I have loved doctor-nurse romances ever since I found Cherry Ames, Student Nurse in my junior high school library. I don’t know why, because I’ve never wanted to be either a doctor or a nurse. My doctor relatives and friends are good at their jobs but we rarely talk about them, and until I was middle-aged I spent almost no time in hospitals. It must be because I like worldbuilding, and hospitals really are their own unique, almost self-contained worlds. In the olden days, medical romances featured handsome, brilliant, and usually rich doctors who fell in love with either beautiful, feisty, yet competent nurses or jolie-laide, shy, yet competent nurses over the course of 192 pages. But while that still happens, we now have the greater likelihood in real life of male nurses and female doctors. Have Medicals changed along with real life? What kind of lives and romances do these books portray now?

Like every other Harlequin line, Medicals have a set of distinguishing characteristics. First, the hero and heroine have to be medics. Women can be doctors, although men are not yet allowed to be nurses (if someone has a contradictory example, please comment!). They can have related medical occupations, like EMT, and they can work in hospitals or in private practice. The majority of Medicals are set in either Australia or the UK, probably because that is where their authors live, but there are a handful of writers who set their stories in the US, such as Dianne Drake, Janice Lynn, and Laura Iding.

There are Billionaire Docs, Posh Docs, Royal Docs, and even Sheikh Docs. But there are also Ordinary Docs. A current release by Alison Roberts, Wishing for a Miracle, features a decidedly middle-class EMT hero. An appealing feature of heroes and heroines in Medicals is that even when they have HP-like attributes, there is a maturity and sense of purpose to them that makes them grounded (Lynn Spencer pointed this out in a comment to Jessica’s post). Being a Billionaire, Royal, or Sheikh (or for that matter Spanish or Italian) isn’t going to matter when you’re in an operating room engaged in a high-risk operation, or sitting in an office telling a patient he or she has a brain tumor. The hero has to be convincing as a professional, and since many readers have much more experience with illness and disease than they do with high finance or running multinational companies, the authors have relatively demanding standards of authenticity to live up to. Similarly, while there are still a few young, ingenuous heroines (Carol Marinelli has a recent release, A Knight on the Children’s Ward, with a student nurse heroine), most heroines are at the very least highly competent and often quite experienced. The hero is usually the more powerful of the couple, which can be especially acute in a medical setting, but many authors are careful to stress the importance of the subordinate occupation. An excellent book by Amy Andrews, Top-Notch Surgeon, Pregnant Nurse, has a brilliant surgeon hero, but the heroine is the head of the Surgical nursing unit, and her staff is integral to the success of a high-risk operation on conjoined twins.

Ah, those conjoined twins. There aren’t very many of those, but there are plenty of standard-issue twins in Medicals, and even more singletons. There are just babies all over the place. Either the babies are patients in the children’s ward and the heroes and heroines are OB/Gyns, Pediatricians, Childrens’ Surgeons, or Children’s nurses, or the hero or heroine has a child when the story begins. Or, of course, the heroine becomes pregnant during the course of the story, usually accidentally or because of the hero’s Miracle Penis (Caroline Anderson has a recent release,The Surgeon’s Miracle, which features a Miracle Vagina for a change). If condoms actually failed at the rate they do in Medicals, the companies that make them would have been sued out of business by now. The authors do their best to make these accidental and miraculous pregnancies believable, and the best books are pretty successful, but it is definitely a trope. I don’t mind babies in my category romances, but even I get burned out after a while.

The prevalence of miscarriage plots exemplifies the greater level of angst found in Medicals. Perhaps it’s because so much of the drama comes from serious illness/disease or unexpected pregnancy, or perhaps the seriousness of the setting and the occupations feeds it. But while the stories can have plenty of lighthearted elements, several authors write intense books (Marion Lennox is a master at these). It’s difficult to pack complicated backgrounds and foregrounds into the category format, and sometimes the complications go over the top, but when the authors pull it off, the books can be really memorable.

Despite the abundance of babies, Medicals are well worth reading for the relationships and the contexts, especially if you like UK and Oz/NZ settings. For those who like US settings, the ones I’ve read have ranged from the Deep South to rural Utah, and I hope the variety will be maintained as the US list expands. The sex is less explicit and frequent than in the HP or Blaze lines, but usually more steamy than the Harlequin Romance line. All those babies have to start somewhere! And there are some absolutely terrific authors. Among my favorites are Sarah Morgan, Kate Hardy,Marion Lennox, Amy Andrews, and Fiona Lowe, and I’m always looking for new authors.

I’ll be doing monthly mini-review roundups of a number of the Harlequin and Mills & Boon releases. The timing of releases is a bit complicated, because Harlequin doesn’t release Medicals a month early the way it does the other lines, and there is a lag between US and UK releases. Moreover, not all the M&B are released as US Harlequins, so the books may not always be reviewed in the month they’re available in the US. But I’ll try mostly to review those that I know will be released in the US, and if there is reader interest, I’d be happy to do reviews of backlist books that are still available in e-form.

If you’ve read this far and want to try out a Medical, There are several available as free online reads at the Harlequin and Mills & Boon website. Harlequin has a new one by Fiona Lowe, Return to Love, and and Mills & Boon’s online read library has stories by Melanie Milburne, Laura Iding, Dianne Drake, and Alison Roberts.

If you have authors and books to recommend, either in the Medical line or elsewhere, I’d love to hear about them.

Related posts:

1. Feel The Heat Writing Competition from Mills & Boon
2. Mills & Boon to Test Paranormal Market
3. Mills&Boon Hosts Writing Contest in India

Considering I put this book both on the Recommended Reads for December and on my Best of 2008 list, I figured I should actually review it. Not that it’s not a pleasure to reread such a great story.

I love the way this book starts:

Eighties dance music blasted through the Yaris’s speakers as Joey Miller flew down the passing lane of I-10, dancing in his car.

That tells us everything we need to know about Joey. He’s cute, he’s expressive, he’s impulsive, and he’s very very gay. Seconds later, he witnesses an accident and, do-gooder that he is, stops to help an unconscious woman trapped in a minivan and calms her toddler. At the accident, he meets Aaron Chase, a paramedic, equally well-described in his first words:

Flashing lights, sirens and caffeine were near the top of Aaron Chase’s very short favorites list. All three gave him a rush that was almost as good as sex-’which took up at least the top five on that list.

They are attracted to each other and fuck in Aaron’s ambulance after all the excitement is over, starting a tentative connection that they both work hard at both torpedoing and also strengthening without quite knowing why.

Joey has two problems. First off, he falls in love very easily:

It didn’t matter how many times it had been wrong, he still wanted to believe it. Wanted to believe it when he kissed a guy and everything inside said him. It had been wrong about Mark and Noah and Jorge and Tom and the whole list going right back to kissing Eduardo under the bleachers in tenth grade. Or maybe before. When he’d been three and told his mom he was going to marry his best friend Cody.
It didn’t happen with every guy, of course. Because then Joey would have a whole hell of a lot more than-’shit, he was into double digits-’ten ex-boyfriends.

And second, he not only goes around with a soundtrack in his head of music that accompanies everything he does, but he has a script he expects his relationship to follow, and when they do, he gets kinda bored. This being a romance, of course, Aaron refuses to follow Joey’s scripts right from the start, making the relationship real. Master manipulator that Joey is–in the nicest, sweetest way–Aaron bulls his way through everything and just does what HE wants to do–and that’s mostly Joey.

Aaron has a few problems of his own. He’s had a very crappy childhood and isn’t really one for boyfriends — he’d much rather a quick, emotionless fuck. He’s also a bit of an asshole. But we see enough from his perspective that we understand why he’s an asshole.

You have a gift for writing sex. There are many sex scenes in this book, but not only do each of them advance the plot and the characterizations, but they also are completely different from each other without being obvious about it. It doesn’t feel like, “Well, here’s the first sex, and here’s the blowjob, and there’s the dildo scene. Oh! and spanking…” Instead, the scenes are brilliantly seamless, fun, exciting, and oh so hott! In one scene, Aaron has Joey talk him through giving Joey a handjob so he can get it right — it’s one of the hottest things I’ve ever read, because is shows how much Aaron cares about getting it right and how unabashed Joey is about sex. One spanking scene in particular brings the characters closer together in ways that only BDSM can, and you do a brilliant job of showing how and why that closeness is created and how amazingly erotic it can be.

I also really like how not only how the sex is an integral part of the story, showing us how the characters and how they grow and mature and fall in love, but their careers are too. In fact, their careers provide both the tension of and the resolution to the story and it’s so great to see jobs be more than something the characters seem to ignore while they get it on. Aaron is an adrenaline junky of a paramedic, gruff and competent, who has managed to raise four siblings through awful family circumstances and fourteen years of battles with social services. Joey, of course, is a social worker, raising all Aaron’s hackles immediately. However, while Aaron can’t stand Joey’s job, it also is an integral part of the man with whom Aaron so reluctantly falls in love. And (desperately trying to avoid all spoilers here!) their careers are what bring about the reconciliation of the story’s tension in fascinating and completely unexpected ways. Kudos for the ending, actually. I can’t talk too much about it, but it’s amazingly done.

There’s just slightly too much of Joey’s ex-boyfriend who was the hero of one of Mitchell’s previous novels. While Mitchell avoids rehashing the entire previous book, thank goodness, Noah and the new boyfriend are sometimes just a little too overpowering.

That aside, this is my favorite type of romance novel: just a romance. No mystery, no “must save the world” suspense, no paranormal aspects, nothing but two men meeting, overcoming their own internal obstacles so that they can truly fall in love, and finding a way to be together permanently. And it’s brilliantly written, with strong, witty dialogue, distinct characters, sharp descriptions, emotional depth and breadth and interest, and scorching sex.

Grade: A-

This book can be purchased in ebook from from Samhain.

Related posts:

1. Editor Spotlight: Betsy Mitchell, Del Rey