Beverly Jenkins

This bodice ripper is set in New Orleans during the reconstruction period after the Civil War. Valinda Lacy has come south to teach the newly emancipated freedmen and their children. But just as she is making headway her school is destroyed by thugs. As she runs for her life, she meets Captain Drake LeVeq, one of the sons of a wealthy Black family who made their money some generations back by piracy. Drake, however, is an architect and builder, intent on helping the freedmen survive and thrive.

It's a typical romance with heaving bosoms, knees made weak by kisses, demure women and strong men who are talented and generous lovers. Valinda and Drake make a nice couple, and his family (mother and three brothers) fills out the cast of characters quite well. Jenkins added some interesting tidbits of information regarding this period in American history.

The action is fast, even if the plot is fairly predictable. This novel even includes a minor subplot involving two gay men.… (más)

The previous book in this series was a romantic adventure, but I think this one is more of a straight romance, albeit with a health scare/accident (not quite an adventure exactly), and more of a social commentary layer than most books of this type—mostly in the form of contrast between what I guess you could call (mostly) full-control patriarchy, all the norms of those times fully funded so to speak, and life on the frontier.

It’s not brilliant, but in the ordinary way it seems entirely free of blemishes.

…. I want to write something about common elements in romance plots and the Black experience (and the Anglo experience).

Part of romance, part of the shame assigned to it, is its spontaneity, its irregularity. Part from the fact that the words lovers use are rarely literally true, and that unlike robots they are using squishy parts, is the aspect that unlike robots they are probably not keeping to a plan or, certainly, not a schedule, right. At first you say that such and such will never happen, but later it does. (That’s a character in a romance novel; in a gen fict novel or in real life, it might be vice versa. But that’s not fun.) Thomas Jefferson, who was obviously a slave owner, and certainly part of the Anglo intellectual experience, is somebody I read about in this book about Black vs Anglo culture in 18th century Virginia. At one point he wrote a letter to his daughter, assigning her a schedule (really almost a monastic rule of life): she was to spend X minutes/half hours reading in English, Y amount in French, and take breaks only at prescribed intervals, etc. Obviously there is some use sometimes to regularity if one agrees to or creates it oneself, and I suppose there is a minimum amount of regularity to a good life. But the 100% planned 24/7/365 intellectual monasticism Tom tried to apply to his daughter would be totally inappropriate and unrealistic even as a self-created plan for self-control, you know.

Sex can be unreasonable, and sometimes is, not least for taking place in a shame-filled, often unreasonable world. But sometimes what we are shamed about IS what’s good about sex, which is sometimes what can seem peripheral to it, or even the cost involved.

…. I do think it is a straight (non-adventure) romance, even if it isn’t the sort of ‘sheltered’ setting that often implies. It’s the romance of people living in a violent, challenging setting, and that violence can kinda interrupt and influence the plot, but I don’t think that the struggle for life itself becomes a real rival for the struggle for love, the way it would be if you were looking to find out who killed the great god Pan, and spared a look sideways at your sidekick along the way; the physical attacks/lack of safety are just an obstacle to overcome on the way to love, and not a really independent sort of plot influence; there are different kinds of books, of course.

…. I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that a system built on raid & pillage, slash-and-burn-down-to-the-bottom—the confiscation of Native land—developed into a sort of crook-capitalism with a lot of fraud and irregularity, you know. We burned everything that was there before, and often rush-built rather primitive stuff on the ash and rubble. The ‘old west’.

But it’s nice to have the whole finance crisis as the end is coming up. The old elite, the old guard politeness police, decline to talk about money—‘I’m rich, but I hardly notice’—but romance does have a lot to do with prosperity. Pentacles and cups are both feminine.

…. I used to think that the whole Jane Eyre plot thing that people like, where you inherit money when you’ve discovered the secret of life or whatever, was silly, “unrealistic”, because really it’s all “random”, and anyway what people like can’t be good; but now I think that that is how money comes sometimes, even today but especially back then, by inheritance, and really despite all the nonsense of life, some of which we can’t control, a great portion of it is voluntary, and when you learn the secret of things, life promotes you.… (más)