Sweet Memories by LaVyrle Spencer ***

At last I found the one book by LaVyrle Spencer I hadn't read, hardcover, used and cheap at Hastings! So my Spencer journey is at an end, because she is retired and no longer writing.

Ya know, if I had started with her earlier books, I might not have done a glom and read everything she'd written, because I found some of her works stunningly wonderful, and others truly mediocre. I'm not sure if it was growth as a writer, or inspiration (as in, better stories). Morning Glory (1989) is one of my all-time favorites, as well as That Camden Summer (1996). And I haven't rated any of them less than 3 stars, although this one might be more in the 2.75 range for me.

Sweet Memories was published in 1984, and it smacks of some of her other earlier books in that it's truly dated and maybe in the future will be considered historically accurate, while today just seems, well, dated.

It's a sweet enough story - a young woman who is well-endowed is embarrased by the attention she receives from men. She still lives at home, and tries to hide her chest from everyone behind bulky clothes and a shy personality. Her younger brother comes home for Christmas with a buddy. The buddy has been "warned" about her problem with men, and spends the holidays slowly wooing her and trying to help her regain her self confidence.

I guess it was an ok story although there were some odd phrases in it that I couldn't follow - I wasn't sure if they were the result of poor editing or local jargon or what. I didn't make note of them, even the one that had me going back and forth between one page and the next since the sentence at the bottom of one page didn't seem to be related to the end of the sentence at the top of the very next page... And I found myself rolling my eyes every now and then at things the characters said and thought - that reaction isn't exactly what I expect from reading a good book.

So - I can now say I've read every LaVyrle Spencer, and that I will continue to re-read my favorites. The rest of them will be listed for trade at PBS so someone else can fulfill their desire to read all her books... 3 stars.

The Endearment by LaVyrle Spencer *****

Interestingly, this is now my 3rd favorite Spencer - and it's one of her earliest books, too!

The Endearment is the story of a young woman who becomes a mail-order bride in the mid-19th century (I believe it was 1854?) for a young Swedish immigrant in Minnesota. She and her younger brother answer the ad in desperation to find a new life - anything other than the hand-to-mouth existence they are barely scraping out in Boston after their mother died, leaving them homeless and penniless.

Unfortunately for all three of them - Karl, the lonely bachelor, Anna, bride-to-be and James, her adolescent brother - the relationship is built on lies to Karl. Anna presents herself as everything Karl is looking for - 25 years old, experienced housekeeper/cook, educated - and alone. But she is only 17, her only domestic skill is sewing - and she's accompanied by James who wrote the letters to Karl, because Anna cannot read or write. She doesn't lie about her appearance, however, and Karl is glad to see her even though he figures out right away that she has lied to him about her age - and about coming alone.

There's one other lie, or rather, omission of truth, that he has yet to discover. In order to earn enough money to pay James' fare, she has to ply her dead mother's trade one time. This is the one fact she is hoping is never revealed because she knows this one will be the deal breaker.

Karl is exceedingly patient and forgiving, after a fashion, of all the lies she has told him. Having an extra mouth to feed is more than offset by James' extra set of hands for chores. And there is enough of an attraction between Karl and Anna for them to build their relationship, slowly, to the point of acceptance and finally consummation. Karl's inexperience with women ensures Anna's secret, that even James does not know, isn't revealed - until James becomes more comfortable with Karl, and exposes damning details when telling him more about their life in Boston. Karl is able to add up the facts, and once he realizes what she did, he turns away from her and cannot forgive, just as she knew he would not.

Once again, Spencer fills in the details of their pioneer lifestyle and the relationships among the 3 characters in such a way that you feel what each is going through - the anguish of Karl's discovery, the fear Anna feels while trying to do whatever she can to keep her brother and herself safe and alive, James's awe at his new life and brother-in-law, and his confusion over why Anna and Karl are no longer happy, the pain of their inability to overcome the obstacles, and the relief and joy when they finally do overcome them and move into their new home, and their new life, at the end.

5 stars

November of the Heart by LaVyrle Spencer ****

I'm very close to finishing all the LaVyrle Spencer books - after this one, I have The Endearment in my TBR pile, and Sweet Memories in my To Acquire pile.

November of the Heart is one of her "Americana" books - it takes place in 1895 Minnesota. A rich young woman, Lorna, yearns to be more independent and liberated from the structure that women much follow. She is the eldest child of a wealthy family whose father loves racing sail boats at his yacht club. In their employ is a young Norwegian immigrant Jens who yearns to build boats, and has a design in his head that will produce a very fast racing sailboat.

Of course, in their world, not only do the rich not mingle with their help, they don't even know their help. I found that a little surprising - Lorna not only didn't know their names, but didn't seem to have ever even been in the kitchen before.

So when she learns that Jens has a design, she is overcome with curiosity and seeks him out to find out more about it. It's scandalous enough that she wants to sail, but to actually speak to and even encourage kitchen help - well, it's too much! But she manages to not only find out about his design, she is able to convince her father to allow him to build it.

She is drawn to this handsome young man in spite of having a perfectly good beau - a man of her social strata who plans to marry her. Against the wishes of her parents, though, she sneaks out to the shop where Jens is building the boat - and she assists in building their relationship from friends to eventually lovers. Although he tells her that what they are doing could lead to her getting pregnant, neither one can resist, and soon she is not only visiting him in the barn, she is also going to his bedroom during the night.

She tells the beau she is no longer interested so that she is truly available only to Jens. They figure when the boat wins the race for her father, he will be able to overlook Jens's status as kitchen help and allow Lorna to marry him. Then she discovers she is indeed pregnant, and she and Jens decide to go to her parents with their intention to marry now. Their big mistake, as far as I was concerned, was not getting married first and then telling her parents - they went straight to the parents who physically removed her from him, tossed him out without a reference (leaving the boat half finished) and scooted her off to a convent to bear the child and give it up for adoption.

The issue that swayed Lorna into considering giving the child up instead of marrying Jens was how her family, especially her sisters, would be affected by her bearing a child by kitchen help - she was convinced she was ruining their lives. I guess it was meant to be a measure of her youth and immaturity that she couldn't stand up to her parents. Twice Jens tried to convince her to marry him against their wishes, and twice she refused. Finally he told her if she gave the child up for adoption, he would never forgive her and would hate her forever.

Meanwhile, Jens managed to find other funding for his boat design, built it, raced it and won hands down - to the shock of the Old School sailors at the yacht club who were laughing at his crazy ideas. This lead to his being able to start a successful boat building business, so now he could support Lorna and the baby - but she still refused him.

Their journey wasn't over - the parents managed to pull one more trick out of their hat by basically stealing the baby from Lorna at birth and putting him up for adoption with someone they knew so that they could keep tabs on him as he grew up. This seemed so incongruous to me - they wouldn't allow Lorna to keep and raise him, but they wouldn't let him out of their sight? I guess they were as conflicted as Lorna about their true feelings.

Eventually the mystery of his whereabouts is solved, and Lorna and Jens find their way to each other and to forgiveness. As usual, Spencer managed to make me feel their indecision, their anguish and their joy in reuniting, and I give this a solid 4 stars - it didn't make it to re-read status but I liked it a lot.

I still think Morning Glory is Spencer's own crowning glory - the one where she manages to truly capture the feelings of 2 people conflicted by so many outside influences who find family and acceptance and love in each other. She also made me feel the struggles and real emotions of the characters in That Camden Summer, another of my Spencer all-time favorites (I think I say this in almost every review I do). Of her contemporaries, I think Small Town Girl and Family Blessings came the closest to Morning Glory. The only 2 I really didn't like were Vows and Spring Fancy.

Vows by LaVyrle Spencer ***

Dang it, I'm considering giving Vows 2 stars just because I finished it thinking, is that it? OK, it wasn't bad, it just was not interesting.

The hero is Tom, arriving as a newcomer to Sheridan, Wyoming, in 1888, with plans to start a new life as a blacksmith running his own livery. He's left his old life behind because his fiancée jilted him for another man.

Tom goes into the local competition to stable his horses, and mistakes the heroine Emily for a young boy working on a horse's hoof. This sets Emily off - and here is where I started disliking her. After all, she was dressed in boy's clothing, she's young and thin, she's wearing her hair stuffed into a boy's cap and she's dirty - surely this is not the first time anyone thought she was a boy. She's not just set off - she immediately turns into a rude spitfire, which amuses Tom and makes her even madder.

Emily is practically betrothed to Charles, who is a childhood friend that accompanied her family out West. He's always known he would marry Emily, but she's not so sure. She's just not that turned on by him, or even by the thought of any man. It made you think maybe she was more than just a tomboy...

Then there's Emily's father, the long suffering Edwin, and her mother, the dying Josephine. Edwin and Josie were betrothed young but Edwin only had eyes for Josie's cousin Fannie. Because that was how things were done, Edwin and Josie married but moved away because he couldn't stay around Fannie. Fannie, a spitfire like her niece, stayed single but lived the life of an independent woman - she had affairs, she wore pants, she rides bicycles - whoooey!

OK - just hit me on the head right now. First Tom's long-time betrothal to his childhood sweetheart, then Emily, and then the repercussions of the same in Edwin and Josie's marriage. I GET IT - this is the opposite of the First Love story. Tom's girlfriend was brave enough to throw Tom over and break his heart. Edwin and Josie weren't and although they stayed married and had 2 kids, they never did fall in love. Now that Josie is dying of consumption, she calls on Fannie to come help her family - guess what, she did it on purpose because she's known all along about Edwin's true love for Fannie.

Now - throw in some parties with really weird parlor games - I'm going to give Spencer her due and assume she can prove these games were actually played by single 20-somethings in 1888 - and we have the bones of putting Tom and Emily in each other's ways long enough to develop a relationship. Or at least Spencer must hope it's long enough, but I myself wasn't convinced. There was one believable scene that shows the budding of their relationship. Emily's studying by mail to be a veterinarian, and goes to help a farmer with a pig. Tom goes with her because on the return trip she takes him to a ranch to buy horses. There is where their relationship is started, and maybe if there'd been more of that type of interaction I would have found it more interesting. But paying a forfeit by staying in a closet together for 5 minutes where they share their first kiss just didn't do it for me.

And Emily - well, she's young and inexperienced, and she thinks she is required to marry Charles to make her mother happy. Or something. It's like she knows it's not right, but she's stubborn and she'll by gawd make it work with Charles. Even after having a taste of actual passion with Tom, she thinks she can make it work with Charles, from whom she pulls away at every touch. I just didn't get behind her line of thought.

Then there's the HEA - yeah, they finally do what's in their hearts and go for the HEA. But the very last sentiment in the book just ruined it for me. See, Charles - now broken hearted - stays to help his BFF Tom rebuild his burned down business, then leaves town before the wedding, smart fellow that he is. He's like Tom in the beginning - he needs to go start a new life now that he's been thrown over by his girl for his best friend forever. So what do our newlyweds talk about on their wedding night? Whether or not Charles will ever come back, and Tom says yes, with both of us here, he'll be back. Yeah, right, as if Tom plans to go back to his hometown now?? Puh-leeze.

OK 3 stars, just because. But man, that last sentence just ruined it for me, big time.

Spring Fancy by LaVyrle Spencer ***

Spring Fancy comes across as an exercise in writing - an study in the (over)use of adjectives, adverbs and various phrases as though testing how they would look or sound.

It's an ok story, but it was contrived, or maybe forced is what I mean. The heroine, Winn, is maid of honor at her best friend's wedding when she meets the hero, Joseph - best man at same wedding. Winn is engaged to Paul, a man her mother introduced her to and that her mother thinks is the perfect match. There's some mother issues here but they're not very convincing, something about mother got pregnant at 19 then dumped by her boyfriend, raised Winn as a single parent and wants better for her daughter. Mother is interested in computers, and Paul is interested in computers. Somehow that translated into an engagement - I didn't exactly follow this train of thought.

It is a romance so needless to say, there's instant chemistry between Winn and Joseph, and since they have to be together at the wedding and dance (and Paul leaves the wedding to go play with his computers), they are given an opportunity to act on it. But she stops it - she has obligations, a fiancé, a wedding to plan, whatever.

Winn is a physical therapist - and there's something in the story about not getting emotionally involved with clients, and Spencer manages to describe a lot of equipment and stuff. There's a plot line where Winn has a young client, severely burned, and she is immediately emotionally involved. She needs to talk to someone about it, and neither Paul nor her mother will listen.

There's a part where Winn and Joseph play racquetball and we hear a lot about racquetball courts and the game (I almost wrote "learn" but I didn't follow much of it, and began to skim).

Eventually Winn and Joseph act on their desires, and Winn is faced with the fact that she has betrayed Paul and must make a choice: her own happiness, or her mother's? Oh yeah another facet of her mother is the snob thing - Joseph is a car mechanic so he isn't good enough for her.

I didn't hate this story but it was really more like paint-by-numbers than a well written, well developed plot with 3 dimensional characters. It really did feel like maybe Ms Spencer had to write this using certain guidelines instead of writing from her heart - or wherever she got the inspiration for better stories like Morning Glory and That Camden Summer. My review isn't any better than the story. There ya go. 3 stars.

Years by LaVyrle Spencer *****

LaVyrle Spencer is such a wonderful storyteller - in addition to her characterizations of her heroes and heroines, she usually weaves a wonderful web of family and neighbors that draw me into their world as one of their own.

Years is another of these stories, one that is not just about a young naive schoolteacher and an older widowed father but also about his extended family that makes up a large part of the rural South Dakota town and their Norwegian ways of farm life. In that framework, there is a heart-warming story of how an 18-year-old brash city girl and a 34-year-old farmer meet and fall in love in 1917.

Linnea is the oldest daughter of 3, from Norwegian/Swedish family that lives in Fargo. She completes "normal school" and gets a teaching position in a small, 1-room schoolhouse in a farm town. Theodore lives near this town with his mother and his 16-year-old son Kristian - Kristian's mother abandoned the two of them when Kristian was 1, and was later killed in an accident. He has traditionally offered room and board to the area school teacher, and is at the station to pick him up when he discovers he is a she. Convinced the new teacher is too young and too wet behind the ears, he tries to convince her to just go home - but she's willful and headstrong enough to get her way.

Spencer's characters include Teddy's bachelor brother John and their other brothers and sister and their families; little first-grader Roseanne who lisps; the preacher's son Allan who is always in trouble; the traveling farm workers, including the cook Isabelle - a whole network of fully developed, 3 dimensional people I fell in love with, laughed with, and cried over.

There were no Big Misunderstandings, no Secret Pregnancies, no suspense or murder or kidnapping or any of the common plots that run the Romance engine. Just the story of meeting, living, falling in love and experiencing the circle of life. And yet this story was just as touching, as emotionally wrenching, as compelling as any of those fanciful plots that keep you on your toes and guessing.

I could describe more of the plot, but really - it's just the story of lives lived well - people who farmed, danced, played cards, fought and made up, fell ill and recovered, fell ill and died. I'm still shaken over the deaths from the Spanish flu. Spencer brings these people into my heart, into my life and makes me love them, feel their pain and joy, and leaves me wanting more.

I'm going with 5 stars - I was thinking 4, but now that I've thought it over, I truly loved this story.

The Gamble by LaVyrle Spencer

I am having another "how to rate" issue with this book. I liked it. I didn't love it, but I did like it. I'm not sure I would read it again (and dang if it isn't water damaged, so I can't trade it back to PBS). But it was a good story.

But a Good Story by Spencer is better than a mediocre story by, say, Lisa Kleypas, in my opinion. So I rated it 3 but it's better than some I rated 3. But it's not as good as some Spencers I rated 4.

Oh what to do?

Here's the plot: a Southern gentleman, Scott, is our hero. He fought in the Civil War for the South. He was raised on a Mississippi plantation that had 1200 slaves. His 2 brothers and his parent died in the war and his young wife and daughter were killed after the war. He now owns this huge plantation, but is all alone. He strikes out on his own and develops a sort of family, with 3 ex-prostitutes, a couple of musicians and a bartender. He heads to Podunk, Kansas (OK, that isn't the name of the town...) to open a saloon, complete with gambling and dancing girls. He purchases a property that houses 2 businesses and 2 apartments.

The current resident of 1 apartment and 1 business is our heroine, uptight spinster milliner Agatha. Agatha is alone in the world, running her dead mother's hat business. Her father, alcoholic abuser that he was, died penniless and miserable years ago, after he pushed Agatha down a flight of steps that has left her limping since age 9. She gets swept into temperance fever and vows to shut down the Gilded Cage, Scott's new saloon, soon after he opens it.

So they start out as enemies. She campaigns along with other women in her area by singing and praying and making nuisances of themselves outside the bars. But that doesn't dampen the spirits of the cowboys coming through town or the resident drunks either, including the father of 5-year-old Willy, whose mother is dead. Agatha finds Willy outside the Gilded Cage one night, dirty, hungry and scared, and takes him under her wing.

Scott is also beguiled by Willy, and between the 2 of them, Agatha and Scott become foster parents of sorts. Willy's father is killed in a barroom brawl, and then Willy lives in a back room at the Gilded Cage. See, now Agatha and Scott become friends of sorts because of Willy.

There's some plot twists and turns. Scott is currently sleeping with one of the dancer/ex-prostitutes even though one of the musicians sorta has a thing for her and admittedly neither she nor Scott are that much invested in their relationship. Agatha regrets her zealousness about prohibition when she realizes that it will close the Gilded Cage and she'll lose her friends and pseudo-family that they've become, although she continues to do things like write letters to the governor. There's a sort of suspense plot: who is leaving the anonymous threatening letters? And then there's the question of what will become of Willy if Scott leaves town.

Of course, Spencer's writing is still wonderful even if the plot isn't as interesting as others she's written. It's almost a paranormal - there's a ghost; it's almost a sequel - the DuFraynes of Hummingbird make an appearance.

The Gamble of the story is when Agatha has to choose whether to move to Mississippi to be Willy's governess even though she doesn't know what Scott's feelings are for her. She would rather be his wife than his employee, but she gambles that she will get her wish if she makes the move. If she doesn't move, she's doomed to spinsterhood in Kansas.

In the end it sorta left me going - ok, what's next? and not sighing or smiling, like I like to do after a satisfying story. So I'm going with 3 stars. She's still a better writer than Lisa Kleypas.

The Fulfillment by LaVyrle Spencer

Another day, another (short) book. The Fulfillment is apparently Spencer's first book, if publication date is any indicator.

It's a completely different plot from any romance novel I've read. There are 3 people, Jonathan Gray, his wife Mary and his brother Aaron. When the Gray brothers' parents were killed, the will stipulated that the house went to Aaron, and the farmland to Jonathan. Mary grew up in Chicago, and came to their rural midwest area to visit her aunt - while she was there, her father died, and she stayed on at her aunt's until she married Jonathan.

Jonathan and Mary and Aaron share the house and the land and its bounty. A few years into the marriage, Aaron left the farm to live in the city, to give Jonathan and Mary some privacy. But after a year there, he was unhappy, and Jonathan needed him on the farm, so he came back. Seven years have passed since Mary and Jonathan wed - and as the story opens it's 1910, and we learn that Jonathan is probably sterile from childhood mumps, and has decided after much pondering to ask Aaron to sire a child with Mary.

I had a hard time getting into Jonathan's head in this book. Somehow he spent a lot of time thinking about having a child, and has reconciled himself to the necessity of asking Aaron to be the father. Mary does wish for a child, but not obsessively so, and has been following the advice of a doctor to have sex when she is most likely to be fertile, to no avail. She loves Jonathan, however, and is appalled when he announces his intentions to her and Aaron.

Aaron is also appalled - he had been courting Priscilla, a neighbor, but was reluctant to marry her because he doesn't really love her. In fact, he recently told her he wasn't ready for commitment, and she broke up with him. However, he can't believe what Jonathan has asked him to do - how could he sleep with his brother's wife? In his frustration, he goes back to Priscilla, but she won't have him back. And now that Jonathan has brought the proverbial elephant into the room, it's all Aaron can think about - and Aaron realizes there is an attraction between him and Mary.

To further complicate matters, Mary also becomes acutely aware of her relationships with each brother. Jonathan, her husband and lover, isn't very attentive. He doesn't notice when she dresses up for him. He doesn't offer courtesies and help. But Aaron does. They all go to a dance together, and somehow Jonathan disappears and Aaron ends up dancing with Mary, confusing both their feelings for the other even more.

Jonathan has another dream: to start a cattle ranch, raising Angus cattle instead of farming the land. He has been researching this for a while, and plans a trip out of town to buy a bull at a time when neither Mary nor Aaron can accompany him. It seems his trip is planned to accomplish both his goals: buy his bull and throw Mary and Aaron together to conceive a child. Everything in his life is about procreation, and when he can't do it himself, he'll just see that it gets done under his control.

While he's gone, Aaron and Mary become more and more aware of their growing attraction. The temptation is too much and they give in to what has now become both their desires. Poor Mary - Aaron has more experience with women than Jonathan, and she discovers sexual joys she has never felt before. To top it off, it's her fertile time as well, and she conceives. Her love shifts completely from Jonathan to Aaron, and she is thoroughly conflicted about Jonathan's return and his place in her heart.

This isn't the first Spencer book I have read with a story line for which there can be no completely happy ending. In Twice Loved, the hero returns from 5 years at sea to discover he's been declared dead and his best friend has married his wife. In Home Song, the hero, married 18 years, learns for the first time he fathered a child with another woman 1 week before his marriage to his then-pregnant bride, so now he has 2 sons the same age. Home Song was easier to resolve than Twice Loved, but still brought a lot of pain and anguish to so many people. But in The Fulfillment, the one I couldn't comprehend was Jonathan. Was he simple? Deluded? At one point, Aaron says to him that he (Aaron) would kill any man who slept with his wife. Jonathan knows - they all acknowledge the child is Aaron's, out loud, to each other. But Jonathan keeps his eyes on the prize - the end justifies the means for him. If he feels anything negative at all, Spencer doesn't say.

I found it interesting that I dreamed of tornadoes last night, long before I read the scene in the book where a tornado changes the direction of their lives, leading to a HEA that is not completely happy for everyone involved. It's almost more like her last book, Then Came Heaven, in that perhaps providence played a part.

Spencer's writing is wonderful, as always, and I enjoyed the journey even though she never let me get inside Jonathan's head enough to understand him. I'm somewhere between 3 and 4 stars on this one.

Then Came Heaven (audio) by LaVyrle Spencer ****

I've been sorta getting away from audio books recently - not sure why. I downloaded Diana Gabaldon's Drums of Autumn in April, and decided to do a full listen starting with Outlander. But I've cooled off a little from the Outlander experience (thank gawd because it was eating me alive) and so I haven't rushed through them, and even though I decided to go to a 2-credit-a-month plan, I've slowed down in buying audio books in general.

I stopped in the middle of Dragonfly in Amber to work on Stephanie Laurens' Bastion Club book #1, The Lady Chosen. Jesus H Roosevelt Christ, that narrator (Jill Tanner) is driving me crazy. So many pauses - complete stops end sentences that should have been slight pauses for a comma. Me, who listens to an audio book a day, and I have been working on it for days, weeks. I have given up and might actually not even finish it!

So I shifted over to Then Came Heaven. Like That Camden Summer, the audio quality is pretty poor, and there are some squeaks and squawks in it. Also the volume is a little wonky in places. The narrator is Amy Irving - not sure if it's The Amy Irving as in the movie star. She's a little better than average, tops. She uses accents well enough, but doesn't do much in the way of creating different voices for non-accented characters. And with the poor sound quality, it's hard really to tell.

The book opens with the heart-wrenching death of the hero's wife Krystyna when her car is hit by a train. Eddie is left with 2 young daughters to raise. Krystyna was truly loved by everyone in the small Polish-American community, including the nuns of St Joseph, where Eddie works as janitor and where both girls attend parochial school. True to form for Ms. Spencer, you grieve and mourn along with Eddie, with his family and with Krystyna's family over the senseless loss of this saintly young mother.

Somehow from reading reviews, I got the wrong idea about the heroine in this book. Sister Regina (aka Jean) is a nun and teaches both of Eddie's daughters. She has been a nun for about 10 or so years, and apparently had been questioning her vocation for about a year at the time of Krystyna's death. I'm not sure why I went into this book thinking she was no longer a nun at the beginning of the book (that the nun part was only backstory) - in fact, she doesn't even request dispensation until more than halfway through the book, and it's near the end that she receives it. That makes building any relationship well past impossible, it would seem. Instead the first half of the book is spent mourning Krystyna (Sister Regina also mourns) and developing the reasons for Sister Regina's dissatisfaction.

In spite of it being so much about why Sister cannot abide her life in the religious community, Spencer is nothing but thoughtful and respectful of the nuns' lives. She spends a lot of time lovingly describing their customs and lifestyle. Even though she makes a good case for why Sister Regina questions her vows, and God knows I could never lead the type of life they live, she doesn't make a strong case against joining a religious community either.

Spencer also spends time developing Eddie's life as a widower - he manages to go on, as best as he can, with the loving support of his large extended family. He attends dances, and family gatherings, and he dallies a little with Krystyna's sister Irene just to test how it might be to have another woman in his life. When Sister Regina reaches out to him, he finds he can talk to her about how he is doing, what he is feeling, and a kernel of the relationship begins to appear.

Sister Regina's dissatisfaction really comes to a head when she realizes she can't ever comfort the girls because she isn't allowed to hug or even touch them, to talk to them outside of what her teaching duties require, to show any kind of emotion. Then she begins to notice things about Eddie, things she finds attractive about him. All of this makes her question her vows to the point that she confesses to the priest. It seems she hasn't been successful in hiding her feelings and the priest isn't surprised at all. (At this point I couldn't help but think of Maria von Trapp.)

Slowly, over time, as Eddie begins to heal, he also begins to notice Sister Regina. Of course, he doesn't even know what color her hair is. She cannot show even her wrists - the only part of her body he has ever seen is just the face that shows through her wimple/gimp. Imagine.

This book takes us from a heart-breaking beginning, through a long, slow, healing search for guidance, to the development of the relationship between Jean and Eddie at the end. A heart-breaking moment for me was when Jean gets her dispensation and is whisked away from St Joseph without being allowed to tell anyone goodbye, not even her students. The students are told she is gone because Jesus needed her somewhere else, which is exactly the way the girls are told their mother died. I actually gasped out loud at this point, feeling the jolt of pain the girls felt when they thought Jean had also died.

There's no mystery, no true suspense, just the story of the developing relationship between Jean and Eddie - it's a Romance, and by definition the hero and heroine get their happy ending, so we know that eventually they overcome the obstacles, including the objections of her family. It's the touching way Spencer builds this tension that makes her stories so memorable.

I'm going with 4 stars for this one for the story, with no points off for the poor quality and mediocre narration. I think I also ordered the book.

Bitter Sweet by LaVyrle Spencer ****

I took a little break from the fun, sexy books by Susan Andersen and picked up a new-to-me LaVyrle Spencer book. I knew it would be different, although I have really liked Spencer's style of capturing how people feel, how their feelings are mirrored in the other.

I also knew going in that this book contained infidelity, which is a hot button for Romance readers in general. I wondered if it was still a hot button for me.

This was a First Love story - I was frustrated by never learning why they broke up and married other partners. But in Spencer's story, there was a soul-mate attraction, a conceit of the romance genre that may or may not have a real world application.

I don't know if the theory of Soul Mate really exists - meaning, there is 1 person to whom you become eternally bonded just after meeting each other. Or maybe Soul Mate theory allows for a courtship, but basically it transcends all other loves, no matter what transpires - once Soul Mates, always Soul Mates, across time, across space. I tend to believe more in the "love builds" theory - where there needs to be chemistry first, so that you meet and court, but then comes a series of deposits, so to speak, where each person fills the needs and wants of the other to maintain the relationship. Where it is entirely possible to fall out of love if the needs and wants are not met, and also to work back into love again with the right actions. Where love can dissipate if not fed, whether by imagination (keeping First Love alive fantasy) or by actions. I think you can feed your own "love bank" with your imagination, but it might go away if you were to actually be in the presence of the person you imagined and that person didn't continue to make "deposits". That sorta negates the Soul Mate theory, which would be that no matter what happened, she is for him and he for her, under all circumstances.

So, in this story, the hero and heroine, First Lovers as teens, were both married to others, and the heroine's husband has died in an accident. The story opens near the 1-year anniversary of his death, and Maggie is attending grief therapy, still struggling with getting over it. The counselor suggests contacting friends from her past, with the idea that going over happy memories of a time when life wasn't so complicated would help put her life in perspective. Specifically, high school friends. She contacts a friend from her home town , who puts her in touch with other friends, one her first love Eric. Although she balks at contacting him, she does anyway. They're adults, after all, having grown and changed, right? (well, not if you buy the soulmate theory, see?)

Eric is married to Nancy, who Spencer draws as a pretty tightass bitch, to be honest. Although they declare their love, and make love when we first meet them, pretty soon we see that Nancy is selfish and cold and not satisfied with life in Eric's small town. She's got a career that keeps her out of town weekdays - and she admits to us, from her POV, she's had several affairs over the years, but she loves Eric - or at least she loves having a good-looking husband anyway. She's not quite Cruella De Vil but she's close. Unfortunately for Eric, he doesn't exactly figure out he's not satisfied with Nancy until he starts seeing Maggie again. That's too bad, really. Maybe if we'd really felt them fighting, growing apart, before Maggie enters the scene, it would be easier to accept his actions.

Maggie is encouraged by her female friends to come back to her hometown for a visit, and while there one friend convinces her to buy an old house, move back and run a B&B from it. Maggie's rolling in dough from her husband's insurance settlement, and decides to go for it. Since it's a small town, she does run into Eric occasionally, and the attraction grows.

Now here is where, in a real world situation, the old Love Bank theory and some of the things I've learned about infidelity popped into my brain. For one thing, it is easy for Eric to transfer his feelings of love to Maggie because they are not living together - he only gets the "nice" side of the relationship, and not the real relationship. Plus it's new and newly-sexually charged, something missing in his marriage. That's a common infidelity issue, really, because it's easy to fantasize how much better the lover is over the spouse when the lover isn't really in the picture. (I'm sure I'm not saying this right...) For instance, a major issue between him and Nancy is her unwillingness to have a baby - but has he even asked Maggie if that is something she would consider? No, he has not. If he had, he might have learned that Maggie is going through menopause. If he had, he might realize that leaving Nancy for Maggie won't fill his need to have children of his own, and that he might stop loving Maggie after a while for the same issue. Of course, right as they're getting ready to Do The Deed the very first time, he does sorta pant out something about birth control, and she reassures him it's not an issue. Do they discuss STDs, health history, anything? No, sorry, they're hot and heavy and just go for it.

(Not that I wanted him to stay with Cold Bitch Nancy, mind you, because Spencer manipulated my own feelings about her! Boo! Hiss!)

Then there's the issue of Maggie's mother. Oh how close I came to relating to this mother. No, not that I am her, but that I know her. She's critical. She's cold. She's demanding. She's controlling. And she seems to be incapable of love. She makes Nancy seem like a mother earth figure. Interesting that Spencer introduces mothers like this in her novels (That Camden Summer comes to mind.) Maybe they just make for good conflict, or maybe she's experienced this. I wonder how the daughters of these mothers become such good mothers themselves, with such a poor role model.

Well, I've already introduced the Infidelity issue, so it's clear that Eric and Maggie do commit adultery - not so difficult with Nancy gone 4 nights a week. He decides to tell Nancy and get a divorce, and every time Nancy finds a way to manipulate him into staying. This part is so true and so typical of how married couples handle infidelity. I kept waiting for him to say "I love you but I'm not in love with you any more" just to get the whole picture. However, since Nancy wasn't the heroine of the book, she isn't destined for a happy ending, and they don't find the right combination of forces to keep their marriage going. Not that they don't drag it out for months - and even after he asks for the divorce and moves out and promises Maggie they will marry, sure enough, typical wayward spouse, he goes back for a couple of reconciliation tries. I did try to feel sorry for him, but his last decision to go back was really for all the wrong reasons, and it made me mad.

Oh the agony, and what a tangled web was weaved. Or woven. It about tore my guts out - that's LaVyrle Spencer for you. When she introduced the biggest obstacle, I waited, torn, knowing there was the Other Shoe, not knowing how she would handle it. When the Other Shoe dropped, I was actually shocked but pleased that it wasn't what I feared. And then - it's a long book, and I got too sleepy to finish, so I had to leave the last 100 pages for this morning, and while I drifted into sleep, I thought about this review and how I would put into words my own feelings about infidelity and love.

This book did bring me tears, which is not all that usual in general, but not completely unusual for a Spencer story. I wasn't prepared, however, for one thing - Maggie took him back in the end a little too easily for my taste. He had promised his mother (thank god she stepped in to save the day) he wouldn't see Maggie until he had divorce papers from Nancy, but that took months during which Maggie had no idea how he felt, or what his plans were. The day he got the papers, he went to her and she didn't even hesitate to take him back. It's not really a spoiler, being a Romance, to say they were married right away, although that wasn't the end.

There were unresolved issues in the story that kept me from feeling happy at the end when the h/h got their own HEA, however. What about her parents? What are her daughter's true feelings? (and on another note, I read a debate about how her daughter reacted to her mother's moving and selling her childhood home, and frankly my opinion is the daughter can take a flying leap - her mother was not wrong to sell/move since the daughter was away at college, having essentially left home anyway!)

Was the infidelity a hot button for me in this book? Hmmm - no actually it wasn't. Spencer successfully manipulated me into rooting for the hero and heroine over the hero's existing legal vows to his wife - a tribute to her talent with the written word, for sure. And it's always fun to keep the fantasies of First Love and Soul Mate alive too, even if I don't actually believe they exist.

I'm also torn on the rating - I think I have to go with 4 stars, because I was affected, because I did cry, because I was on the edge of my seat. Better than average/3 stars. But not a keeper/5 stars - I don't know if I can read it again. I think I need to devour another Andersen book and smile some more, because I didn't smile at the end of this .

Small Town Girl by LaVyrle Spencer ****

At last, a Spencer book that didn't tear my heart to shreds while reading it!

Small Town Girl is about Tess McPhail, a famous country western star (think Reba McIntire), returning to her small town at the insistence of her 2 sisters - Mother McPhail is having hip surgery, and the sisters need Tess to help mom out. She has been gone 18 years, since she graduated from high school and left home to make it in the country music business. And boy oh boy did she ever make it - she's a shrewd business woman in addition to a major singing talent, so she's a multi-millionaire now. She has to interrupt an album release and several appearances to come home, and she's not too happy about it either.

She hasn't been home for more than a brief visit or three in years and years, and staying with her widowed mother is not easy. Mom is pretty set in her ways, and in spite of the financial help Tess has sent home over the years, nothing has changed much at mom's house. In fact, the same Boy Next Door still lives across the alley - geeky Kenny who had a crush on Tess in high school. Well, he did move out, married, had a daughter, and then his wife left him and the kid, so he and the kid moved back home with his mom, who has since passed on.

Tess's life in the small town wasn't bad, she wasn't seriously deprived - her father died when she was young but all in all you get the feeling she had a good childhood. But what she wanted from the minute she could talk was to be a big-time country singer, so as soon as she graduated, she boogied - no hard feelings, no wayward childhood - just an itching for bigger and better. And she got it.

Kenny's life is pretty much as you'd expect for a Small Town Boy – boring - he's a self-employed CPA, living in his mom's house with his 17-yr-old daughter, dating the same woman for 8 years. He and Faith have a nice routine - for the past 8 years on Thursday's it's bridge night; she irons his shirts; he mows her lawn. But it's a small town, and they won't live together without marriage, and neither one is moved to make the commitment. The excuse is that she's Catholic and it would be a sin to marry a divorced man. The real reason is a little deeper - there's not really anything more than convenience and comfort between the two. Basically, Faith is a very nice woman that everyone respects, but frankly, she doesn't like getting messed up, and well, sex is messy. She never spends the night at his place; he never spends the night at hers. Oh, yeah, she puts out "on occasion" but no fireworks or even a spark there.

Tess remembers Kenny as the geeky boy who tried to kiss her on the school bus; he remembers her too (of course, she's extremely famous, so how could he not?) but his feelings for her are a lot more complex. First, he's still mad and embarrassed about how she treated him in high school. Second, he did have a crush on her and he's been fascinated by her ever since. Third - well, he does need to keep in mind Thursday is bridge night with his nice girlfriend Faith. And fourth - he has this daughter, Casey…

As it turns out, Casey is a big fan of Tess's - and she's a great singer too. Casey hears Tess writing a new song ("Small Town Girl") and gives her a couple of lines she thinks up, and later another verse. Tess figures out pretty quickly that Casey has some major, undeveloped talent, and takes her under her wing. This forces more contact between Kenny and Tess - and lo and behold, the geeky boy next door has evolved into someone a little more interesting to Tess after all. They sense the attraction, and dance around it - not really fighting it but not really exploring it either. See - there's that Thursday night bridge with Faith thing, and well, Tess is a famous singer who lives 250 miles away and performs 120 concerts a year, and, it just doesn't seem like their attraction could lead anywhere either of them is prepared to go.

You know, I did try to feel bad for Faith. Everyone really does like her, a lot, and she is nice to everyone. But sheesh - the whole thing with her ironing for him and going over there every night to make them dinner, then going home alone after dinner - it was sorta creepy really, since they don't show any overt signs of affection in front of anyone, ever. Tess even thinks how much she seems to be taking the place of his mother. All that almost completely emasculated Kenny for me - I mean, he wasn't the shy beta hero with a past, like in Morning Glory. He seemed to have no desires until he starts to show signs of attraction to Tess, though he doesn't really act on them. Even his backstory with his ex-wife (which I kept trying to fit into the timeline - if Tess left town 18 years ago, and the daughter is 17, he must have knocked up his wife about the same time Tess left?? so much for carrying a torch) didn't explain his lack of sexual desire (like, was he was so put off by women he won't have another?). It's not like he pressed Faith for anything more in this story. Maybe we're supposed to conclude that he did, once, and gave up, resigned to his fate of having to raise his daughter and having a nice almost-platonic relationship with Faith. Maybe if I read it again, it will be clearer to me.

He goes ahead and confesses to Tess his attraction – in fact, he really did carry the torch for her, as we learn towards the end. In this way, it's almost a First Love story. Tess has a harder time coming to terms with her own feelings – after all, she has this incredibly successful career that really doesn't leave time for a family, and I think she feels a little bad about stealing him away from Faith. She makes it pretty clear that he has to give up Faith for them to continue. But, it is a romance, and in the end they reconcile all the that in a nice, satisfying way for the two of them. Really, Faith is the only one left sort of undone, but frankly I think she had it coming. Well, no, actually, she deserved better – she deserved her own single Catholic fellow that would marry her, and she should have given up Kenny a long time ago if she wasn't willing to take him as he was. Or maybe the relationship she had with Kenny was all she wanted, in which case, good riddance for Faith.

Too bad Spencer retired – maybe she could have written a sequel for Faith. After all, she spent a lot of time convincing us that Faith was truly a nice, nice person that everyone respected and loved, and then BAM she gets dumped, pretty much on her ass, with not much explanation. And dang it all if she didn't come to their wedding at the end and make nice. She needs a spine and probably doesn't deserve her own book anyway!

Bygones by LaVyrle Spencer ***

You'd think by now I'd have read every Spencer book there is. Nope - there's plenty more that I haven't even gotten yet!

When I first started this journey, my first 2 books were That Camden Summer and Morning Glory. Both of them were 20th century American - 1917 and 1941 - and both I consider "sweet" romance: sexual tension yes, actual graphically described sex, not much, if any. Both wait til after marriage to consummate - in fact, in Morning Glory it's well after, since she's a pregnant widow. So I had this notion of her writing that isn't exactly correct, not having read more. She writes a completely new and different story every time - she uses different times, different regions, completely different situations and backstories. Now I have read 2 "family" stories, where a couple is already married, with older children - both completely different (Bygones and Family Blessings). She doesn't only write "sweet" romances or historical romances either.

Bygones is a family story - and also a "first love" story. Bess and Michael married young, had 2 kids, and went through some rough times, ending in Michael having an affair, divorcing Bess and marrying the Other Woman. It's 6 years later - Michael's second marriage is now ending in divorce and Bess and Michael's daughter brings them together to announce her pregnancy and marriage. The daughter harbors a fantasy that Bess and Michael will get back together, and she does everything in her power to get them to do just that.

Their son Randy, on the other hand, has never really recuperated from the bitter divorce. Bess admittedly kept the kids away from their father, and it was no secret from the kids how bitter her feelings were for Michael, enough to poison Randy against his father.

Because they have to see each other during all the wedding festivities, Bess and Michael are forced to act civilly and even face some of the truths about themselves. Many reviewers of this book feel that Bess ended up taking the blame for Michael's affair that broke up their marriage. Although she does realize that she shared in the breakdown of their relationship, she doesn't really take the blame for the affair. Michael as much as admits the second marriage was a mistake - but it's true that neither of them come out against his adultery as much as they could have. Adultery is a major hot button amongst romance readers, so if this book were ever re-written, maybe that could be dealt with differently.

Their attraction grows throughout the book, although once again, Spencer writes a stubborn heroine who almost ruins her chance at love because she can't voice her feelings. Michael tries to give her an ultimatum, but - lucky for us readers - he gives in and forces the issue another way, since Bess just cannot seem to be the one to give in and admit she wants to resume the relationship. And we have another hero, like in The Hellion, who undertakes some changes to win back his girl.

I just can't say I dislike any of the Spencer books I've read so far, but I didn't love this one either, so I'm going with 3 stars.

Forgiving by LaVyrle Spencer ****

Forgiving is another of LaVyrle Spencer's Americana series - set in the 1870s in the Dakota territory. And it's another one where Spencer creates characters that grabbed my heart and squeezed until I was sure there would never be anyone happy ever again. Arg, why does she do that??

The heroine is Sarah, a 25-year-old spinster coming to Deadwood by train to find her sister Addie who ran away from home 5 years earlier at the age of 16. She, like some of Spencer's other heroines, has been with her widowed father and hasn't had a real chance for love. Bookish, plain and independent, she's been assisting her father in the printing business, and now that he's dead, she's brought her printing press to Deadwood to start a newspaper.

She finds Addie working in a brothel; Addie doesn't want to see her or have anything to do with her.

Enter the hero: Marshal Noah Campbell. They meet at the brothel where Sarah learns he's been a customer of the sister. He's supposed to uphold the law in this newly created city, and Sarah manages to break a couple right off the bat. And there starts their relationship - as adversaries.

The secondary romance is the sister, Addie, and her beau from before, Robert. After Sarah lets Robert know Addie is there, working in a brothel, and that she doesn't want to see him, Robert comes to Deadwood as well, to start a business and work on winning back Addie.

There are several complications, and one is that Sarah has carried a secret torch for Robert all along. Another is the dearth of eligible females in the area, making Sarah attractive to several men, including the hero's younger brother. But somehow Noah comes around to realizing his own attraction to Sarah, and doesn't waste much time sparking and courting - he just flat out asks her to marry him.

And there is the mystery of why Addie ran away and became a whore - one that I guessed early on, but was still shocked when it was revealed. In fact, shocked both times it's revealed because first she tells only Robert. Robert assumes she has told Sarah and brings it up in front of Sarah and Noah after they have set a wedding date. It's shocking enough to Sarah that she sinks into a depression, and the wedding is called off.

Spencer often manages to make her heroines way too stubborn for their own good, and although I understood how Sarah could undergo a change of mind, it was still heart breaking to read and suffer through. In fact, the secret seems to affect Sarah even more than Addie in the end. Well, not really, I guess, since Addie was a whore for 5 years because of it - but she manages to heal and recognize her love for Robert anyway, while Sarah doesn't seem to be able to shake it off until the very, bitter end. Whew. I knew there had to be a HEA, but it was slow and long in coming, and heart wrenching all at once.

Twice Loved by LaVyrle Spencer ****

Continuing on with my Glom of LaVyrle Spencer, I am almost finished reading the Big Box of Hardcovers. Twice Loved was one that pretty much squeezed my heart until I thought I couldn't take it any more, and I don't know if I'll be able to read it and go through this again. It was so heart-wrenching and never really uplifting, like Morning Glory was, even the ending, because frankly there was no way to have a completely happy ending, even though the hero and heroine do get together.

The plot: it's about 1837, and a sailor returns to Nantucket where he left his bride 5 years earlier.

The backstory: 3 children are close playmates, best friends, 2 boys - Dan and Rye - and a girl Laura, all through their childhood - but Laura only has eyes for Rye as they mature. Laura and Rye marry, and Rye goes to sea to make his fortune. He doesn't know that Laura is pregnant - and that his ship has gone down with all hands aboard after he is left in a foreign port with the smallpox.

The news of the ship's demise gets back to Nantucket, and since he is assumed dead with everyone else on board, Dan convinces Laura to marry him so that he can take care of her and her son. He's always carried a torch for her, and he raises Rye's son Josh as his own.

The son is only 4 when Rye returns - he has no idea that Dan isn't his father. In fact, it was heartbreaking to me that Rye's parents were never even acknowledged as the grandparents, and Rye's mother also dies while he is away. When Rye returns, his best friend now has his wife, his son, his house - everything except his dog, who left Laura to live with Rye's father after she remarried.

I spent the whole book in such agony - the law was on Dan's side, and his marriage to Laura the legal one. He's so desperately in love with Laura but can feel that she is still in love with Rye. However - she stays with Dan while trying to decide what she wants - a decision that may have made sense but still was agonizing to read. Dan starts drinking and staying away from her; Rye stays in town, giving Laura time to come to some kind of decision, which she drags on and on and on until I thought I would die from it as well.

Rye gets a chance to leave Nantucket and go to Michigan - and he finally forces Laura to choose. Of course, the whole town is in on the entire sordid affair, and the son learns that Rye is his real father through a friend. Needless to say, a 4 yr-old can't really understand. I went back and forth over this in my own mind - should she have had her son keep his real father's name? Should she have told him? But can a 4 year old understand something like this? And since it's 1837, and truly everyone believed him dead, how could it make any difference?

When Rye tries to form another relationship, Laura is desperately jealous. That was incredibly two-faced of her, in my own mind - if she felt she had any claim to Rye, she should have at least stopped sleeping with Dan while she decided which one she wanted! And once she decides it will be Rye and she promises to tell Dan, she commits adultery with Rye - and then doesn't tell Dan she wants a divorce! Arrrrgggg - I was so anguished for Rye, every minute while reading this story.

In the end, Dan basically lets Laura go by initiating divorce proceedings himself - Laura, in my own mind, never has the courage to tell Dan what her decision is. So while Rye and Laura do get together and take Josh to Michigan, of course Dan and Josh are both devastated by their separation - Josh, from the only father he has known up to this point, and Dan from his love Laura, his best friend Rye and the boy he has raised.

Even a "happily ever after" ending couldn't bring my spirits up for this book, because all of them suffered so much. Still - 4 stars. Just thinking about it again has me filled with the anguish - Spencer can really make you feel what each character is feeling.

Hummingbird by LaVyrle Spencer ***

This is the 3rd story in the 3-story book: Hummingbird. It's also a full novel, not a short story. I had already read the 2nd story, Separate Beds.

This review contains spoilers, as in the secret identity and the resolutions. If you don't wanna know, don't read.

Hummingbird is a historical novel that takes place in Colorado, but I can't recall the year exactly - 1870s sometime. After The War. Before electricity and cars. During trains being built across the nation - and the story is that there's a train robbery, and a passenger stops the robber by shooting him, and gets shot in the process. So now we have 2 men shot - the passenger in the big toe and the robber through the upper thigh. The passenger is awake and aware; the robber is unconscious.

The heroine is an uptight spinster of 33 - her backstory is that she had a fiance at 20, but he jilted her, supposedly because she had to take care of her invalid father. Her mother, already dead at that point, was the one who drummed Puritanical ideals into her, and we learn that the real reason she was jilted was because the hero decided she was too much of a prude, and the father/invalid was the only excuse she could admit to herself. The father is now dead - the spinster holds herself a leeetle above everyone else now, and the town respects her but doesn't exactly consider her friendly or approachable. Oh - she's now out of money and needs a job.

So she is pressed into the long-term care of both the patients because the doctor is overwhelmed with work, and no one else will care for a Bad Guy. The passenger is considered a hero (not The Hero of course) for shooting the robber; the robber stays unconscious for several more days while she tends to him, doing her best to keep him alive in spite of his alleged sordid deed.

Spencer builds a believable story around her relationship with the passenger - he's gentle, kind, appreciative and the heroine believes she could have a second chance at love with him. Then he sees her in bed with the robber - well, she was did crawl into the bed and fall asleep, but it was in the line of duty, trying to keep his wound from bleeding or something - and he leaves, mad, accusing them of consorting. So now we concentrate on her relationship with the robber, who is now awake and aware but surly and rude and all things bad. Plus now he's saying he wasn't a robber at all - but he doesn't elaborate or try to convince her of his name and status. And I think his manhandling her, with her being truly shocked and not submitting - bordered on assault, not "forced seduction". It started with a couple of kisses but went past that pretty quickly, although not yet All The Way.

Of course - the Big Misunderstanding is: he's the train's owner - he's rich and he's also a photographer, and he was never robbing the train (the passenger's mistake). He does understand that he messed up her chance at love with the passenger, so when the passenger sues the train for his disability, the Hero (aka the robber aka the owner of the train) pays him off enough with stipulations that he remain in the town. He knows that will mean the heroine has another chance at love with the passenger - which she takes.

Except. Well, she didn't realize any of this (his being the owner, the passenger returning to town), and insists on losing her virginity to the Hero - ooops - and he does try to convince her it's the wrong thing, but he doesn't exactly own up to the reasons. It Happens, then she learns The Truth, and the Hero is well now and leaves. Wham Bam Thank You Ma'am.

The passenger and the Heroine do some courting, and the town accepts him and her and all is peachy except she keeps thinking he isn't making her feel the way the Hero did - he won't even really kiss her. But hey, she's ok with all that, thinking this is really her last and only chance. Plus it's nice to have the town folk being so nice to her. And she has goals and aspirations now - the shoe store, a life.

They set a wedding date; it's now the day before the wedding - enter The Hero, who just can't stay away - he seduces her, and ooops the fiance walks in on them going at it. That's ok, the Hero just grabs her and they take His Train and leave town forever. The End.

I dunno, this story just didn't 100% work for me, even though maybe it's sorta credible for the time period? Still, with Spencer's story telling and prose, I had to give it 3 stars - I didn't hate it, but really - he did physically overwhelm her waaay against her will, the way I read it, several times. Not in a "I'm so attracted to you I can't help it" way, but in a "I can do it so I will" way - I just wasn't convinced he was attracted to her. And she seemed sort of fascinated by him, but not really attracted to him, enough to give in, on those first few times. She really does just seduce him in an attempt to learn what it would be like, thinking she'll never have another chance and knowing he was well and leaving, and NOT knowing the passenger was coming back to her.

I dunno. Not heart-wrenching, and plus I still feel she did the fiance wrong.

The Hellion by LaVyrle Spencer ***

I'm glomming Spencer's books, and I got a PBS deal on 7 hardcovers, of which 1 has 3 stories, and of which I have read 2 already - so that is 9 stories, 7 new to me.

The first one I picked up was the 3 story book, and the first story (it's a complete novel, not a short story or novella) is The Hellion. It's a first-love story - the hero and heroine were always next door neighbors, grew up, fell in love - and she got pregnant at 17. The heroine's parents decide the best thing is to send her away to another state to a home for pregnant teens, give the baby up for adoption and keep her out of town for her senior high year. The incident also causes the parents of the kids to cease their close friendship, since they don't agree on how it was handled, and the hero also stops communicating with his parents after a few years as well.

That's the backstory - now it's 24 years later, and the hero is The Hellion - fast living, fast cars, fast women, 3 failed marriages, 3 troubled kids. He drinks too much, drives too fast, has a beer belly - but he's a successful businessman, still living in the same small town with the heroine and all the parents. The heroine is now, just, a widow - she nursed her husband through 2 years of cancer, and as the story opens, she is burying him. Hero and heroine have successfully avoided each other all these years - but he attends the funeral and the story begins.

A lot of this story is dated, firmly set in the 1980s, like some of her other books of this era. Maybe in several more years it will work as a period piece, but right now the decorating and dressing details just seem dated. The big conflict really is that he has such a reputation now that she finds it hard to overcome What People Will Say, especially her father. Frankly it took her a while to just tell her father to go to hell - he's really the villain in this piece, for strong-arming her all along, including into the marriage with the husband who just died. He tries to strong arm her into into another relationship, with the man who was there for her during the husband's illness, and she even gives that a shot.

Well, there is one more issue: the hero's 14-yr-old daughter is rebellious and comes to live with him after she fights with her mother. The hero now has an obstacle - how to break it to a teen who holds a fantasy that her parents might get back together that he has another, true love. This is actually a stickier proposition than dealing the hero's father - after all, the father is an adult who actually did the kids wrong all those years ago, and deserves to be put in his place. The daughter has a lot more to overcome, and had no part in the original situation - and she is just a child.

Three stars for good story telling and prose. It didn't grab me and squeeze my heart, and I don't have a great need to read it again like Morning Glory or That Camden Summer.

gotta lotta reading to review

Wow - I have some reviewing to do. Finished Baby, I'm Yours by Susan Andersen for the 2nd read. I picked up 2 books from my seriously-old physical TBR pile next to the bed - Nan Ryan's You Belong to My Heart and Jude Deveraux's Wild Orchids, both purchased months ago at the Portal library book sale.

I had been avoiding Wild Orchids because the Amazon.com reviews indicated it was a paranormal, and not a Romance. Wrong! Well - there is a paranormal element, but it's not vampires or some weird alternate reality. And it's a Romance through and through. I really enjoyed the writing - this was my first Deveraux - and the book was written from the hero's and heroine's first person POV, each chapter from 1, back and forth. The story is about a best-selling author, our hero, after his wife died, trying to get back his writing mojo and deciding to write a book about ghost stories, and a young researcher (our heroine) - engaged to be married but jilting her fiance at the altar to join the hero as his assistant. She has a devil story from her youth that interests the hero, and he takes them both to the story's town of origin to research the story.

The book had me crying twice in the first 26 pages as the hero talks about his now-deceased wife and her family - I knew from those first pages I would love this book. Then as we get closer and closer to the devil story, it picks up pace. The actual solving of the town's problem was almost a let-down for me, but then when the Real Reason the Devil is there comes to light, it becomes tense as the hero fights his own devils and of course, being a Romance novel, he wins. Think The Devil Went Down to Georgia.

You Belong to My Heart was another good book. It takes place in Memphis before and during the Civil War, and involves our wrong-side-of-the-tracks hero and plantation belle heroine as they grow up as best friends then young lovers, thwarted by her parents who think he's not good enough for her. Years go by, there's that Big Misunderstanding thing between them, the Civil War starts and they meet again - and must overcome the wrong done to them by someone else and not, as they each think, by the other one. The actual unveiling of the Big Mis was a little too pat, and made me wonder what made the fellow admit the truth and since he did, why did he wait so long?? But I still loved the story enough to give it 4 stars.

I happened across 2 LaVyrle Spencer books at the Rodeo book exchange in the cafe: Family Blessings and A Heart Speaks. My previous Spencer reads have me glomming her backlist - although I was surprised how much I liked her writing style, since the 2 I read were both "sweet" romances. Turns out she did write some steamier and more graphic stuff, and contemporaries at that (well, in the 80s - so contemporary to that). Family Blessings concerns an older heroine/younger hero - he's the roommate of her son who is killed at the beginning of the story. They turn to each other for support, one thing leads to another - and the big conflict is of course how her family feels about their age difference, and how they deal with that. Yeah, lotsa tearing up at the beginning as the death happens, and they deal with the grief. Since he's 30 (to her son's 25) and she's 45, it's a credible plot but they still overcome. He's something like the hero in Morning Glory - really bad upbringing, and somewhat needing mothering as well as loving from the heroine, although he's made a much better life for himself on his own.

A Heart Speaks is actually 2 short novels, Forsaking All Others and A Promise To Cherish. Forsaking All Others has our photographer heroine not yet over being dumped and screwed by a former boyfriend/male model, meeting the hero - guess what, he's a male model she's hired to pose for a Romance novel cover she's doing. A Promise To Cherish has a Native American heroine trying to make it in a man's world and trying to get over her divorce, from which she loses custody of her kids to the ex-husband (something we don't learn the details of till the end, really). The hero is the owner of a rival firm, who hires her when she quits her job. The Big Secret here is, she has a chip on her shoulder about being part Cherokee - she thinks it's why the kids were taken away - and she learns the hero's mother is also part Cherokee. Of course, there's the conflict of her being the employee and not wanting to sleep with the boss - but it's very 80s and that conflict isn't really dealt with much. The biggest conflict is her not telling him about having children because of her shame of losing custody. Three stars for Promise, and 4 for Forsaking. Neither one was as compelling a story as Morning Glory or That Camden Summer, but I still like her prose.

From PBS, I got Spencer's Separate Beds. Now I'm starting to think maybe her earlier stuff isn't really as good as the later stuff, or I just lucked out by reading her best stuff first. I enjoyed Separate Beds (ok, 4 stars) but it's very dated with 80s styles and such. I have to agree with an Amazon reviewer who mentions how it pulled her out of the story to read about how they dressed and how they decorated. I guess someday it could be a period piece. We have a rich law-school student hero, who has a fight with his rich girlfriend, and for revenge goes on a date with our wrong-side-of-the-tracks college student heroine during which she gets pregnant. That's backstory - we start with the heroine's alcoholic father going to the rich kid's parents to see if he can profit from this.

The protagonists choose a marriage of convenience (I guess it's 80s that they didn't even talk about prenups, even though the father is a big lawyer, and hero a law student??) that only they know will end after he finishes law school, within the year. She's so completely screwed up by her upbringing that she cannot allow herself to ever be nice to the hero - even though she decided early on she loved him. That was frustrating. Bring in the Rich Girlfriend to complicate matters - it's intimated the hero kept up the relationship during the marriage, although he denies it. Then - lo and behold, he does go back to the Rich GF and actually moves in with her for several months, which - yeah - I found that squicky. I mean, he knows RGF lied to the heroine. Then - this is kinda messed up - he just leaves RGF one day and calls heroine, and they get back together. I wondered (1) why he didn't visit the baby more and (2) why she didn't take the baby to his parent's more. And she saved the get-back-together scene for the very last page, so... well, I still liked it ok, but again, comparing it to Morning Glory and That Camden Summer, it just didn't live up to the promise of those 2 wonderful books.

Did I mention I did listen to David Dukes' narration of That Camden Summer? And I'm still working on the audio of DIA - we've just fought Prestonpans, so it isn't long now til Culloden. Which leads nicely into the next 2 books I have from PBS by Marsha Canham, which take place during the '45.

A wrap-up of April's reading and...

I am now on the audio book Dragonfly in Amber. I think I truly managed to quell my obsession with All Things Jamie-and-Claire, and hmmm - I'm not getting through it as fast as I would have thought. And because I'm determined to get through them in order, I now have 2 audible.com credits which I'm not planning to redeem. I did get LaVyrle Spencer's audio of That Camden Summer, but have not listened to it.

What did I read in the past month? Well - using the AAR Top 100 Romance Novels list, I decided to start reading Lisa Kleypas. And now that I've read Prince of Dreams (a while back), Someone to Watch Over Me, Then Came You and Dreaming of You (the #2 in the Top 100), all I can say is: IS THAT ALL THERE IS? Then Came You was filled with bone-jarring typos - what a poor editing job! The hero practically raped the heroine more than once. The heroine decided to knock him out and tie him up - not for raping her, but to keep him from marrying her sister. Why? Well, mainly because the heroine is meddling. The sister - actually in love with someone else - wants to marry the hero anyway because that is how it's done. The author doesn't prove to me that the marriage shouldn't take place, that the hero will do anything worse than not being in love with his fiancee which could change... But then there wouldn't be a story, right? And to that I say, and who cares?

Someone posted either a review or a forum post talking about the Laugh Out Loud moments in this book. Laugh out loud at someone getting knocked unconscious and tied up? I Don't Get It. Am I just a curmudgeon or do I just not like the popular Lisa Kleypas' writing??

Dreaming of You was better than Then Came You - fewer typos. But she comes nowhere near Loretta Chase or Jo Goodman in prose, the ability to use words to draw a picture, evoke an emotion, show the reader. And the hero Derek Craven that everyone loves so much? Me - not so much. Well, she does have him say some wonderful things that do not make up for the lack of... well, whatever, lack of story line, character portrayal.

Silly me, I've already ordered several more Kleypas books - well, I'll muddle through. To be sure it wasn't me just being contrary, I did re-reads of Morning Glory (love it), Captives of the Night (love it); and a couple of Goodman books (the sequels to Season to be Sinful, which is loaned out to Susanne, or I'd have re-read it as well). And still loved them. And there's a major difference in the style.

Also read this month: Susan Anderson, Baby, I'm Yours - a contemporary. 4 stars! A bounty hunter mistakes an identical twin, one of whom is jumping bail, and drags her across the country by Greyhound bus while she tries to convince him she's the wrong twin. She sets it up well enough: the wrong twin had a vacation from her job and was supposed to be in Europe. Unfortunately, there was some issue with her plane ticket and she didn't get to go at the very last minute. The one issue I had with this was how hard it was for me to believe that identical twins raised together would be so incredibly different in education, accent, manner of speaking, etc. I don't know that much about twins, but from what I've heard/read, they are very close, even having their own language as children. But I went with the leap, and enjoyed the ride.

I finished Ceremony in Death (JD Robb) and Vengeance in Death. I took a break between them, and did appreciate Vengeance more that way. So I plan a break between each of them, and now have about 6 waiting.

I read all 4 of the Jo Goodman Compass Club books: Everything I Ever Wanted, Let Me Be The One, All I Ever Needed and Beyond a Wicked Kiss. I gave them each 4 stars but did not put them on my Keeper/Re-Read list. I did like them but wasn't consumed by them.

I read 2 LaVyrle Spencer books - wow! Another new keeper/re-read author. The 2 I read (That Camden Summer, Morning Glory) are early 20th century and rural America, and both beta/mild-mannered heroes. In fact, That Camden Summer doesn't even have an explicit sex scene (shock) but still the tension created was enough to make it incredible. I need to explore her books more - apparently she's retired. I rented the movie Morning Glory, with Christopher Reeve. I liked it ok - and actually they stuck pretty close to the book, leaving out the part where the hero goes to WWII, and changing a couple of minor points. Since I had just read the book the day before, it was hard to compare them - I had the story so firmly in my head, it was hard to say if the movie covered something or I just knew it. I can see where, although a picture is worth 1000 words, those words are not necessarily the ones the author would have chosen and so someone seeing the movie may miss some of the subtle things going on, especially in their minds. I love how Spencer had the hero and heroine have such similar thoughts although they didn't share them or even let them show on their faces. This can't just be shown by even good actors - you need to see or hear the words Spencer wrote to appreciate it.

I picked up 4 used books at Hastings: A Long Fatal Love Chase by Louisa May Alcott (4 stars) and 2 by Elizabeth Lowell, Always Time To Die (4 stars) and Beautiful Dreamer (3 stars) as well as a Nora Roberts, Blue Smoke. Lowell is an author that sometimes I love and sometimes not so much. Sometimes the same treatment she gives one story just doesn't seem to work in the next one. Sometimes she just drums and drums some point over and over into the reader's head and I just want to say OK WE GET IT PLEASE DON'T SAY THIS AGAIN. Beautiful Dreamer was like that - ok, she loves her ranch and it has no water. Got it, stop driving it into me. I did do a re-read another Lowell book (which one? cannot recall). I gave Blue Smoke 4 stars - liked it a lot. It's about a woman arson detective and her journey from child watching her parents' business burn down to what she is today. Her hero sees her and is in love at first sight, even though it's years before they meet - it's a nice treatment of the hero. Another mostly beta hero - and I liked it.

So I read 14 or 15 new books in April (I marked 3 of them as being read on 5/2, and I think I read 2 of those in April.) I don't keep track of re-reads, but I think I did 4-5. And the only audio books have been Outlander and now I'm in part 3 of Dragonfly in Amber, both re-listens.