky book. There you go. Now somebody make him please stop singing.
Leslie, when I first read your rant I was hugely entertained and considered The Bronze Hawk just another of the bad books that have been hilariously reviewed at SBTB. However, as I was looking for some reading material I tried The Magnificent Rogue (my library had an e-version) and thoroughly enjoyed it. Now, I can somewhat understand your outrage. How can the author of TMR which is a great book have written such rubbish! I feel your pain.
I read a lot of older detective fiction (Christie/Marsh/Allingham) and have come across some startling content before (a new couple is delighted to find they have a mutual hate on for fat people and black people – how delightful for you both…the amazingly frequent use of ‘dago’…I could go on) but recently I was reading a Margery Allingham in which the female lead is bummed that a potential boyfriend has been poached by her best friend. Her brother’s (the series hero) response? I’m paraphrasing but – ‘you just need a good rape’ [to get over it]. o_0
I’ve never experienced the sensation of being slapped in the face by a book before. I don’t care to repeat it. It got worse – she brushes it off to the effect that ‘all you men say that’ which indicates to me that maybe this wasn’t an uncommon thing to hear then..?