I like to re-read the Neels books, but I can’t read too many in a row. Because all those similarities start to become annoying. But I always read my favorite, Fate is Remarkable, at least once a year.

I really enjoy the Essie Summers. She did for New Zealand what Neels did for the Netherlands. Her books are rich with history and geography of her homeland. She also did children and families, especially elders, really well. All of them distinct people, with their own part of the story.

The contemporaries that don’t grab me today barely make the h/h as interesting as the supporting players that Burchell, Neels, and Summers created.

Now, obviously HQN did this because her books sell and sell and sell. Which naturally leads to the question, why? Why, in the 21st century, would people be reading extremely predictable books about shy (or outgoing but very sweet), plain (or pretty but not at all prideful), poor (usually down on their luck) heroines and taciturn, unexpressive, giant Dutch (and then English Doctors (and then tycoons)? One website describes her as a comfort read, and she is clearly that. She also did an amazing job of conjuring up a Holland that used to exist and that has never experienced drugs, red light districts, or immigration. I’ve been to the Netherlands, and you really *can* use her books as a travel map. And she emphasized the differences among the regions, the old languages like Fries, and other cultural particularities. So readers felt like *they* were in Holland. There aren’t many other writers who were quite that good at the cultural background across so many books. Unlike all the exotic Sheikh books, or ones set in exotic locales with British characters, Neels’s characters were rooted in the Netherlands.

Some time in the early 1980s, Neels began writing about English heroes, but after a few books she would alternate them with the Dutch doctors, no doubt because her fans wanted them. The heroines got more and more plain and downtrodden, so that in some of the later books they were living like The Little Match Girl. They almost always had cats or dogs that the heroes rescued along with the pathetic heroines. Some of the books get pretty squicky, because the heroes were literally saving them and there was almost no development of a romantic relationship. After 150 pages of an essentially distant, paternalistic relationhip the hero would say I love you and everything would be fine. And the writing and plots got worse as well. But clearly these Match Girl heroines struck a chord, and to be fair, there were also pretty heroines with happy families (Neels did families and children quite well). But the cultural contexts got more and more removed from reality.

As I write this, I wonder if readers accepted the more recent books as fairy tales in a much more literal sense than the average HQN romance, with the poor but virtuous heroine and the unattainable hero who magically falls in love and they live wealthily and happily ever after in a make-believe world.