Crossing the Color Line in New Adult Romance: Jacinta Howard's HAPPINESS IN JERSEY

I've read a lot of New Adult romances since the birth of the subgenre in 2009. But it didn't register with me how most of the NA books I read featured primarily white protagonists until I picked up a copy of Jacinta Howard's Happiness in Jersey, on the recommendation of Women of Color in Romance. Howard's 2014 romance, set at historically black Texas College in Tyler, Texas, opens with the strong first-person narrative voice and focus on sex common to the NA genre: "I wasn't having an orgasm. And that realization was a little disappointing, given that he was still on top of me pumping like there was no tomorrow. Or like . . . well, I was about to have an orgasm" (5). But the narrator here is not the typical white girl New Adult protagonist with which I was most familiar. The nineteen-year-old telling this story is Jersey Kincaid, a Georgia-born African American who rocks out on the bass in her band, The Prototype. And her story is less about the melodrama typical of NA romance, and more about the painful story of coming to terms with trauma, both her own and that of the young man who becomes immediately entranced by her after watching her play.

Texas College students

As the opening paragraph of Happiness in Jersey illustrates, Jersey's narration is direct, honest, and unflinching. She openly enjoys sex, but isn't one for boyfriends or relationships: "I just never wanted to do all of the emotional bullshit I guess. Too much drama and work with hardly any return" (114). In Jersey's experience, boys expect subservience and idolization from the women they date, things that she's not at all inclined to give. With her band and rehearsals, her job at a local coffee shop, and her grades in business management to keep up, there's no time for anything as complicated as a relationship that blurs the lines between friendship and sex.

Jersey's toughness, and her wariness about letting down her guard, stem not just from her personality, but also from trauma in her past: the suicide of her mother when Jersey was only nine weeks old, and the verbally abusive behavior of her Pops, who takes out his resentment of her dead mother on her, and who, when he drinks too much, tends to berate Jersey for being the cause of her mother's death. Jersey's best friend and bandmate Devin worries that Jersey's penchant for one night stands is a defense mechanism, one that allows Jersey to distract herself from her pain: "messing with these dudes isn't anything but you being emotional about other shit and trying to compensate for it with them. I guarantee you talked to your Pops today, huh?" (13). But even if Devin's "psychobabble bullshit" contains a grain of truth, Jersey has no desire to delve into it, not with Devin, and certainly not with herself. She's just fine the way she is, thank you very much. And cut it with the slut-shaming already, right?

But even Jersey can't help but admit that her attraction to the cousin of one of her bandmates isn't quite like anything she's experienced before. Zay, "short for Isaiah" Broussard, who has recently transferred to Texas College from his home in New Orleans, is one handsome dude: "His hair was grown out but cut low, not a fro like Devin's. It too was unkempt, but it was curly. His skin was dark caramel. But those eyes. They were piercing—and beautiful" (22). It's not just Zay's looks, though, but the look in those eyes, that draws Jersey: "He looked about our age, but like he'd seen some things in his life. I knew the look well" (23). In all likelihood because it's a look that Jersey wears herself.

Despite her attraction, Jersey insists on giving the flirtatious Zay the brush-off. But Zay, who has experienced painful losses of his own, recognizes a kindred spirit in Jersey, and keeps after her, clear that he'll back off if she wants him to, but equally clear that he really wants to get to know her better:

"I'm not a stalker, Kitten. Just interested, that's all."
 .....
My heart was thudding in my chest now and I struggled to breath normally. His words were simple, flirtatious, harmless. But it somehow felt like he was declaring something.
     "I don't know if it's even possible anyway." I shrugged, looking down into my cup before meeting his eyes. The sun was lighting his face again and this time his eyes looked even lighter, almost blue.
     "What?" he asked curiously.
     "Knowing someone. I mean really knowing someone. People tend to surprise you with the things they don't let you see about themselves."
     His eyes turned thoughtful and his signature smirk was gone. He looked at me like he was seeing through  me and I shifted in m chair, biting the inside of my cheek. I didn't know why the hellI even said all of that. I must need more caffeine.
     "That's true. But sometimes finding out, digging beneath the facade is the fun part." He smiled and it seemed more genuine than the others he'd flashed at me. (37)

Esperanza Spaulding: a model for Jersey?

I'm usually not a fan of romances in which the heroine gives in a little to a potential romantic partner's desires for closeness (physical and emotional), only to immediately back off, then move closer, then back off yet again. But Howard shows us why Jersey is so cautious, so wary, so that her moments of desiring closeness, then then backing off in fear at her "weakness" in giving in to her desire, make all too painful sense. How she feels that her Pops is her only family, and so can't stop answering the phone when he calls, even though she ends up feeling like crap after they talk. How she worries that if Devin starts seriously dating a girl, he'll have no more time for her or their friendship. How she fears that she herself might fall into the same kind of depression that killed her mother if she spends too much time being introspective rather than pushing forward towards her goals.

What's so unusual in this push-pull romance is how well Zay understands Jersey's reluctance to reveal herself, her fear of getting involved and then being abandoned, and how both patient and yet persistent he is in offering her friendship, even though he knows (and lets her know) he wants far more. When the two do end up crossing the line into sex, Zay knows that Jersey's motivation is less about love and more about escape from bad feelings. "Maybe I was wrong, maybe I shouldn't have let you escape that way, when I knew what you were doing . . . [But] I wanted to be your escape, Jersey, I wanted to be that for you, I want to be that for you" (179). But the fear of loss is too much for Jersey, and once again she retreats, brutally burning bridges behind her.

The narrative is only from Jersey's point of view, so at times Zay feels almost too good to be true, a projection of what Jersey most needs rather than a character with his own personality and needs. But it is only when Jersey finally realizes that Zay could use help himself in dealing with the aftermath of his own trauma that she is able to begin to move past her own fears of abandonment and recognize that she can both help and be helped, love and be loved, be tough and be open—with the right person.

Howard's log line—"love is beautiful. people are messy. I write about the space in between"—feels like far more than a catching slogan. With her strong ear for dialogue, her gift for crafting nuanced characters, and her focus on protagonists whose voices are not often heard in New Adult romance, Howard is definitely a romance author worth following. I'm excited to pick up the second book in The Prototype series, and to dip into her adult contemporary romance series, Love Always.


Photo credits:
Texas College Students: Texas College Photo Gallery
Esperanza Spaulding: Wikipedia

Jacinta Howard

Happiness in Jersey

The Prototype, Book 1

Indie published, 2014

Feminism in the Details: Lisa Henry's ADULTING 101

In need of a good chuckle, but tired of being expected to laugh at sexist jokes and male-centered humor? You might want to pick up Lisa Henry's latest male/male romance, Adulting 101. I was in real need of cheering up this past summer, and Henry's book made me laugh so hard my stomach ached for days after I finished it. Even better, it did so while drawing on a decidedly contemporary feminist set of underlying assumptions, far different than the typical two guys fighting over a girl love triangle found in much New Adult romance in the Twilight vein.

Adulting takes place during the summer between Nick Stahlnecker and Devon Staples' high school graduation and their taking off for two different colleges, where, for the first time since they were in elementary school, they will be living in different towns. Nick is gay, while Devon is straight, but the differences in their sexual orientations never get in the way of their best friendship. As the narrator, focalizing through Nick, explains:

Devon Staples and Nick Stahlnecker are now, and forever will be, best bros. Their bromance is epic. Devon even took Nick to prom, which was beyond incredible because he's not even a little bit bi—except for the thing that happened at baseball camp when they were fourteen that they don't talk about. He's just super cool, and gets a kick out of pissing off his stepdad, who is an evangelical Christian and can be kind of a dick. So prom was pretty funny. (117)

As the above quote, and almost every line in her story, demonstrates, Henry's strength as a writer is voice. Though the novel is written in the third person, the language Henry uses makes it clear that we are clearly in the mind of an 18-year-old guy. In particular, a guy who is not really sure he is ready, or even able, to make the jump to independence and this weird thing called "adulthood":

Nick had figured it [adulthood] was something that happened to everyone. That at some point you got tall and grew out of pimples and into the ability to understand what stock options are. So far, none of that has happened for Nick, and he's starting to worry it maybe never will (670).

Readers, then, can be excused for worrying, too. Especially when they read scenes like the one with which the novel opens: Nick's well-meaning dad has scored him an office job working for a construction company, where Nick spends most of his time playing with the stapler and ogling the hot construction workers. Especially a sexy guy named Jai, whose ass Nick commemorates in haiku in his notebook:

That ass is so hot.
 I would totally hit it.
Yes yes yes yes yes. (83)

After less than a week on the job, Nick finds himself asking if Jai owns any leather pants. And then asking if Jai would like Nick to suck his dick.

On the jobsite.

In a porta-potty.

Where of course they get discovered by the boss. . .

As Devon says to Nick after he hears about the porta-potty incident, "You're not a bad person. . . You just have terrible impulse control" (390). Or as later Nick reflects, "His mouth still works. It's never needed his brain to function. Ask anyone" (1547). Both understatements of the year.

When I first started Nick's story, I thought for sure that he and Devon would end up discovering love together, perhaps because of passages such as this one:

Devon is also oddly protective of Nick sometimes. He claims it's because he's three months older than Nick, and therefore the big brother in this bromance. Nick claims it's because he's secretly jealous of any guy who tries to get with Nick, because of complex abandonment issues and uncertainty about his own sexuality. It's probably some weird mix of both, but they've never bothered to analyze it except in a teasing way. (120)

And this one:

There was a time when Nick and Devon had to swear to his parents that they weren't sleeping together—well, they were sleeping, but that was all—because yeah, they are weirdly codependent and they are snuggle buddies. Nick's mom doesn't even blink these days when she finds Devon sleeping in Nick's bed. (723)

Only gradually did I realize that because Henry's writes in such deep point of view, we are getting Nick's take on his and Devon's relationship, rather than the neutrality the third person narration initially suggests. As, for example in this second, slightly different, take on the "the thing that happened at baseball camp when they were fourteen that they don't talk about":

Devon is the first person Nick came out to. Nick was sixteen. And Devon was totally not surprised. Which, after that thing at baseball camp, okay. Yeah, maybe Nick had totally initiated things and Devon had just gone along with it when Nick promised that straight bros jerked off together all the time. Really, he, isn't sure why it took him another two years to come out to Devon. And then, when he did, Devon had only nodded, hugged him, and asked him if he wanted backup when he told his parents. Devon is fucking incredible, and, if he weren't straight, Nick would be planning their wedding already. (378)

I also might have realized that Devon and Nick weren't destined for love because of the dual narrative of the novel From a formal narrative standpoint, if Devon had been Nick's intended love interest, I would expect that the book would give me his point of view, as well as Nick's. But it is not Devon, but twenty five-year-old Jai who serves as the story's second focalizer.

And it is Jai, who is as adrift in many ways as is Nick, who ends up becoming Nick's summer fuck buddy, not Devon.

For his part, Devon is nursing a crush of his own, on a girl who works with him at his summer job at the local pizza parlor. I absolutely loved how Henry depicts how a heterosexual male teen's awareness of women's issues plays out in his thinking about how to interact with a girl:

[Nick] attacks the rest of the pizza while he listens to Devon wax lyrical about how incredible Ebony is, and how she's funny and smart and also really pretty, except what if she still thinks he helped her make signs to protest the protesters at Planned Parenthood that time just because he was trying to get into her pants? Devon's a nice guy, but he's worried that she thinks he's one of those 'nice' guys who's only interested in being friends with her if it goes somewhere. And Devon wants it to go somewhere, even though of course Ebony doesn't owe him anything. It's complicated. Devon's too scared to make a move because he's been crippled by the weight of his male privilege. He only discovered it a few months ago, and it's shaken him up pretty badly. (400)

Or, as Devon explains it, "I don't want to turn into one of those assholes who gets all angry on Reddit about being friend-zoned and hates on every girl for being too good for him" (404). Hilarious and dead-on feminist, here and during a understatedly funny "shovel talk," the details of which I will let you discover yourself.

And I loved it that Henry makes space for a friendship between to men in which they could snuggle but have it not be sexual. And that a male friend can be protective of another male, rather than the usual female (see the aftermath of the aforementioned shovel talk).

And that traditional gender roles between gay male lovers are called into question, too:

     "You think because you fit the description of a twink that you can't top?"
     Nick narrows his eyes, like he suspects a trap. "Maybe?"
     "You need to find more porn," Jai tells him.
     "Lack of porn has never been a problem for me before. Trust me."
     "Better porn, then. Porn where bigger, older guys are getting absolutely plowed by twinks. See if you like it.
     Nick's eyes actually glaze over. "I," he begins, then stops. He draws a deep breath. "I will get right on that. Thanks, dude!" (1183)

Feminism in the details, as a taken-for-granted part of everyday life. And all in the midst of the funniest, sweetest romance I've read all year.

Sign me up for more Lisa Henry.



Photo credits:
Porta-potties: Westender.com
male privilege sampler: Rebloggy

Lisa Henry

Adulting 101

Riptide, 2016

What Do We Owe Our Exes? Elle Kennedy's THE SCORE

The latest addition to Elle Kennedy's New Adult Off-Campus series, The Score, focuses on the developing romance between college hockey player Dean Di Laurentis, the "king of one-night stands," and Allie Hayes, the girl who makes "little Dean" (i.e., his cock) pine for her and no other. Yet Kennedy's tale isn't the "teach/tame the philandering bastard the folly of his promiscuous ways by throwing a good-hearted virgin at him" storyline typical of old school romance (a large part of the appeal of the novel is that Allie, though she's had far fewer partners than has Dean, is in many ways more sexually adventurous than he is). Neither is the novel about being simultaneously resentful of and jealous of a man's right to be more sexually active than a woman is, as are so many other good-girl-heroine romances. In fact, the key to the fantasy of Kennedy's romance is that the villain of the piece is not sleep-around Dean, but Allie's nice-guy ex-boyfriend, Sean.

Reading The Score made me laugh at Dean's bawdy seduction attempts as he tries to win over the one girl who says "no" to any repeat performances after sleeping with him one time. But it really made me think why so many young women hold on to romantic partners long after everyone around them knows that the relationship has long run its course. And how many young women feel guilty if they are the ones to call a halt. What, if anything, do girls owe their exes?

The Score opens with Allie receiving increasingly desperate text messages from Sean, whom she's just broke up with—again. For the fourth time in three years. After being part of a couple since freshman year, Allie feels "like such a failure" for not making it work with Sean. "No, I feel like a quitter," she amends her thought; a quitter because "The last piece of advice my mom gave me before she died was to never give up on love" (Kindle Loc 62). Women teach other women that it is their role to nurture relationships, to pour their energies into emotional care-taking; when such care-taking fails to achieve the promised results, women are often made to feel, or make themselves feel, guilty about it.

Sean isn't evil; in fact, he's often rather sweet. But he can also be pretty un-sweet, especially when Allie's goals do not align with his. Their latest breakup came after Allie realized that while Sean had been fine with her plan to move to LA after college to pursue an acting career at the start of their relationship, of late he'd been arguing against her going into acting at all. His dream is for Allie to join him in Vermont, playing the role of happy housewife as he works at his father's insurance firm. And the arguments he'd been using to convince Allie of the rightness of his dream have involved far more verbal abuse of her acting talent than celebration of the bucolic Vermont lifestyle.

And so Allie breaks up with him. Again. For the last time, she swears. Afraid, though, because of her "terrible habit of wanting to make everyone happy, eve if it means sacrificing my own happiness" makes her scarily susceptible to Sean's sweet-talking ways (1046), Allie calls on her roommate, Hannah, for backup. But Hannah, out of town for the night with her boyfriend, can only offer her boyfriend's house as an escape. A house which said boyfriend just happens to share with the incorrigible, highly-sexed Dean. Allie, who's not a one-night-stand kind of girl, starts off the evening determined not to heed Dean's inevitable come-ons. Yet Dean's surprisingly easy to talk to, and, after a movie, a joint, and more than a little tequila, Allie wakes up the next morning hung over and naked—beside an equally naked Dean.

Allie feels anything but satisfied, even though the sex she and Dean shared was fabulous. "I'm such a slut. Okay, maybe I'm not. Maybe I'm just a twenty-two year old woman who had some no-strings fun for once in her life," Allie debates with herself after the fact. One-night stands make her feel "defiled," "ashamed," and now, having engaged in one only one day after breaking up with a long-standing boyfriend, more than a little guilty (721, 726). So guilty that Allie feels compelled to tell Sean what she's done when he calls with his heartfelt apologies and pleas for forgiveness and second (fifth?) chances). And later, when Sean tells her "I forgive you," Allie feels not just resentful ("because forgiveness implies that I'd done something wrong by sleeping with someone else, and that wasn't the case"), but also "relieved."

Intriguingly, it is the two men in her life who do the most to convince Allie that she does not owe Sean. Allie's tough father tells her he's glad she broke up with Sean:

    "Boy was too needy," Mr. Hayes continues. "I didn't like the way he looked at you."
     "How did he look at me?" Allie asks warily.
     "Like you were his entire world."
     She frowns. "And that's a bad thing?"
     "Damn right it is. Nobody should ever be someone else's entire world. That's not healthy, AJ. If your whole life is centered on one thing—one person—whatcha going to be left with if that person goes away? Absolutely nothing." He gruffly reiterates, "Not healthy." (3427)

And Dean urges her to drop the name/blame game:

    "But I wasn't kidding when I said I'm not into casual sex, okay? Every time I think about what we did this weekend, I feel—"
     "Horny?" he supplies.
     Yes. "Slutty."
     I don't expect the flare of irritation I glimpse in his eyes. "You want some advice, babe? Erase that word from your vocabulary."
     I suddenly feel guilty again, but I'm not sure why. Very reluctantly, I join him on the couch, making sure to keep some distance between us.
     "I mean it," he continues. "Stop slut-shaming yourself. And fuck the word slut. People should be able to have sex whenever they want, however many times they want, with however many partners they choose, and not get some shitty label slapped on them."
     He's right, but . . .  "The label is there whether we like it or not," I point out.
     "Yeah, and it was created by prudes and judgmental assholes and jealous pricks who wish they were getting laid on the regular but aren't." Dean shakes his head. "You need to stop thinking there's something wrong with what we did. We had fun. We were safe. We didn't hurt anybody. It's nobody's business what you or anyone else does in the privacy of their bedrooms, all right?"
     Oddly enough, his words succeed in easing some of the shame that's been trapped inside me since Friday night. (1315)


And this, perhaps, is where the fantasy of this romance lies: not in the fact that sex-loving Dean falls for sexually adventurous Allie, but that sex-loving Dean proves to be a sex-positive feminist, while nice-guy Sean proves to be a sexist asshat (examples of which come later in the story). Allie may need validation from men, as so many romance heroines do, but ultimately this validation is about affirming her rights—to her own plans, her own desires, and above all, her own sexual selfhood—not the rights of her male partner.

Or maybe there are just a lot more sex-loving sex-positive male feminists out there than when I was in college?

Elle Kennedy

The Score

Off-Campus Book #3

2016

Paying it Forward: Heidi Cullinan's LOVE LESSONS series

"Pay it forward": to repay a good deed that someone has done for you not by reimbursing that original benefactor, but by doing a good deed to someone else entirely. According to Wikipedia, the concept is as old as the ancient Greeks, and endorsed by a panoply of past luminaries from Ben Franklin to Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Lily Hardy Hammond to Robert Heinlein. Sometimes, the philosophy focuses on random acts of kindness to strangers: paying the toll for the car behind you; buying the cup of coffee for the person standing in the Starbucks line beside you. Other times, though, paying it forward is more specific: volunteering at one homeless shelter after you've been helped by a different one; helping unpublished writers learn more about their craft when you're an already-published author. Some of the most powerful acts of paying it forward, I think, take place among groups of people who miss out on the benefits others of us take for granted. Such as adolescents who find themselves estranged from their friends, families, and networks of support because of their sexual or gender identities.

This concept of paying it forward serves as a unifying thread through each of the three New Adult romances that Heidi Cullinan has published as the Love Lessons series. In book one, Walter Lucas had planned to spend his senior year living off campus. But when his planned roommate graduates early and moves away, Hope's Dean denies Walter's request, insisting that he live in the dorms. Thus Walter, big gay man about campus, finds himself stuck rooming with geeky, Disney-loving, allergy-suffering freshman Kelly Davidson. Kelly, who grew up in a close-knit, accepting family but who is just coming out in public for the first time, is looking for romance with a capital "R." To cynical flirt Walter, wanting romance is to want a false, Disney-fied version of life:

"What the hell do I do on a date that I don't do any other time? Talk? Hell, you and I are talking right now. Go out to eat? That's on the agenda too. Doesn't mean we're sleeping together, not necessarily. Sometimes sex happens with people I hang out with, sometimes it just happens. It's like a game. Why would I want to fuck it up with some heterosexual mating dance?" (Kindle Loc 408)

With such an attitude, Walter's completely up for casual sex with his younger roomie. But Kelly wants his first time to be special, to matter. And so, despite his attraction to Hope College's very own homosexual Casanova, Kelly keeps his hands to himself.

Is Kelly at fault for wanting perfection, the ideal, a fantasy relationship that never can exist in reality? Or is Walter, for not being willing to even consider, never mind believe in, the ideal at all? Cullinan does an amazing job balancing the need to stick a pin in the false promises offered by the papering over, or Disney-fication, of real-life injustice, while simultaneously acknowledging the power of our fantasies and dreams to inspire.

This is a lesson that both Kelly and Walter take with them into the second book in the series, where they act not just as cameo guest stars from a past book, but play an active role in supporting the protagonists of Fever Pitch, both of whom are dealing with situations where their sexuality is far less accepted than was Kelly and Walter's. For Giles Mulder, high school has been a "slog through hell" (181). His family accepts and loves him for who he is, but since Giles doesn't not want, and isn't at all able, to pretend he's anything but gay, his male peers have taken their homophobia out both verbally and physically, on Giles' body. Especially those peers who've indulged sexually with Giles but who fear having anyone find out about it.

Parties are usually not Giles' scene—being the ball in a drunken game of "Kick the Fag" is hardly his idea of fun—but he promised best friend Mina he'd tag along to the end-of-senior-year shindig. No way had he expected the night to end in a lakeside tryst with Aaron Seavers, the popular transfer student whom he'd been crushing on all year. Or that he'd arrive at St. Timothy College in September to discover Aaron, who'd left him without a word, a fellow first-year.

Quiet, gentle Aaron has bee browbeaten for years by his overbearing father. But after he meets Walter during his summer job at his father's law office, and finally begins to talk openly about his sexual identity, he begins to find the courage to make a life decision: he'll follow Giles to St. Timothy. Aaron hopes being away from his family will help him figure out what he wants—out of life, out of love, and especially out of himself. Dealing with a deeply strange roommate, as well as Giles' unexpected animosity, leaves Aaron wondering if coming to St. T's was a huge mistake. But when Aaron's singing talent lands him in the midst of the college's chorus, as well as in its elite male singing group, the Ambassadors, he finds a built-in support group he never even realized he was missing.

A group he certainly needs after his father kicks him out of the house at Christmas after he hears that Aaron was kissing a boy (Giles) at the Winter Concert. But Aaron needs Walter's friendship even more, a need which Walter is determined to meet:

"I knew when I first saw you that you were lonely too. When I saw you in your corner all curled up, though, it got to me because you looked like I still feel inside most of the time. It was like I had to get you out of there,  had to take you to lunch, had to keep in touch with you, because everything about you felt like this big chance to take care of someone the way nobody ever did me, not until Kelly. I think if Kelly weren't so awesome, didn't know where this all came from, he'd be jealous. He does know, though, and he gets how taking care of you is like taking care of the little brother I never had or an alternate version of me. . . . Sometimes we need a place to be completely safe, somewhere boring that isn't about sex or adventure or wild hairs. I am that place for you." (Loc 3750).

Romance is important, yes but so is having friends who make you feel protected, feel safe. Especially when the world—or more painfully, one's family—is not a welcoming place.

I had originally started reading with book three in the series, Lonely Hearts, which was published this year, but I had to go back and start over with book one, because there were so many characters, with so many relevant stories, from the previous two books in the series that I felt I was missing out by not understanding all the romantic and friend connections Cullinan had established earlier in the series. And while each of these three books can stand alone, the experience is far richer if they are read in order.

Lonely Hearts, in fact, opens with Walter and Kelly's summer wedding, a Disney-themed extravaganza that has bitter, nasty Elijah (Aaron's difficult former roommate) nearly gagging. Elijah, whose gayness was anathema to his strictly religious parents, has nearly lost himself pretending to be the repentant Christian boy his mother and father demanded of him after he limped home after a painful year on the streets. He understands why St. Timothy's music clique has adopted "orphaned" Aaron—Aaron's sweet, and kind, and handsome, and good. But prickly, caustic, unlovable Elijah knows he's another story. He alternately rejects with loathing and feels weak at accepting Aaron and Giles' intrusion into his solitary life. And drowns himself in liquor and drugs to dull his feelings.

Elijah's not the only one who needs drink and drugs to help him pack away the pain from a life that's been "a lot more Grimm brothers and much less Walt Disney" (310). Baz Acker, the senior member of the Ambassadors, works hard to present a hip, carefree face to the St. Timothy community, even while his dark glasses and bum hip speak to Baz's own share of Grimm brothers in his past. Baz rarely tells anyone about being gay-bashed outside of a Chicago Boystown bar on his sixteenth birthday ("I lived. My boyfriend didn't" [460]), but finds himself confiding in Elijah at the wedding. Baz's graduating friends warn Elijah away from the volatile Baz, but Elijah knows Baz doesn't always cut and run—he's saved Elijah's life, not once, but twice.

Yet as the new school year unwinds, and Baz vacillates between wooing Elijah and giving him the cold shoulder, Elijah isn't sure he can cope—with college, with romance, or with his increasingly frequent anxiety attacks. And especially not with the publicity of having a relationship with a guy who has become the center of a maelstrom of media interest after said guy's mother announces her candidacy for a U. S. senate seat. Only the wholehearted support of Giles, Aaron, Walter, Kelly, and the music gang can help Elijah and Baz find the sheer courage to care about another, and, more difficultly, about themselves.

And to find their own unique ways of paying it forward.

Heidi Cullinan

Love Lessons

     Book #1 Love Lessons 

     Book #2 Fever Pitch

     Book #3 Lonely Hearts

Samhain, 2013, 2014, 2015

Slut Shaming, University Style: Sarina Bowen's THE SHAMELESS HOUR

In a Wonk-o-Mance blog post in April amusingly entitled "Herpily Ever After," romance author Cara McKenna mused about why there are so few mentions of sexual transmitted diseases in contemporary romance. After her initial instinct to "get uppity" about their absence, well-aware of the way that our "sex-shaming culture still clings to the belief that STIs are punishment for moral failings," McKenna reined in her initial instincts, noting that for most sufferers, dealing with a sexually-transmitted disease today is akin to dealing with pollen allergies or wearing contact lenses. And, like other similar banalities that people deal with on an everyday basis, STIs only belong in a story if they have some meaningful effect on a character or on the plot in which he or she appears. McKenna definitely believes that there should "be more visibility and frankness in our culture around STIs," but doesn't necessarily think that romance fiction is the "place to champion such a movement."

At least one romance author begs to differ. Only a few days after McKenna's "Herpily" post appeared, Sarina Bowen published the fourth book in The Ivy Years, her New Adult college romance series set at a thinly-disguised Yale. The Shameless Hour not only uses romance to call for the very visibility and frankness around STIs that McKenna is looking for, but also explores the linkages between STIs, slut-shaming, and the policing of young women's sexuality.

Readers of earlier books in the series will remember Shameless's heroine, Bella, as the student-manager of Harkness College's male hockey team. Bella has had, and continues in this book to have, an active sex life, one which she refuses to feel shame over, even when friends on the team make stupid remarks ("Who does Bella like? I need this intel for the season-opening bets.... There's a pool going on which freshman Bella goes home with first" [Kindle Loc 357]). Such comments grate on Bella: "It was true that I'd had a lot of sex with hockey players. (One at a time, usually). But the players weren't saints, either. And nobody was starting a betting pol about any of them. Double standard, much?" (357). But Bella won't change her behavior just to conform to unfair sexual norms, even though she knows there's a price to be paid for nonconformity: "The truth was that people were always going to talk smack about me because I didn't hide the fact that I'd had more than a few sexual partners. Girls who played the field got called names. I knew the drill" (370).

Talking smack is one thing, but public humiliation is another. After Bella is diagnosed with chlamydia, the most common STD in the United States ("Well, yippee. It isn't every day you find out that you've got the good kind of STD" [1408]), she's faced with the task of informing the one guy with whom she had sex within the transmission window that he infected her, and needs to get checked himself. Not freshman Rafe, with whom she had a mutual consolatory one-night stand early in the semester, but her most recent hook-up, Beta Rho frat boy Whittaker.

Bella's nurse counsels her that her partner may not believe her, since "over half the people who carry [chlamydia] don't have symptoms" (1417). Thus readers aren't surprised when Whittaker, an entitled jock, refuses to accept responsibility. More than that, he actively blames Bella, orchestrating a particularly public form of revenge against her, one involving permanent pens, misogynistic words, and photos uploaded to a fraternity boast and prank web site. Even though the nurse who treated Bella tried to interrupt the linkage of STDs and female sexual freedom—"Bella, would you be feeling the same way if you'd caught the flu from a partner? ... This isn't a message from God. There's no reason to panic or to feel any shame" (1408)—after Bella's experience, she can't help but burn with shame.

Bella's protective alpha hockey team friends rally around her, but their questions—"Was the ink the worst thing that that happened to you that night?" (1969)—just add to her humiliation. Bella withdraws from her friends, even from her job on the hockey team itself. And she decides not to report Whittaker's fraternity, or Whittaker himself:

He'd want to know if I'd been assaulted, just like Rafe had tried to ask, too. In their minds, it was the worst thing that could've happened to me. And maybe they were right. It's not like I had any experience with that.
     But I'd had enough experience with other kinds of assholery to know public humiliation was no trip to Hollywood, either. I wasn't about to make my own life worse by making a complaint against the fraternity, because there was no way I'd prevail. The Beta Rho national chapter probably wrote their own slut-shaming tactical handbook. (1977)

This is a romance novel, though, so justice does eventually get meted out, both of the official and unofficial (i.e., Bella playing a decidedly feminist prank on the entire Beta Rho fraternity) kind. And Bella finds unexpected support, and friendship, with her next-door dorm mate, when she's never had a close friendship with someone of her own sex before.

And she finds surprising support from another unlikely quarter: her one-time hook-up Rafe, a boy who is in many ways her exact opposite. Dominican to her white; working class to her ownership class; family-loving to her family-rejected; serious to her casual. Especially when it comes to sex (favorite line: "I don't do casual, because I don't want to feel like the most convenient dick in the neighborhood" [2887]). Despite his own sexual mores, Rafe clearly appreciates Bella, in all her outspoken, sexually liberated glory:

"Someday," he said, "you might have a daughter..."
     "People keep warning me that karma is a bitch."
     He shook his head. "That's not what I mean at all. You'll have a daughter, and she'll be able to tell you wahtever is in her head. And you won't hit the roof you'll just deal with it, you know? The girls in my neighborhood, they hit high school and all the aunties start heaping on the guilt. 'Don't wear short skirts, because the boys will think you're easy. Don't let him kiss you. Don't let him touch you. Go to confession.' It's crazy." (2421)

For Rafe, though, friendship is rapidly transforming into falling, and falling hard. But when he scrapes up the courage to ask Bella to be his girlfriend, she says no, and counteroffers a friends-with-benefits deal. When Rafe in turn refuses, Bella accuses him of slut-shaming her. But he immediately protests: "I think you're amazing, and I've said so every chance I get. Don't put words in my mouth. I never said your way was wrong. It's just wrong for me" (3121). Is wanting a relationship with Rafe the same as giving in to everyone's desire that she be a good girl, that she stop rocking the sexual double standard boat and settle down with a guy, instead of playing the field?

In The Shameless Hour, Bowen dissects the ways that privileged men often use shame to control female sexuality, and the corroding effects of such sexual shame on young women. But in Bella and Rafe, she also provides strong role models for both women and men who want to reach a place of both shamelessness and caring when they embrace their own sexual desires.



Photo/illustration credits:
Chlamydia statistics: National Chlamydia Coalition
Slut Shaming poster: Betrayed Mermaid

Sarina Bowen

The Shameless Hour

Rennie Road Books

2015

Recovering from Rape: Elle Kennedy's THE DEAL

It feels a little weird to cheer a romance with a protagonist who was raped as a teen. Rape surely isn't anything to cheer about. But a romance with a heroine who has been, and is still, refusing to buy into the victim-blaming discourses that so often surround those who have suffered sexual trauma, a heroine who has been taking active steps to claim her own sexual pleasure despite her past assault, seems rare enough to be worth a hurrah or two.

It's not hard to understand why college junior Hannah Wells is not a big partier; at 15, she was raped at a party, and when she tried to prosecute her attacker, she and her family became pariahs in their small town. Hannah's had lots of therapy, and has even had a few boyfriends, since her assault, but she's never been able to reach orgasm during sex with a partner. Justin Kohl, sexy new transfer student, has her heart pounding, though, even though he's a jock, not arty Hannah's usual type. Might he be the one to help her get over her sexual difficulty?

When he signed up for Philosophical Ethics, hockey team captain Garrett Graham thought the course would be a breeze. But this semester, a new, far tougher instructor is teaching it, and after a disastrous midterm, Garrett (and most of the rest of the class) is in danger of failing. Brash, aggressive Garrett will NOT allow that to happen—if he can't get his GPA up, he'll be suspended from the team. And hockey, and his teammates, are the most important thing in his life.

Hearing that fellow classmate Hannah has aced the midterm, Garrett decides that Hannah must and will be his tutor. But unlike most of the girls who fawn over this BMOC, Hannah won't give him the time of day.

Garrett isn't one to take no for an answer, though, and tries several different angles to convince Hannah that it's in her best interests to accept the job he's offering. But Hannah remains firm—why would she ever want to spend her time tutoring a dumb, foul-mouthed, cocky jock? Especially when she has her duet in the Winter Showcase to prepare for. The Showcase isn't just a performance; it's a competition, with the winner granted a major scholarship. With all the money her family had to spend on lawyers during the rape prosecution and trial, Hannah wants more than anything to win the scholarship and relieve some of her parents' financial burdens.

When Hannah's roommate, aware of her crush on Justin, drags her at a party, and Garrett sees how she's drooling over Justin, he comes up with the perfect deal: she'll tutor him for a week and a half, preparing him for the Philosophical Ethics midterm re-do. After the test, Garrett will go out on a very public date with her, thereby raising her social profile up to a level that will attract the status-conscious Justin. Much to Garrett's surprise, and to her own, Hannah takes Garrett up on his challenge.

As Garrett and Hannah spend time together prepping Garrett for his test, their sarcastic dissing of each other gradually leads to something unexpected: friendship. And for Garrett, who is happy to sleep with almost any girl, but has no desire to take on the time-sink of a girlfriend, something even more unexpected happens: not only is he attracted to arty singer Hannah, but he actually might want to spend time with her outside of bed.

It was great to read a romance with a female character who had experienced sexual abuse, but who had already engaged in extensive therapy and who was not allowing shame, guilt, or victim-blaming discourses to undermine her hard work in learning to deal with the aftermath of her trauma. Hannah has learned to be comfortable with her body, can bring herself to climax through masturbation, and knows that she'd like to experience orgasm with another person, if she can only find the person who turns her on enough. That she learns that it's not only her own attraction to a potential partner, but also the attentiveness of that partner to her needs, that allows her to achieve her sexual goals, is a lesson that not only those who have experienced sexual trauma benefit from learning, but that every girl and woman beginning to explore her own sexuality needs to discover.

And it was also great to watch the brash, vulgar Garrett starting to recognize the sexist language and behavior that he and his fellow jocks take for granted in their dealings with the opposite sex. When Garrett's housemate and fellow teammate Logan says about Hannah, "She's hot... You tapping that?" Garrett can't help feeling uncomfortable:

I'm not sure why I'm suddenly on edge. I'm not into Hannah in that way, but the idea of her and Logan hooking up makes me uneasy. Maybe because I know what a slut Logan can be. I can't even count the number of times I've seen a chick do a walk of shame out of his bedroom. (Kindle Loc 1295)

After Hannah reveals her trauma and asks Garrett to help her overcome her sexual problem (thinking it might be easier to focus on her own pleasure, rather than worrying about disappointing her partner by not reaching orgasm, if she's with someone whom she doesn't love), Garrett agrees. But Hannah and Garrett don't jump immediately into fabulous, problem-free sex; despite Garrett's cocky reputation, there's no magic penises here. Garrett actually takes the time to do some research about victims of rape, and refuses to rush straight to intercourse. The two work on establishing mutual trust, and joint experimentation, to find what Hannah responds to sexually, and what triggers can short-circuit her sexual pleasure.

The last quarter of the book, when Hannah and Garrett's friendship-with-benefits is threatened by Hannah's earlier agreement to go out with Justin and by the meddling of Garrett's verbally and physically abusive father, takes a decided turn toward the melodramatic. Rather at odds with the realistic feel of most of the earlier story, and certainly not my usual cup of tea. Yet I was willing to live with the soap-opera-y shift for the rewards of the book's earlier unusual, progressive depiction of a young woman who had been raped, but who, through therapy, self-development, and the cultivation of caring friendships, works to craft an identity that is far more than just "victim."


Photo credits:
Girl with Guitar: Love this pic
Shame Blame: Pinterest Mirah Bradford

Elle Kennedy

The Deal

(Off-Campus Book 1)

Self-published

Surfacing the Sexist Assumptions Behind Revenge Porn: Robin York's DEEPER

A week ago today, a Manhattan judge dismissed the first attempt in New York State to prosecute a "revenge pornographer." For those unfamiliar with the term, "revenge porn" (also known as non-consensual pornography or cyber rape) occurs when a person posts pictures of another person without his or her clothes on, or in a sexually explicit position or act, on a social media site such as Facebook or Twitter, without that person's consent. Most often, the poster is a former romantic or sexual partner of the person in the photograph, and the posting done in order to shame, intimidate, demean, and/or physically threaten.

According to the New York Daily News, Criminal Court Justice Steven Statsinger wrote in the decision dismissing the above case that while the defendant clearly sent sexually explicit photographs of his former girlfriend via Twitter to the woman's employer and her sister without her consent, the act did not "violate any of the criminal statutes under which the defendant was charged." Though the judge termed the defendant's act "reprehensible," under current New York state law, the defendant had not done anything criminally wrong.

The general tenor of the comments posted in response to Daily News piece were disheartening, if unsurprising:

This is why I tell my daughter, be mindful of pictures, who is taking them and where they are. This stuff will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

Don't want anyone to see you [sic] nude pix? Then don't have them taken in the first place!! DUH!!

When will women learn not to allow anyone to take nude photos? There are too many stories of women showing up on these revenge sites.

Maybe woman in NYS should be nicer to the man they hurt!

Women can't help themselves. They LOVE to take pictures, and nude photos makes [sic] them feel sexy. They place a HIGH premium on looking and feeling sexy. Not their fault, though, as the beauty industry is so manipulative and suffocating.


Though several of the posters echoed the judge's belief that the man was a jerk, more of the comments (from both men and women) focused on cautioning against the behavior that led to the woman's victimization. Why are we so ready to blame the victim? Does it have anything to do with the fact that in the majority of these cases, the person featured in the photos is a woman?

New Adult author Robin York attempts to answer this question in her provocative, insightful, and surprisingly romantic first novel, Deeper. The story opens with Iowa college student Caroline Piasecki, opening a link sent to her by her roommate, a link that reveals photographs that Nate, her old boyfriend, took with his iPhone while they were having sex. The link, to an internet porn web site, includes not only the pictures, but also Caroline's name and home town. As a bonus, an added-on cartoon bubble has been pasted next to her face in the final photo: "I'm Caroline Piasecki! I'm a frigid bitch who needs to get FUCKED!"

Up until the middle of her sophomore year, Caroline had been the embodiment of the proverbial good girl. Dated the right guy, earned the good grades, got into the best colleges, Caroline never caused her single father the least bit of trouble. Though she'd recently broken up with her first serious boyfriend, Caroline thought she had the whole world ahead of her. But now, with sexually explicit images of her proliferating across the web, and the derogatory, shame-inducing, and outright threatening comments anonymous males are posting in response to them, Caroline believes that her dreams for the future have been irrevocably damaged.

The usually confident, outspoken Caroline finds herself with her head down, hoping that if she just keeps a low enough profile, the whole awful mess will just disappear. That someday she'll be able to get the chorus of vulgar men and the hateful, demeaning slurs they post in response to her photos, out of her head. York does not shy away from the shockingly aggressive, abusive, and denigrating words male posters feel they have the right to spew from the anonymous safety of their computers: Got what you deserved, didn't you? Slut.    I can't help it, Caroline... It's your fault or being so fucking hot! 

Lying low certainly means not getting involved with the campus bad boy and local pot dealer West Leavitt, even though the two have been attracted to each other since freshman year. The last thing Caroline needs is to discover West and her ex in the midst of a fistfight, a fight purportedly sparked by her ex's derogatory comments about her. "He'll draw attention to me. My primary purpose in life at the moment is to disappear.... I can't chance it happening again. I need to talk to West." But Caroline's "talk" doesn't quite go the way she had planned. And soon she finds herself in a tenuous "not-friendship" with the compellingly attractive West, a boy bent on protecting others, but unwilling to show anyone, even Caroline, the truth behind the facade he presents to the rest of the college world.

York hones in on just what is so appealing to readers in the New Adult genre: the overwhelming feelings of first, requited lust; the all-consuming focus on a new love; the difficult, often traumatic life circumstances that prevent young love from flourishing; the pleasure-pain of angst when love goes awry. She has a real gift for not only for limning the contours of passion, but also those of character, particularly characters from different class backgrounds, and the inevitable misunderstandings and miscommunications that result because of those differences.

But at the same time that she embraces some NA tropes, she clearly rejects others, carefully and convincingly exposes the sexism that underlies them. Fighting Nate on Caroline's behalf may seem heroic, but West's behavior also undercuts Caroline's own power, her own ability to fight her own battles. As does publicly staking his "claim" to her only two days after he's broken off their "not-friendship," cutting in front of a guy in whom she's expressed interest and kissing her in public during the women's rugby team fundraiser. While some girls might find such a public declaration swoon-worthy, it only infuriates Caroline, because she understands the sexual politics behind it: "Mine, his mouth says. Mine, mine, mine. But I'm not. I'm my own." Part of what Caroline has lost because of the outing of her photos is her sense of control, her ability to make up her own mind. Having someone she cares for take away that control is little better than having it stolen away by someone who means her harm. York also highlights how much the appeal of the NA "bad boy" rests on class differences, differences that simultaneously make working-class male rule-breaking attractive to "good" middle class girls, but deny young working-class men the power that their rule-abiding middle class male counterparts take for granted.

A good girl is not supposed to be a sexual creature; but a good girlfriend does what it takes to make her boyfriend happy. Including not making a fuss when he pulls out his camera. The paradox of two such diametrically-opposed messages is what lies at the heart of the blame-the-victim mentality when it comes to revenge porn, York's story argues. York shows how Caroline gradually comes to realize that she's drunk the patriarchal Cool-Aid, buying into the belief that she, not Nate, is to blame for the public release of his private photographs. Not only due to West's more earthy, matter-of-fact take on sexuality, but also due to Caroline's new involvement in sports, her willingness to allow female friends to support her, and her ability to mock the very derogatory terms intended to bring her down (for example, laughing rather than getting upset after a friend trying to persuade her to join the rugby team says, "Oh, right. I'll settle for the blow-job queen here, then"). Only after Caroline realizes "I'm not bad. I'm not good. I'm just alive. I'm just here, dancing," can she find the courage to face down Nate, to demand her father's love rather than his judgment, and to persuade West to allow her to be more than just the damsel in need of his saving.

At the end of her book, York includes a note to the reader, urging us to become involved in the campaign to outlaw revenge porn (currently legal in every state except New Jersey, York reports, although the above map suggests California has recently outlawed it, too), by visiting the web site End Revenge Porn. Immediately after I finished her book, I clicked on the link, and signed the petition encouraging legislators to draft and pass laws to criminalize this deeply anti-feminist crime. I hope you all will, as well.

And now I'm headed off to the bookstore, to buy a copy of Deeper for my teenage daughter. Because this is a book that every adolescent girl needs to read.


Photo credits:
End Revenge Porn: Traverse Legal
Revenge porn legislation map: apcrunch

Robin York

Deeper

Bantam, 2014

Feminism and Teen Melodrama: Katie McGarry's CRASH INTO YOU

In general, I haven't been a big fan of the emergent New Adult subgenre. Coming of age during the 1970s and 80s, the glory days of young adult realism, I'd been trained to prefer deep, psychologically complex, and above all, realistic novels of adolescent experience to books that took a more melodramatic approach to the teenage years. But ever since a commenter (Rebecca Rogers Maher) on an earlier post pointed out that melodrama as a genre is often preferred by oppressed social groups, I've been interrogating the grounds upon which I'd dismissed this new teen literature. Adolescents are in the midst of learning to navigate the world beyond the family, exploring social structures in which they often have little power or control. In contrast, to read a steady diet of YA realism means imbibing the genre's structural message: problems are internal, psychological, often of a protagonist's own making, and can be solved if a protagonist confronts and overcomes his or her personal demons. To delve into a genre like melodrama, which is typically structured around problems external to the protagonist, might be a way to reject realism's structural message, to insist that not all problems stem from an individual's inner psychology. Or at least to entertain the idea that the external world may play just as big a role as an individual's psychological weaknesses in impeding an adolescent's life goals.

Thinking about teen melodrama in this way helped me to better appreciate one of the most popular contemporary YA/New Adult melodrama writers: Katie McGarry. Her latest release, Crash into You, tells the story of two high schoolers whose lives often feel completely out of their control. From the outside, rich-girl Rachel seems to live a life of privilege. But having grown up the youngest of five, and repeatedly told she was conceived so her mother could have another daughter to replace the older sister who died of leukemia, Rachel feels like the invisible girl in her family. Always expected to be as perfect as the dead Colleen, to keep her mother from falling into the debilitating depression that hit her after Colleen's death, Rachel has to connive and sneak in order to indulge in the one thing she truly loves: tinkering with her beloved 2005 Mustang GT and driving it as fast as she dares. Succumbing to panic attacks whenever she's called on to speak in public certainly doesn't fall within the parameters of perfect daughterhood, either, and so Rachel has been pretending for the past two years that her own mental illness is just as nonexistent as is her own mother's. But as her parents and older brothers begin to push her to speak at the leukemia fundraisers her mother organizes, hiding her condition grows more and more difficult. Everyone in the family considers Rachel weak, in need of their protection; no one realizes how hard she's working to protect them all.

Fleeing one night from a particularly grueling fundraiser ("Cinderella ran away because her coach was going to turn back into a pumpkin. I'm running away because I'd rather be knee-deep in axle grease"), Rachel chances upon an illicit street race. She ends up competing against a dangerous-looking guy ("The two opposing parts of my personality, the girl who panics and the girl who loves speed, declare war and the result is a head rush") who helps her escape when the cops arrive. Readers of McGarry's previous books will recognize Isaiah, escapee from the indignities and abuses of the foster care system, cultivator of a bad-ass image, and the one on the short end of the romance stick after his best friend/confused sex partner Beth moved to the suburbs and found love with a good middle-class guy (in Dare You To). But Isaiah's destined for an even greater cross-class romance than Beth's after his car breaks down and swanky Rachel refuses to save herself and leave him behind for the police to capture.

Shunted into the foster care system at the age of six, after his mother was sent to jail for Armed Robbery and Child Endangerment (she'd brought her son along during her heists), Isaiah has spent most of his life struggling to regain mastery over his out-of-control life. Immediately drawn to Rachel, but convinced he's unworthy of this beautiful angel-girl, Isaiah's almost glad to have a real reason to keep away from her: Eric, the organizer of the street races, was robbed by the college boys who led Rachel to the race, and Eric's on the prowl for her, determined to teach her a lesson. The best way to protect Rachel is to steer clear of her.

A comic Rachel would likely appreciate:
1971's Nobody Wants a Girl Auto
Mechanic (although by comic's end,
mechanic Lisa wins a job, and the guy)

But in the way of good melodrama, malevolent Eric is not so easy to put off. And soon Isaiah and Rachel are forced to work together to appease the villain, by earning $5000 drag racing to pay him back for his losses. And also in the way of good melodrama, external forces—a betraying friend, an automotive mishap, a gambling-addicted brother—keep pushing the two away from achieving their goal, upping the stakes and drawing them emotionally closer.

Yet in the midst of the melodrama lies an interesting feminist message. Isaiah, determined to keep things under control, insists that he's the only one who will race Rachel's car (given Rachel's earlier loss to him during a race, she doesn't protest too much). Isaiah also doesn't tell Rachel everything he's planning or doing in his quest to gain the money. "I'm doing it to protect you," he protests when his well-intentioned deceptions come crashingly to light. But Rachel isn't having it: "You're doing it to protect yourself. You never really let me in, did you?" Just like her brothers, just like her parents, Isaiah has used the pretext of protecting her in order to appease his own psychological needs. And Rachel finally realizes that "I'm tired of being protected," tired of serving everyone else's needs but her own.

Only after finally breaking down and speaking honestly with his estranged mother does Isaiah realize that his own need to protect Rachel is just as much a need for control as was his mother's refusal to let a kind foster family adopt him, or to allow his grandparents to take him in. Only by recognizing Rachel as an autonomous individual, and accepting her right to take chances, to make decisions, to act in ways that might lead to results he cannot control, can Isaiah prove worthy of her. Rachel's triumphant moment on the race track inverts film melodrama's embrace of traditional gender roles in a particularly satisfying way:

     Her eyes have a contagious gleam. "I want to do that again." [says Rachel after winning the race]

     "You're going to make scaring the shit out of me a habit, aren't you?" [replies Isaiah]

     Her lips whisper against mine as she speaks. "And you won't do a thing to stop it."

     "No." As much as it kills me. "I won't."

Though the continued melodrama of the novel's denouement seems rather needlessly (and unintentionally) punishing, it echoes the message of the novel's climax: "I've got to let Rachel make her own way, even if it means watching her stumble," Isaiah affirms to himself when she rejects yet another well-intentioned attempt to help her. Isaiah becomes not the savior, not the protector, but the symbolic reward for a girl who has finally learned that pretending to be weak only weakens the ones she loves. A message rare in traditional melodrama, but immensely welcome in a New Adult novel.

And here, weirdly enough, I've come full circle on the issue of control. Am I really only praising this melodramatic novel because at its end, it incorporates the internal psychology of the YA genre? Even if that internal psychological message is about giving up the need for control?

Photo Credits:

2005 Mustang GT: Kimballstock

Nobody Wants a Girl Auto Mechanic:  Career Girl Romances #66, courtesy of Sequential Crush

Katie McGarry, Crash Into You

Harlequin Teen, 2013

Mid Adult Romance?

A recent post by S. L. Scott on the Huff Post Books blog, discussing the rising popularity of the "Mid Adult" book—genre books with "characters that range from the ages of 35 to late 40s"—surprised me, because I'd been considering writing my own blog post about how few genre romances feature protagonists of a certain age. The Old Skool romance paradigm, matching a-30ish hero with a late teen heroine has given way in recent years to protagonists of more comparable ages, but still, the majority of romance lovers could hardly be said to be middle aged. The three books that Scott cites as examples of this new trend—Gillian Flynn's Girl Gone, Daisy Prescott's Geoducks are for Lovers, and Helen Fielding's Mad About the Boy—can all be categorized as romances, although Girl Gone's primary genre affiliation is suspense/thriller, and Mad's (if it is anything like the earlier Bridget Jones books) is chick-lit. But do three books make a trend?

Despite the fact that, being myself a gal of a certain age, I'd appreciate seeing more middle aged protagonists in my romances, I can see quite a few reasons why the genre is less than welcoming to such older lovers. First, as my spouse pointed out when I was bemoaning the prevalence of the youthful in romance, we've all been young once. Older folks can remember, and thus presumably relate to, love at a younger age, but the opposite is not true for younger readers. In a genre focused so much on "relateability" (oh, how I dislike this coinage!), on assuming that a reader must closely identify with its protagonists, the market for older heroes and heroines will necessarily be smaller than that for younger lovers. Perhaps the splintering of the market in the wake of romance's current self-publishing tsunami will make books with smaller audiences more economically feasible, but in the past, few traditional publishers could justify printing a genre romance with an in-built limited readership.

Not the image I was looking for when
I did a Google search for
"middle age romance"

Older lovers also fly in the face of the "one true love" paradigm that most genre romance still holds close to its heart. If you've made it to 35 or older and still haven't found that one true love, that's a pretty sad statement about the state of the world, a sadness that romance isn't likely to want to acknowledge. Or if you have, but then lost it (except through death—widows and widowers still make for good romance protags), you're flying in the face of the central hope that romance offers—that finding true love = living, and loving, happily ever after. In the world of romance, if a breakup or divorce, rather than death, ended a romance, then you must not really have found true love, putting us back at problem 1 (the bummer of not finding true love before age 35).

Are there other reasons you can think of why "Mid Adult" romance is unlikely to flourish? Or, if you're of a more hopeful turn of mind, reasons why we really might be on the cusp of a flowering of forty-something lovers in our romance reading?

Do you have any favorite romances that feature not just one, but two older protagonists?




Photo credits:
Medieval romance: GGGA English