DP writes in with a request, but I don’t think this is a Harlequin – or was there rape in early Harlequins and I missed the joy of reading them?
I need your help with a book. I think it was a Harlequin categorial, set in
Australia or New Zealand. It was an OLD SKOOL romance, early 90’s. This
girl lives in a historic town or a farm near the town and meets young, hot
man who is looking for work (I think). And, he has dreams of becoming a
movie director. But, they fall in love and they get married. Because he has
no money, he works for her dad and they live at home. The parents hate him
so to get back at them, he has sex with the girl every night and she is a
screamer. But, then somehow he gets a break to go and do something
Hollywood-y and she doesn’t want to go with him.So, he leaves. She pines
for him and parents start pushing her toward the local farmer or something.
He comes back after he is successful and is jealous of the farmer. I think
he comes back to the town to do a movie about it. But, instead he rapes her
and she gets pregnant. And, that’s all I remember. I never finished it
because my mother caught me reading it and tore it out of my hands and said
I was going to go to hell for reading it (picture screaming, Indian woman a
la Bend it Like Beckam). I would really like to know what happened…
Love the schtupping his wife to get back at her parents. This guy sounds like a true prince. Anyone remember this book?
Sarah—
I don’t know the answer to this HaBO, but…
The early Harlequin Presents line (I’m talking late 70’s-through the 80’s) featured a lot of raging asshat ‘alpha’ heroes. I didn’t (at the time)think of the forceful sexual encounters as rape. But I think I would now. The current generation of HP heroes are tame variations of the Olde Skool HP dudes. So this storyline could well have been an HP.
The book is called No Winner and it is by Daphne Clair and probably one of the finest examples of Old Skool classic HPness outside of Charlotte Lamb.
Don’t know this one but I will freely admit to reeling over the definition of Old Skool being from the early 90s. I wasn’t aware that rape-y novels were de-rigeur after the mid-80s or so.
This is definitely No Winner by Daphne Clair.
I don’t remember it as a rapey story. She loves him, she loves the sex, but she’s really really uncomfortable having sex in her parents house. She does get pregnant and has a miscarriage; the big break between them comes when her mother doesn’t pass on the heroine’s messages to the hero. So he thinks she’s dumped him, and she thinks he’s dumped her.
A lot of the book, on the way to the HEA, is everybody involved figuring out that nobody else is evil, just misguided, confused, and human.
Go to hell for reading romances? Never heard that one before.
He definitely rapes her in the book, that is how she gets pregnant. He takes off for the US and her mother does send a message but he never gets it. This is one of the 80’s romances when Jayne Bauling, Robyn Donald, Daphne Clair, Sara Craven, Carole Mortimer and several other big HP authors almost always included the H raping the h.
I can take or leave the book, but that image of your mother… that’s going to make me smile all day!
Oh my goodness, Daphne Clair! Now there’s a name from my HP past.
I always believed that Charlotte Lamb and Carole Mortimer had to hate women; the vicious way the heroes treated the heroines and the absolute ‘doormat-ness’ of said heroines in that they put up with that garbage. I learned early on to avoid their books, as they managed to push ALL my buttons!
Sara Craven is still writing rape stories for Harlequin Presents. The Innocent’s Surrender was published just last year.
However, I do agree that these sorts of stories are now the exception rather than the rule. I saw (and contributed to) a lot of negative feedback against the Innocent’s Surrender, so I do wonder whether she’ll be made to tone it down in future.
Is this the same Daphne Clair? The one that was the founder and first President of Feminists for Life?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Clair
Go to hell for reading romance? I heard that. A lot. I learned to tear the cover off a biography and wrap it around my romance books as a teen.
Yes, it is the same Daphne Clair—this was on of the last rape romances she wrote and even this one was not typical of the usual trope. Everything after this was decidedly feminist, I always found it an interesting contradiction.
Wow… just wow.
Can I be a bit nosey? You said that you are Indian, and that your mom said you’d go to hell for reading romance. So is there a hell in Hinduism, or are you Christian?
Seriously, I shudder at reading Old School as early 90s!!!
Heehee. My aunt barged into my room while I was reading an HP when I was a teen, and I tossed the book in some secret romance-book stash behind me. She caught me tossing it, held out her hand and asked for the book, flipped it open in the middle, and unfortunately for me, she happened upon (and read out loud with The Tone) the part where the H and h are getting it on in the shower stall. Gah. The scolding I got, still makes me cringe when I think about it. :]
This book sounds like a rip-off of McNaught’s Paradise, with all the letters-not-received, and angry parent.
The book i was thinking of is Pirate of Her Own by Kinley Macgregor.