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REVIEW: Start Me Up by Victoria Dahl

Janet — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:00:59 +0000

Dear Ms. Dahl:

Now that I’ve read three of your novels, I see a pattern in your heroines: they are extremely jealous of their independence, convinced that no man can be depended on, and afraid of showing themselves completely to the world. I appreciate these qualities in a genre that too often holds its heroines to unreasonable standards of nobility, gentility, and congeniality. All of which is another way of saying that I enjoyed Lori Love, the heroine of Start Me Up, and her difficult path toward the kind of happiness she had more or less given up on the moment she had to leave college and move back home to take care of her father and his car repair business. I did not find the book to be as strong as last year’s Talk Me Down, but it was still very readable.

In Talk Me Down, we meet Lori as Molly Jennings’s childhood friend, a woman whose tomboy wardrobe, no-nonsense mien, and skills as a mechanic earn her a reputation as the town lesbian. Lori has no real interest in changing anyone’s opinion of her, as the label gives her a certain amount of freedom from the expectations of others. And Lori likes it that way, because she is having enough trouble not living up to her own expectations of what her life should be to comfortably accommodate anyone else’s. However, Lori does have two strong desires that remain unfulfilled: one is to travel the world, and the other is to have a no holds barred, hot and dirty affair. The first was sacrificed the day Lori left college and returned home to Tumble Creek and an incapacitated father (her mother having long abandoned the family). And the second becomes immediately imperative from the moment in Start Me Up when Molly’s brainy, sexy architect brother realizes Lori is a girl.

Of course Quinn knows Lori possesses two X chromosomes, but it’s not until he sees her in a shapely blue dress with deep red high heels that he realizes she’s a woman. And since Quinn spends most of his time in a sort of intellectual haze, the shock of being pulled out of his self-absorption catalyzes a powerful but somewhat uncomfortable (for Lori, at least) mutual attraction:

. . . "You were just asking me about dirty things, Lori Love.   Remember?   And then Quinn walks over here and stares at you like a raspberry truffle dipped in honey cream."

"He. . . A what?"

"I’m sorry.   That was too much, huh? Too erotica-y?   Too much creamy goodness?"

Lori wrapped her fingers around the stem of her martini glass.   "God, you are strange."

"Don’t change the subject.   Do you want to do dirty things with my brother or not?"

"No!" Her brain seemed to vibrate at the word, like an internal lie-detector test.   "Of course not.   I just fixed his backhoe.   That’s it."

"Got his engine running?"

"Stop it."

"Hey!"   Molly protested.   "I could have said something about being a hoe, but I didn’t."

Anyone who has read Talk Me Down knows that Molly is an erotica writer whose occupation has only recently become public knowledge. Lori, who likes to read erotica, can’t help but be attracted to the hunky, Barbie doll dating Quinn, but she certainly doesn’t want to share that with Molly. Which, of course, only adds to the forbidden nature of the attraction for Lori. And Quinn, who has a terrible track record with remaining focused on a woman long enough to establish an actual relationship, is more than interested in volunteering for duty as Lori’s experimental stud, a position he learns about only when Lori turns Quinn down, wrongly assuming that Molly has told him of her interest.

Thus begins the unexpected dalliance, which Quinn juggles with his busy architectural firm and Lori tries to manage in the midst of offers to buy her late father’s riverfront property and mysterious incidents of vandalism to the garage.

In a traditional Romance, Lori’s vulnerability would bring out Quinn’s protective instincts, building the emotional bond between the lovers as Quinn keeps rushing to Lori’s rescue. In Start Me Up, however, Lori doesn’t want to be dependent on Quinn, and so he never hears about the danger until later, building tension between them through Quinn’s frustration over Lori’s distancing and Lori’s fear that if she started to depend on Quinn she would most certainly end up hurt.

In many Romance novels, I would find Lori’s attitude an annoying and artificial means to delay the inevitable emotional bonding of the couple, but in Start Me Up, I understand Lori’s hesitancy. After all, she has cultivated an image in town that has not exactly played on her female charms; her mother left when Lori was a teen; her own dreams have been deferred for less glamorous responsibilities; and Quinn has a history of dating extraordinarily beautiful, extraordinarily tall, extraordinarily shiny women, and he hasn’t exactly been focused on Lori in that way. It doesn’t matter that Lori is pretty and sexy and appealing – she has set things up so that most people don’t see past the coveralls and the greasy fingernails and the tough exterior.

So in that sense it was quite a pleasure watching Quinn begin to chip away at Lori’s self-image, and I found it believable and frustrating in a good way that she resisted falling too hard for Quinn. What worked less for me, ironically, is born of this same dynamic – namely that I didn’t get enough of Quinn to understand why Lori, of all women, was the one who managed to hold his sexual and romantic attention. NOT because Lori’s physical charms were perhaps a bit more petite than Quinn’s other women, but because slack jawed surprise merely opens the door to sex, and what makes Quinn want more is not justified merely because the reader may understand Lori’s appeal. In other words, even though I may be able to construe any number of reasons they work as a couple doesn’t mean the book has, in my opinion, done its job in effectively building the relationship beyond the bedroom.

Consequently, while I understood why Lori was both attracted to and a bit intimidated by Quinn, I did not have that same clarity from his side of things. Take the moment he proposes that she come and live with him after things really begin falling apart around her:

"I want   you to come live with me."

"What?"   She’d worried he was about to make a grand declaration of love that she’d have to wiggle away fro.   But this?   This was crazy.   "I can’t come live with you!"

"Sure you can."

"I live in Tumble Creek" [note: Quinn lives in Aspen, across a pass that closes in winter]
"Come on, Lori.   There’s nothing left for you in Tumble Creek. You don’t belong there."

Lori’s jaw fell open.   He’d said it so casually, as if it weren’t her whole life he’d just tossed aside.   "It’s my home," she forced past her tight throat.

"It’s where you live, sure."

"It’s my life."

When he sighed, he sounded exactly as if he were dealing with a recalcitrant child.   "You don’t have a life."

. . . "You thought I could just move in with you, no problem."

He paused for just a moment.   "Yeah."

In one sense Quinn is correct; Lori has put all of her plans on the back burner, not even picking them back up after her father died. But on another, deeper level, this is a guy who we are supposed to trust in his deeper than sex attraction to Lori who is seeing her here on a rather superficial level. It is a conflict in the book that was never satisfactorily resolved for me. And it reflects for me a larger tension between the upending of some genre stereotypes that occur throughout the book and a conformation to other genre stereotypes. For example, I loved the way Lori is acutely aware of her class difference from Quinn and his circle, and the way she can articulate that so clearly – "an exotic taste of the underclass," as she puts it at one point. And I appreciated the lack of judgment Dahl places on her characters’ sexual desires; as Quinn and Lori discover that they both enjoy power games, they are free to explore that without it having it reflect some deep psychological issues in either of them.

All of these things were refreshing and interesting, especially combined with the chuckle out loud moments in the text like the initial exchange I quoted between Lori and Molly, where Molly worries aloud that her description is "too erotica-y." Those moments of amusing and self-conscious referentiality become more significant the larger Dahl’s body of work gets, and they are a very nice touch. If only Quinn had been constructed with that same level of textual depth, I think Start Me Up would have been an unqualified winner. As it is, I found it an entertaining but not fully satisfying B-.

~ Janet

This book can be purchased at Amazon or in ebook format from Sony or other etailers.

Romance and the Boundaries of the Self

Guest Reviewer — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 10:00:30 +0000

Today’s guest opinion is brought to you by Jessica from Racy Romance Reviews. Jessica started blogging in 2008 and has provided some great reviews as well as thoughtful commentary. She first came to my attention by Janine linking to one of Jessica’s posts. (Word of Mouth, isn’t it grand?). Jessica started reading romances in 2007 after a decade of not reading fiction. She, like us, is the typical romance reader which is to say she’s not typical at all. She’s a self described feminist, a Ph.D., and most of all, a lover of the romance book.

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Romance is defined by its exploration and celebration of romantic love. That said, I’ve been surprised and delighted by the number of other important themes that are explored in the genre. I think it behooves romance readers to discuss these non-romantic themes, because romance writers tend to bring a unique focus to these themes, and because highlighting the ways that romance authors approach nonromantic themes can help to forge links between a belittled genre and more respectable ones.

Consider the theme of selfhood in romance. In some ways, every single romance is about selfhood, since the romantic ideal says that until we meet our counterpart, we cannot truly be our best selves, our complete selves. What’s unique about this, is that the self is defined as fundamentally relational: people are not silos, who choose to enter relationships as they might choose to engage, or not, in hobbies, but rather, people can only be who they are with relations of the right sort with other people. I personally believe that the valorization of this relational way of viewing the self is a key source of the feminist potential of romance, but I also think it gives romance, as a genre, some unique and important things to say about questions of selfhood and personal identity per se. I have been amazed at the number of romances I have read, across all the subgenres, that deal centrally and directly with the metaphysical question of what is self and what is nonself.

What would it take for you to become another, different person? First, consider loss: is there one essential thing, say, your memories, or your physical body, or your career, that defines you? What could you lose and still be you?

Or we can come at this in terms of gain: what new material or spiritual/nonmaterial substance could you take in, while still being you? And would you consider this new addition "really you"?

Some characters are so identified with a job or skill that to lose it is to become a different person. In Suzanne Brockmann’s The Unsung Hero, Tom, a Navy SEAL commander, has sustained a head injury that makes him distrust his own judgment: he’s not sure about what he sees, or about how to assign meaning to events. For Tom, this loss of his mental faculties is not just potentially career ending, but self-ending as well. It’s heartbreaking to follow his thoughts along a route that always stops dead at his possible resignation: he can’t imaginatively project himself into a future where he doesn’t, in some important sense, exist. But Tom’s growing relationship with Kelly provides a tether to which he can hold while exploring these uncharted waters.

For others, it’s the loss of cognitive capacities themselves that threatens identity. Laura Kinsale’s Flowers From the Storm also explores the impact of brain injury when the hero, Christian, sustains a cerebral hemorrhage that leaves him unable to express himself in speech. The "Mathematical Duke" becomes vulnerable, frustrated, terrified, and dependent. Is he still the same man? It’s his relationship with the heroine that helps provide the bridge between his old self and new.

In Charlaine Harris’s fourth Sookie Stackhouse book, Dead to the World, vampire boss Eric Northman loses his memory. With his memories, Eric is confident, ambitious, ruthless and selfish. Without them, he’s still got that innate confidence, but it’s layered over with fear and a new sense of empathy for others brought on by his precarious existence. Is it still Eric? This question is crucial for Sookie, whose attraction to him has become safe for her at the same time it represents taking unfair advantage of him.

Many paranormal romances utilize demons and other supernatural forces to explore the same theme. In J. R. Ward’s Lover Eternal, Rhage, a vampire, has been cursed. He has a demon "inside" him, which emerges in moments of intense emotion, transforming him into a violent dragon. The dragon is totally "other", and Rhage is not self-conscious when he is in dragon form. He was responsible for being cursed, so is he responsible for the dragon’s behavior? His relationship with the Mary is crucial in helping him to reconcile vampire and dragon by claiming the dragon as a part of his self.

Ward’s vampires are a separate species from humans, but in other paranormals, the state of being a vampire itself represents an identity challenge. For a hero who was once human and is now vampire, does blood lust represent an external force? When does the "humanity" become other? After fifty years? A century?

In Linnea Sinclair’s Games of Command, Branden Kel-Paten, who is cybernetically enhanced, struggles with the attempt to determine which of his desires, feelings, and beliefs are his, and which are implants or external. It’s his love for the heroine that inspires him to try to define which parts of him are "self" and which are not.

As an aside, you might notice that all of my examples are of heroes. I had a hard time coming up with heroine examples. This might well be due to my limited exposure to romance (at only about 150 books, I’m an infant compared to the gang at DA). But since this is a letter of opinion, I’ll stick my neck out and say you’re more likely to find heroes facing these sorts of questions in romance, because it’s more common for men to define themselves in terms of isolated properties, like skills or vocations, than women, who are more likely to define themselves in terms of their relationships (and I don’t have space for all the usual caveats, but, believe me, they are there in my mind). That the heroines bring the heroes around to this view of personal identity is, in my opinion, an important source of female empowerment in romance.

I think the explorations of selfhood in the books noted above (and the many others I could name) constitute an important engagement with both an enduring literary themeand some of its very contemporary manifestations. This brings me to the third reason I think it’s good to highlight these not-directly-romantic themes. An exclusive focus on romance as the champion of love and sexuality contributes to the idea that romances are about escape and escape only. I can’t speak for others, but I have found my romance reading to be very relevant to real life issues and challenges.

To use just one example: I work part time in a hospital, and I was recently having a bit of a debate with a cardiologist who refused to deactivate a patient’s pacemaker, despite the fact that the patient was near death and on "comfort measures". The pacer, he argued, had been implanted a decade ago. It was inside her body and now "a part of her", and to turn it off would be akin to removing a kidney that had been transplanted a decade ago. As he was talking, Branden Kel-Paten flashed into my head. Kel-Paten had been a Biocybe for years, but had never accepted his enhancements as fully "self" – not even the cognitive ones, which you would think would be harder to reject. Just because something has been inside you for a long time, doesn’t mean it is you. Is romance escape? It sure didn’t feel that way when I was standing in an ICU having this discussion.

We’re faced with lots of biomedical challenges like this today: outliving our cognitive capacities as dementia sets in, or even our organic capacities as we are sustained by machines. We will soon have new reproductive options that will create identity issues for our children (who are your parents if it took five people to make you: the sperm donor, the egg donor, the surrogate mother, and the two infertile people who commissioned you? Who are your parents if you are a clone?). With our PDAs and smart phones, and laptops and wireless connectivity everywhere, we are already cyborgs, albeit not yet with the seamless integration of the organic and the mechanized. I’d like romance to get the credit it deserves for exploring these issues of selfhood, and for doing so in a way that valorizes relationship, connection, empathy, and creativity.

And why would I care about that? Didn’t I read Jane’s Romance Apologia Scale? Yes, I read it and loved it. And while I think level 4 is the right attitudinal stance, in conclusion, I’d like to offer a feminist argument in favor of at least occasional level 3 type responses to the dismissal of romance by TPTB. First, most romance writers are women, and if romance pays worse than other genres, it’s a feminist issue to see that equity is achieved. Combating false stereotypes and insisting on the value of what’s denigrated can be one means of doing this. And second, most romance readers are women – even women who don’t read romance are associated with the genre — and the dismissal of romance is connected too closely for my comfort to the dismissal of women per se to allow it to stand. Respect and self-respect may seem ephemeral, but they are important bases of a good human life, and in this case they are closely related to the material bases for such a life. For me, those are good enough reasons to keep trying to make the case for romance.

Thanks so much to Jane and the gang at Dear Author for inviting me to do this, and for those of you still with me at the end, thanks for reading!

Everything We Know About Scotland, We Learned from Romance Books

Jane — Tue, 01 May 2007 10:00:10 +0000

All Scottish men are named Jamie. But that’s only if they’re not called Alistair.
All Scottish men wear kilts, even when they were outlawed and even when they didn’t exist. All clans have an identifying tartan.
All Scottish men carry claymores.
Everyone is a Highlander because the Highlands start right at the border between England and Scotland.
Half the country has red hair and half has black. Not brown, mind you but raven, midnight black. There are no fair haired lassies in Scotland.
Speaking of Lassies, all women are lassies. Wee lassies especially. Never mind that actually refers to young girls.
All Scottish men prefer English brides.
Every other man is a Laird.
They all say “didnae, cannae, willnae, wouldnae” with the emphasis on the “ae.”
Scottish men are always drunk on single malt whisky.
Haggis is served at every meal.
Everyone lives near a loch.
They all own sheep. Sometimes drunk on single malt whisky, full on haggis, wet from the loch, they mistake the sheep for wee lassies and take off their tartan to lay on the ground and . . . well, that scene wasn’t from a romance book.
At least once a day, Scottish men say “Och, wee Lassie, doonae ken my kilt?”

Of course, our list is tongue in cheek. We know that romance historicals often take license with history and the question is to what extent can authors do this and still be acceptable to readers. Let’s be real. The majority of the romance reading public do not hold history degrees. The majority of romance reading public will not know when a desk with a drawer was first made; how terribly wrong it is for a gentleman to remove his jacket in public during the Victorian period; that potatoes didn’t come to Europe until 1570.

For me, I am not going to let a historical inaccuracy get in the way of my enjoyment of a good story so long as the inaccuracy is not noticeable or does not detract from the overall world created by the author. I loved The Raven Prince and felt that I could overlook the unlikely possibility of a young gentlewoman serving as the secretary for a titled man in the Georgian period.

For others, the craft is the story and a fork appearing before forks existed will kill the mood of the entire book. If you can’t trust an author to get the fork right, what other specious goods is she trying to pass off? Some authors are personally affronted that others don’t put as much effort into ensuring that the book is historically accurate. The problem is that accuracy can sometimes be, well, subjective.

Readers don’t always know what is historically accurate. I’ve read individuals complain that an author is too modern. This is an accusation that was leveled often toward Connie Brockway whose historicals are keepers for me. I recall people picking on Julie Ann Long for her use of “alien” in Beauty and the Spy. Ms. Long, I believe, came along and defended the etymology of the word “alien”. Alien was first used as a synonym for foreigner in 1330. It wasn’t until the mid 1900s that alien was first attributed to meaning “of another planet.” The Raven Prince also suffered the accusation of too modern of a voice for some. The hero is described as demolishing his plate. Demolish is attributed to the 1500s French word, demoliss.

I am guilty of this. Recently I read a book set in the late 1800s in England that referred to New York York harbor on Independence Day (1885); werewolf (Old English); velvet lined handcuffs (pre 1900s). The book was historically accurate but because I have had a decade of reading almost soley Regency related romances, when I first started reading, I had to remind myself of the time period. The more immersed I became in the story, the less this became a concern.

I love those old time Susan Johnson books that included footnotes. I remember reading Forbidden featuring a female Native American attorney in Montana set in the late 1800s. I was skeptical that there was such a creature, but the footnotes sold me that this could have happened.

Fn. 1. Lyda Burton Conley, of Kansas City, was the first Native American woman lawyer in the United States. Admitted to the Kansas bar in 1910, she’d begun studying law in 1904 in order to represent herself and the Wyandotte tribe in a lawsuit against the United States government.

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Fn. 2. In 1878, the House passed Bill No. 1077, which gave women attorneys access to the federal courts. After another year of buttonholing senators in the corridors of the Capitol, the “Lockwood” bill passed the Senate in 1879 after three years of extensive lobbying, and President Rutherford B. Hayes signed it into law.

In Arnette Lamb’s, The Betrothal, the historical detail added such richness to the story that I felt I was actually there. The heroine, Marjorie Entwhistle, was the postmistress of Bath when Blake Chesterfield came to claim her hand. Chesterfield has a terrible secret to which Marjorie’s father became privy. Chesterfield must convince Marjorie to marry him or Marjorie’s father will make the secret public, damning Chesterfield and his entire line. Lamb laid out in great detail the workings of the Post and how Marjorie came to be in control of it; how important that this was as it made money for her which she desperately needed to provide independence for herself. Hogarth’s work as a cartoonist and satirist played an integral role, firmly settling the book in the mid 1700s.

To further muddy the waters, history is recorded by the conquerors of a period and many details can be interpreted more than one way. In Joan Wolf’s Fool’s Masquerade, the hero is trying to explain to the heroine how wronged King Richard the Third was by history. King Richard did not, Diccon tells Valentine, dispose of the three princes in the tower.

The earl’s dark eyes were hard on my face. “. . . Richard the Third, Valentine, is the most bitterly wronged king in all of English history.”

I held his gaze. “I only know about him from Shakespeare.”

His mouth twisted. “You and everyone else. Crookback Richard, villain, usurper, murderer. And none of it is true.”

“What was Shakespeare’s source?” I asked. One thing I had learned from my father was to evaluate the bias of historical sources before coming to any conclusions.

Lord Leyburn looked at me speculatively. “The History of Richard III by Sir Thomas More.”

“Sir Thomas More?” I shook my head. “I don’t think one can call into question the integrity of a man like More, my lord.”

“Thomas More was brought up in the household of Cardinal Morton, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Morton was the right hand man of Henry the Seventh, the Tudor usurper who defeated Richard at Bosworth Field. Morton was also, and had been for years, Richard’s deadly enemy. There is no doubt that Morton is the one who supplied the information about Richard to his pupil, Thomas More. And the history was never published in More’s lifetime. It was found with his papers after his death. It was not finished. I’ve always thought that More, who was an extremely intelligent man, never finished it because he had begun to doubt the honesty and the value of the material supplied to him by Morton.”

This was all extremely interesting. “Are there no other sources?” I asked thoughtfully.

“Nothing chronological. There are, of course, Parliamentary records and decrees, personal letters from the time, the Patent Rolls, things like that.”

I want authors to get it right. I think that they should do the research and know the time period in which they write as well as a scholar of that period. Shouldn’t we readers be the allowed to learn as well as be entertained? The thing is, though, that even if we readers want writers to strive for more historical accuracy, we don’t want slavish devotion to accuracy (whatever that may be) to take the place of a good story.

Just because I have a law degree and can barely stomach reading contemporaries featuring lawyers because so many of authors portray legal proceedings incorrectly, I don’t think that Jayne is foolish or ignorant for enjoying a book like that. Similarly, a reader who doesn’t recognize the tricorn (Georgian) from the bicorn (Regency) from the derby (Victorian) isn’t a cretin either. I believe we readers we are looking for is to be swept away into the past, even if its a fantasy past, for just a few hours.