The Power of Happily Ever After

Genre fiction of any sort has a certain power. It's the power to sneak serious thinking into "mindless, fluffy, badly written" books. It's what part of what Very Serious Literary People do not understand about why smart people sometimes read "dumb" books. Part of it is escapism (which I don't view as a derogatory term): the ability to turns our brains off for a while and coast. But not every work of genre fiction, including not every work of romance, is best understood that way. It's the ability to get a reader to let down whatever guards they have, let go of whatever biases, prejudices or preconceived notions they have about how the world works and experience difficult topics and themes from a perspective of non-judgment. Even if they don't realize they're doing it. When an author really grabs you and pulls you into a story, you accept all sorts of things that your rational mind knows are "not true".

In science fiction, this power comes from shifting the setting of the story from our world to another, even if it's only a variation in time, space or history. In fantasy, the power comes from concocting an entirely new world based on different physical rules and social mores. Sometimes these are exaggerated versions of ours, like in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Sometimes they establish behaviors as normal things that are seen or were seen as "abnormal" as in the case of the same-sex relationships in Ursula LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness. I'm sure mystery and horror have their own powers considering people like Dorothy Sayers, who wrote mystery, and Stephen King, who writes horror, have never struck me as stupid people or bad writers. I don't read those genres (I've read other things by both authors), but they must have a similar attraction given how many smart people I know do.


So what about romance? It's tempting to ascribe some of the same power of fantasy to paranormal romance and that of alternate history to Regencies and Victorians. However, no matter the sub-genre,  romance's defining characteristic and special power is the happy ending.

The happy ending allows romance to explore difficult topics from a safe and comfortable distance. The 12,000 of us who follow Victoria Dahl on Twitter are keenly aware of her stance on sexism, but she presents her positions much more widely and much more subtly through her books. She's able to tackle issues of divorce, infidelity, spousal abuse and fears about aging within a context that keeps the reader feeling secure because we know no matter what happens, by definition, everything is going to be alright in the end. In the hands of a writer of literary fiction, these and other topics might simply prove too serious or too terrifying for a reader to face down, particularly one who has personal experience with these issues.

In the hands of writers like Dahl and many others, these problems are not just a reason to keep the couple apart for 300 pages. Mainstream romance reaches readers of all kinds of backgrounds, world views and political stripes. People who might view addiction as a moral weakness, kink as a mental illness or verbal abuse as a just and reasonable parenting technique get a different perspective. Now, sometimes this breaks down and readers complain about couples who don't deserve their HEA; sometimes for reasons of stupidity or cruelty on the part of a character, but sometimes for how the writer handles these larger societal issues.

I don't want to make it sound like every writer is out to publish moral and political screeds in the guise of love stories. The amazing thing about romances is that they evince so much empathy for all sorts of different people with all sorts of different failings. Many of them do it from within our cultural framework. Though many characters display the defining sarcasm, snark and smarm of our age, writers and readers of romance are able to slip into a world of eternal optimism and look at it from that perspective for a while, even if it isn't normally our default setting.

Happily ever after can be a means of exploring topics and themes which might otherwise seem too tough or too trivial from within the context of a story in which the anxieties of ultimate failure, rejection and death have been removed. It's romance's super power.

Looking for Trouble Chinese Take Out

Victoria Dahl kicks off a new series this week with Looking for Trouble (which comes out tomorrow). It centers around a group of friends we first met in the last series. In fact, if you intend to pick up this one, it helps to have read Too Hot to Handle, which features the story of Merry Kade and Shane Harcourt, who is the brother of Looking for Trouble's hero Alex. You'll be able to follow the story if you skip the other book, but like Mary Balogh's Slightly series, it's awfully nice to have a handle on some of the secondary characters going in.

Speaking of Alex Harcourt, he hasn't been back to Jackson in a decade. Unable to deal with his mother's mental illness and his brother's enabling of her bad behavior, he has chosen to absent himself from their lives. Now he's back for his father's memorial service, and none too happy about it. At least until he meets Sophie Heyer.

Sophie is a librarian in town and a friend of Lauren Foster, the super hot heroine of the novella Fanning the Flames (still available for free, I think). Her mother and Alex's father had a scandalous affair and when they disappeared on the same day, it left a huge hole in both their lives. Since it was pretty big news for a pretty small town, everyone is still talking about it. Plus Alex's mother isn't any help, continually labeling Sophie the exact same kind of trollop as her mother, which is plainly unjust and wrong.

I don't know what it is with heroines lately. Even though the plot revolves more around Alex, his brother, his mother and his commitment issues, it was Sophie's character growth I found most interesting here. Leaving out her qualms about Alex, she has a complex relationship with herself. Sophie desperately wants to let loose: she wants to travel, she wants hot sex with hot men, she wants more than her small town library job. This is not helped by the constant slut-shaming she receives from town members, largely thanks to Alex's mother's interpretation of the events surrounding her mother 20 years before. Even her clothing telegraphs her ambivalence about herself: all modesty and primness outside, fiery hot lingerie and garter belts inside.

The source of much of the conflict in Looking for Trouble revolves around Sophie and Alex keeping their fling a secret from the rest of the town. They know that if they are linked together, it will start up even more talk than the actions both their families caused in the past and continue to cause in various ways throughout this book. Sophie is very concerned about her reputation and how it reflects on her father and brother. Alex is uncertain that he wants a relationship with anyone at all, thanks to the dysfunction of his family. This feeling of small worldness is highlighted by the inclusion of characters from both previous books and the short Fanning the Flames that kicked off this series earlier this month.

Looking for Trouble is quality Victoria Dahl. If you've liked her other books, you'll definitely like this one. But don't skip out on Lauren and Jake's story in the short freebie. The older hero and heroine make for some seriously smoking hot chemistry. I can only hope this represents a trend in Dahl's work, as Fanning the Flames might be the best thing of hers I've read yet.

I've gotten pretty inventive when it comes to creating recipes for the various romances I read, even when there's a dearth of food in the actual novel. When it came down to food in Looking for Trouble, though, the choices were pretty much vast quantities of Scotch or grabbing Chinese take out on the way home from the grocery store. Since I couldn't quite see consuming half a bottle of Scotch in lieu of dinner, Chinese take out it was. If you want to make a different choice though, far be it from me to judge.

One of the things I loved about this book was seeing the relationship between brothers Shane and Alex get reestablished. The scene where Merry brings home take out and they spend time together for the first time in a decade was particularly touching.

Plus everyone can use a break from cooking every once in a while. Even me.

I don't think I'm unduly picky, but what is it with trying to find quality Chinese food? So much of it is greasy, salty and MSG-laden. However, we actually sat down and did some research this time, and found a pretty darn good spot near our favorite grocery store. Yelp actually knows what it's talking about!

I think I see more Chinese take out in our future.

Scent in Romance

My husband bought me a surprise present last weekend when we were at Anthropologie, the sneaky man. That's it above. It's warm and woodsy with a hint of vanilla that's perfect for me. And it got me thinking: how many times have you seen a reference to scent in a romance novel? All the time, right? I can't remember whose series it was (Grace Burrowes maybe?) who gave each of her heroes and heroines a signature scent, sometimes in some interesting combinations: oranges, lavender, vanilla, cedar. In the series I just read by Laura Kaye (Hearts of the Anemoi, which I'll talk about in more detail next week), the heroes are all associated with a season and both hero and heroine have a scent that matches the hero's season. And of course, we're all aware of "man scent".

This is interesting to me because scent isn't something we're aware of a lot of the time. Scent registers when we smell something particularly good like baking cookies or particularly bad like pond water wet dog. A few months ago, my husband went back to my home town on the Central Coast of California. While there, we wanted to pick up a present for some friends of ours and we stumbled into a shop that specialized in local products: everything from soap and block-printed linens to sauces and spice blends. Our friends love tea so we were smelling all the teas when one of them socked me in the gut. The scent was Paso Robles: sage and lavender, but other things I couldn't readily identify. Until that moment, I didn't realize that Paso had a scent.

It's that concept of man scent that I'd like to explore. I ran across it again recently in an earlier Victoria Dahl work, which I forgive and don't feel weird calling out because she has gotten so so very good in the intervening years that it's basically the only criticism I can level at her. She said something similar in her new novella, Fanning the Flames, though this one worked for me while still remaining vague on the finer points of scent: "He smelled the way a man should smell when he was in your bed and working hard for it." [Loc 67] Nearly all romance writers use the man scent device. If it doesn't pop up in a book, I'm surprised at this point. Why? I have some theories. Four, actually.

The first theory is that writers are lazy. Maybe they don't know what to write as an introduction to further intimacy. Maybe they can't distinguish what makes a man smell good. The second is that they experience some form of sensory deprivation. Maybe they don't realize that all men smell different. The third theory is that it's a joke that romance writers are all in on and I'm not. My final theory is that scent is a very personal thing and they don't want to turn a reader off to a hero by giving him a smell that might be objectionable. I can't come up with any other reasons. Am I missing something?

Because I've gotta be honest, I think all of those reasons are dumb. I know writers aren't lazy. It takes a special kind of crazy to be willing to muck around in your own head as much as writers do. Writing, editing, copy-editing, etc. takes a lot of time and effort. Nor do I believe that writers are somehow unobservant. Maybe it's a charming conceit that good writers are all incredibly observant, but it doesn't seem so to me.  And those powers of observation must extend into realms beyond the visual. I also don't really believe that it's a joke, unless it's like one of those Onion stories that people occasionally pass around not realizing that it's satire.

The final theory is maybe a little more believable. My husband mostly smells like soap, which is fine by me and probably also universally appealing. There are certain colognes that trip my circuits. Calvin Klein's Obsession is one that gets me, but referring to a cologne by name in a book probably wouldn't be super helpful unless it's scratch-and-sniff like a Macy's catalog. That said, I once had a boyfriend who worked in a bar and smelled of cigarette smoke, Big Red gum, leather and Jack Daniels. Some people would think that smelled terrible, but I loved it. And if a writer described a hero that way, the reviewers would all go, "Ew, he smells like cigarette smoke? Disgusting. You totally lost me there. DNF." But writers who have written red-haired heroes or villainous heroes or short heroes or heroes with a little bit of a belly might get the same reaction.

So I understand why writers would stick with safe things like pine needles, citrus and rosemary, but there are a lot of other man smells. Heroes who work on cars or motorcycles should smell like gasoline and motor oil.  Shouldn't a man who swims or surfs smell like chlorine or salt water? Guys who have been working out should smell like sweat. Or at the very least, some kind of deodorant. And office-working billionaires do smell subtly expensive: like an upscale hotel. I can't be alone in finding any or all of these things sexy on the right guy. Man smell seems like an unnecessarily safe choice.

So please, no more "man scent". I don't know what that means. It isn't interesting. It isn't alluring. Tell me what he smells like instead. Whether that particular scent gets me hot or not, it tells me something about the hero that I want to know. Man scent does not.