In my desperation for something to read this week after knocking out Laurie King’s third Mary Russell story, I spent a few minutes sifting through the large, often precariously-stacked book piles scattered throughout my house, and discovered something I had no idea we actually had. I know I certainly didn’t purchase it, and I’m pretty sure Colleen doesn’t either, but there it was, a trade paperback sized omnibus edition of three Nora “over 150 novels in 28 years” Roberts novels.

The garish pink cover ought to have scared me away, but I figured I’d give it a try, since my sister reads this woman almost exclusively, and I’d survived three whole Dan Brown novels, as well as “N.K. Stauffer’s “The Legend of Rah and the Muggles, where the author couldn’t even keep her verb tenses straight from page to page…this couldn’t be any worse, so I cracked the first story.

So, how bad was it? Not awful, but certainly not my thing. Sorry, Jennifer, I tried.

Herein begins my reaction to this, my latest wading into mass-market pulp literature, Nora Roberts’ Risky Business:

Thankfully, The author exceeds Stauffer in the fact that she (or at least her editor) has a competent mastery of the english language, even if the words she uses are not at all exotic, and if a word pops up that your average fifth grader wouldn’t recognize, she goes out of her way to define it for the reader.

Plot-wise, it’s standard bodice-ripper fare; previously hurt, independent, relationship-averse woman meets cocky bad boy loner type. In the course of solving a by-the-numbers murder mystery, she oh-so-very-suddenly melts into a puddle of lovey-dovey goo the moment he roughly forces himself on her, and through this experience he discovers a soft, nurturing side he never knew he had. I assume they live happily ever after, and he becomes a model father figure for her ten year old daughter – I don’t know, I still have forty pages to go, but I’d feel safe putting money on it.

While it may be a contrivance of the genre, I’m really kind of put off (and maybe even offended) by the way Mr. Manly-Man really comes in and takes what he wants with little consideration for the woman’s feelings, or for the obvious signals she’s sending out, as well as by the fact that our heroine immediately submits because said man didn’t give her much of a choice.

I kind of wanted the heroine to grab a convenient SCUBA tank (the backdrop is a dive shop on Cozumel, with just enough diving and reef lingo tossed in to suggest maybe a tiny bit of research may have been done) and conk the brawny hero with it as he tried to have is way with her, rather than “give into the pleasure” or “arch her body toward him” or whatever sort of undulating passion innuendo the author used. The actual text seems kind of out of character, even for these barely fleshed-out protagonists.

What’s worst, though, is that the whole circumstance of the thing plays into all sorts of damaging stereotypes; that “men who are unsuitable relationship partners can be domesticated by the right woman”, that “all an otherwise independent, competent woman really wants is for one of these bad boy types to give her a rough and tumble on the couch afer dinner*” etc. Is this the kind of wish-fulfillment Ms. Roberts’ target audience looks for?

These are exactly the kind of values I’d like to encourage my daughters to reject (and yeah, the son as well); and here they are in mass-market schlock novels. I’m no prude, certainly – I’m not offended by the content (other than, perhaps the way it’s inartfully described), but rather the sentiment.

No wonder I have such a hard time communicating with most people; they apparently see the world in a very different light than I do.

*Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with a tumble on the couch under the right circumstances, but I’d rather see some indication that both parties were into the idea before proceeding, and I’d certainly hope said tumble, should it occur, be more interesting than the one our author describes.