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Runaway Wedding

by Ruth Jean Dale

Waiting at the Altar

by Amy Frazier

Amaryllis

by Jayne Castle

The casual observer might swear that there isn’t much to distinguish between the romance novel and the soap opera. Both, after all, are about the many and various vicissitudes of love. But the major difference between them (beyond the media through which they deliver their stories) is not simply that one has a predictable happy ending and the other unrelenting agony. Soaps also have continuity – an ongoing storyline and cast of characters – that typical standalone novels can’t duplicate.

It was only during this decade that romance publishers really began to capitalize on this strength of television’s afternoon tradition by introducing what the trade calls “out-of-series continuity programs” – which is a convoluted way of describing a run of books about the same cast of characters or the same locale.

Harlequin’s first centred on a small American town, Tyler, Wisconsin, and president Brian Hickey takes credit for inspiring it in the late 1980s. Sick abed at home from time to time, Hickey noticed that he could pick up the overall thrust of a soap opera’s plot even when seeing shows in a series six months apart. Soaps, he observed, have a continuous environment – including cast and locale – so viewers supply “90% of the story” as they watch an individual segment. Why, Hickey wondered, couldn’t the world’s largest romance publisher duplicate this phenomenon in print?

The successful Tyler series had a shifting troupe of characters who all lived in the same town. Harlequin followed it up with another called Crystal Creek and, more recently, one that was located in various romantic cities around the world but focused on members of the same family, all of them in the wedding business. Weddings by DeWilde , written by a dozen different authors, beginning with prolific mainstream author Jasmine Creswell, was launched in April and will run until March, 1997. (A series from sister company Silhouette, aimed at the young adult market, has used a similar concept: set in Chicago, The Loop books have a company of characters in their late teens, or what Harlequin vice-president Kathy Orr calls “Generation Y, dealing with adolescent problems like finances and unwanted pregnancies.”)

Both Harlequin and Silhouette already had similar series based on the genre’s popular theme of weddings. Two of their recent offerings – and a third with completely different subject matter from a long-time competitor, Pocket Books – demonstrate the sorts of changes the ever-inventive industry can ring on romance.

Ruth Jean Dale’s Runaway Wedding is the June release of Harlequin Romance’s year-long Hitched series – “How the West was wooed!” runs the jacket splash – about women who tame their western lovers. Dale (aka Betty Duran, a Coloradon who has written more than a dozen Harlequins) presents the conventionally plotted, prosaically told story of Lark Mallory who rediscovers the guy she fell for as a girl. All grown-up, she meets him again in her family’s former mountain cabin, where the book opens with a scene observed from the hero’s point of view in a parody of fairy tale prose: “Someone had been sitting in Jared Wolf’s chair.” The someone is Lark, a refugee from her own wedding to the boring Wes. The big, not-so-bad Wolf, who is more complex than he first seems, resists her allure because he’s angry at her improbably overbearing father. This is a classic sweet, as opposed to spicy romance, with discreet sex. The heroine’s relationship with her sister brings the story to a close with a satisfying twist.

An offshoot of the so-called continuity programs is the mini-series, three or four books written by the same author. Silhouette’s latest is Sweet Hope Weddings, set in a town in Georgia, the home state of the author, Amy Frazier (aka Amy Lanz). The second in this Special Edition trio, Waiting at the Altar, is another second-chance story, reuniting 23-year-old Cathryn O’Malley with Jacob Matthews, the man she abandoned moments before their wedding five years earlier when she was pregnant with another man’s child. Jacob was aware of the impending birth but not the terrible secret of how it was conceived. Now Cathryn’s back, a single mother with a five-year-old, to help out in tornado-stricken Sweet Hope, where she learns that Jacob has become a pastor. Although Frazier writes reasonable romance prose, her pastor is so saintly and the tension between him and the heroine so flaccid that the story merely limps. At book’s end there’s a passionate bit of lovemaking, but it’s safely performed within the confines of the inevitable marriage. What’s fascinating is that, while the Lord is mentioned many times inside, nowhere in the packaging of the book is there any hint of the hero’s calling. Is this a subtle field test of Harlequin’s stated desire to enter the inspirational market?

Jayne Ann Krentz is an eloquent spokeswoman for the romance world as well as one of its superstar authors. “Like all the other genres, romance is based on fantasies and readers know it,” she writes in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, the collection of essays she edited for the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1992. “Readers and writers alike get disgusted with critics who express concern that they may not be able to step back out of the fantasy.” Certainly her latest from Pocket Books, Amaryllis, cranks up the fantasy level to high pitch. It’s the first in her series written as Jayne Castle that centres on Psynergy, Inc., a psychic investigative agency in the city of New Seattle, two centuries hence (the other two titles in the trilogy, all featuring different heroines, are Zinnia and Orchid).

The conceit of the novel is amusing. Amaryllis Lark (not to be confused with Lark Mallory) is a proper ex-academic who now works for Psynergy as a prism. It seems that in this new world, on the planet St. Helens, a colony long since cut off from Earth, prisms wield their mind power to help people with psychic abilities focus their capricious gifts. These psychics are called talents, and a talent named Lucas Trent asks Amaryllis’s aid in determining whether his female assistant has been betraying the secrets of his mining exploration company. Because this is romantic fiction, the mental mixing of the prism’s and the talent’s powers explodes in instant physical passion, in explicit scenes that the author writes as artfully as she does the book’s science-fantasy elements (although even she has the hero describing himself in a mirror). Krentz has a sense of humour that enlivens the conventions of romance; for instance, she creates a society that does not tolerate divorce and so insists on professionally arranged marriages. Her central characters have some depth and history and the minor ones are intriguing: a politician who uses prisms to enhance his charisma, and an upright professor who pays a stripper for private performances.

I believe every man should read at least one good romance novel to learn what a lot of women fantasize about. But Amaryllis, with its business details and action scenes, its mystery and wit, is among the few in the genre I could recommend to a male reader to be enjoyed just as a novel – in spite of the much-mocked category in which it finds itself.

 

Reviewer: Paul Grescoe

Publisher: Harlequin

DETAILS

Price: $3.75

Page Count: 186 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-373-03413-X

Released: June

Issue Date: 1996-7

Categories: Fiction: Novels

Tags: , , ,

Reviewer: Paul Grescoe

Publisher: Silhouette/Harlequin

DETAILS

Price: $4.5

Page Count: 250 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-373-24036-8

Released: June

Issue Date: July 1, 1996

Categories: Fiction: Novels

Reviewer: Paul Grescoe

Publisher: Pocket Books/Distican

DETAILS

Price: $8.5

Page Count: 328 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-671-56903-1

Released: June

Issue Date: July 1, 1996

Categories: Fiction: Novels