WITTY ROMANCE FOR VALENTINE’S WEEKEND
Hello Stranger by Katherine Center
Romance is a hot genre these days. It’s come out of the closet or perhaps better put, out from under the covers. Romance novels, historical ones and contemporary ones, have been around for years. New sub-genres incorporate fantasy or feature gay protagonists. With their large readership, romance titles are also receiving more attention from the reviewing world and even academia. Note the new exhibit related to romance cover art and publicity materials, Romancing the Novel, at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland. It’s curated by a male communications and cinema professor.
Texan Katherine Center’s recent rom-com, Hello Stranger, features artist Sadie Montgomery. A portrait painter, Sadie is struggling to gain recognition in her career. A finalist in a big prize competition, she must produce one more work for it when she has a major accident. Post surgery, she awakens with face blindness (a real condition where human faces often appear incomplete.) She tells only a handful of friends as she struggles to adjust.
Sadie is attracted to her dog’s vet as a potential mate and makes damning assumptions about a neighbor in her apartment building. It’s funny, poignant, heartwarming, and a really good story! You will route for Sadie all the way through.
MARRIAGE AND FAMILY GONE AWRY
The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts by Louis Bayard
Constance Wilde knew Oscar loved her and their children. He was affectionate, but not passionate. In Louis Bayard’s marvelous new novel, The Wildes, we see Constance as she becomes aware that her husband’s emotions are more fully engaged elsewhere. It is late summer in Norfolk, England, an escape from London for this family, and the young poet Lord Alfred Douglas, familiarly known as Bosie, is coming to visit.
In the opening chapter, we follow Oscar and Constance on a leisurely stroll as she quizzes him about this latest house guest. It is a brilliantly rendered description of wifely curiosity and husbandly dodging of the real issue.
Subsequent chapters or acts follow Constance and sons Cyril and Vyvyan, to Italy where they live under assumed names during Oscar’s time in prison, to the sons in the mucky trenches of WWI, to Vyvyan some years later re-visiting the past to try to sort it all out, to finally a re-imagining of the family’s sojourn in Norfolk in 1892. Well researched and beautifully crafted, Bayard’s novel sensitively combines reality with creativity. One of the best literary novels I’ve read in some time! (~JWFarrington)
COMFORT VIEWING, AUSSIE STYLE
Darby and Joan (Acorn)
English widow Joan, a retired nurse, is determined to find out what her late husband was up to in Australia, when he was supposed to be in Barcelona. Boldly setting out in her mobile home across the wilds of that country, she encounters retired Australian detective Darby whose truck has broken down. Her offer of a ride quickly becomes a shared journey as they deal with a death among a group of hippies and then travel on to assist an old chum of Darby’s.
The story is light, the banter between these seniors is engaging, and the mysteries they solve are often murders, but the series is not gruesome. There are two seasons with 8 episodes in Season 1 and six in Season 2. The Chief Penguin and I have now watched the first two episodes. Thanks to new friends for suggesting it. Recommended if you are in the mood for stress free, fun viewing!
Note: Header image of hearts from Unsplash.com
