Wednesday 25 May 2011

Book Review of Kate Walker's The Proud Wife


The Proud Wife
By
Kate Walker
A Review by Mary Middleton

Think of everything you love about a Mills and Boon and you will find it in The Proud Wife. Kate Walker skilfully creates the sexual tension, mental anguish and tangled emotion that makes a novel sizzle.
Aside from the convincing backdrops and accomplished narrative, Pietro and Marina emerge as free standing, fully developed characters with all the flaws, confusion and complexities of real human beings. The reader is dragged into their world to share their torment and it is impossible to put the book down until their trials are resolved.
It is no surprise that Kate is one of the more successful authors of this genre. She understands people and the barriers that can keep us from achieving personal fulfilment. Because she knows exactly what makes her characters tick they come alive on the page and the reader is personally involved with their happiness and craves the resolution as deeply as they do.
Marina is a fully rounded woman, no swooning, no soppy weaknesses; she emerges as a strong, modern, convincing woman who stands on her own two feet. Pietro is troubled, with some skeletons in his cupboard but he is essentially a good, fair minded man (aside from being stupendously good looking) and as such, is the type of man we can all fall in love with.
When you open The Proud Wife you will become involved in Marina and Pietro’s journey and can expect vivid scenery, sizzling sex scenes and heart wrenching dark moments but you can be safe in the knowledge that it will all come right it the end.
The Proud Wife is a romance that sparkles.

ISBN-13: 978-0263886412
Also available on Kindle

Monday 23 May 2011

Alpha Males


Well, this is my first blog and I thought I'd ramble on about the thing that, if we are really honest, draws women to romance novels, the alpha male. Critics of romance are quick to dismiss the male characters as unrealistic, plastic people that lack substance and, on the surface, they may be right, there are some undisputable similarites.

They are always handsome, always rich and usually brooding and sexually unsurpassable,often with a flaw that can only be mended by the love of a good woman - a woman the reader can identify with. 
The male characters put the romance into the genre simply because it is most women's dream to be the object of an alpha male's desire.


For many women, after a long day at the office or of wrestling with a couple of cranky kids all day,  there is nothing nicer than to slip into a hot bubbling bath with a broad chested, smouldering hunk of muscle -a fictional one, of course.

But, let's face it, few of us are ever going to meet anyone as handsome or as rich as a romance hero ...or maybe we do, at least once.

Apart from being rich, my own smoulderingly sexy, alpha male fills most of the above criteria or at least he does in my head; which is all that  matters. 

I think romance is a lot to do with your personal outlook.  My man is getting on a bit now, he has grey hair and a few wrinkles and he doesnt own a big yacht to sail me away around the world.  But he does it for me.

What I think I am trying to say is that alpha males are all in the mind. When in a novel, the ordinary girl from the east of London looks upon her wild eyed, Italian billionaire she is looking at him through the eyes of love; eyes that can change the most ordinary bloke into an adonis.  To a woman in love her man is an alpha male, his eyes do have the ability to weaken her knees and his touch does burn her like a brand. 

Most of  us have been close enough to feel the passion at some point, haven't we? So what's wrong with celebrating the feeling?

Women in love

Since I blogged last time about Alpha Males, this time I thought I should turn my attention to the women. I have made quite a study of the characters in the romance novels, both male and female and, although there are a lot of stereotypes, some stand out from the crowd.
The romances with the most developed characters are the ones that work, the ones we remember. It isn't so much the plot or the luxury of the settings but the way in which the characters interact with eachother and the way in which they resolve the problems the author has set them.

There is little point in creating a wonderful world as a back drop for wooden, unconvincing characters.  Women today are forceful, they know what they want and they go out to get it. Would they put up with man who was little more than a moody bully or would they tell him to take a running jump?  I know what I'd do, no matter how darned good looking and rich he was. 

Modern women deserve respect and I hope they don't settle for anything less? I know, as well as anyone, that love can make you do silly things, it can make you blind to a man's faults and there are plenty of us who end up with the wrong man the first time round; but I am not sure it has a place in romance.

If, at the end of a novel, the heroine ends up with a  man who has bullied her and abused his power through out the story then, to me, it doesn't quite constitute a happy ending.  I am too aware that leopards rarely change their spots and am left thinking, is this man going to revert to type? Are they really going to be happy?  The author has lost me because she hasn't convinced me of her male lead's integrity.

If I reach the end of a novel where the male character is fully rounded, even if he goes through a period of seeming to be threatening, because i have been made aware of his good points and can believe that his redeeming features outweigh the bad, then it leaves me a happy bunny with a rosy glow. which is the author's intention, isnt it?

Some Thoughts on the Agonies of Cathy and Heathcliff

The two main characters of Emily Bronte’s earth shattering novel, Wuthering Heights are now part of our collective consciousness and, therefore, need no introduction. At the time of publication, because of the restrictions placed upon female writers, the novel was issued under the male pseudonym of Ellis Bell. Regarded initially by some as scandalous and ‘coarse’ it remains one of the most discussed books of all time.

Wuthering Heights is an unconventional romance and some would say it isn’t a love story at all but for me there isn’t a love story to top it. The storyline is deeply troubling and evades satisfactory analysis but, nevertheless, I love everything about it; the construction, the unreliable narrators, the stormy characters and wild setting of the wild moors, the creaking farmhouse and the stately Grange. The sweeping story is just like life, or how life can be; wildly chaotic, ungovernable and I wish with all my heart I had written it.

Emily Bronte was just thirty when she died but hopefully she took some satisfaction from having written such a shockingly brilliant novel. The Brontes had a tough life. I am not going to go deeply into all the conflicting opinions and controversy that surrounds them, I am just going to say, ‘it was tough.’

Death was no stranger to Emily. The girls’ mother and two of their sisters died while they were young and, largely ignored by their father, Reverend Patrick Bronte, the three remaining sisters and their brother, Branwell formed a strong bond. In later years Branwell became an alcoholic and a drug addict and was subject to bouts of insanity during which he threatened suicide and murder. The bouts of delirium eventually ended in his death. Sickness, death, madness, anorexia, class, religion, race and gender issues and, of course, love are all to be found within the pages of a Bronte novel which when one considers their life experiences is no surprise. In Emily’s case what is remarkable is the consummate skill and detail with which she created Wuthering Heights.

The love between Cathy and Heathcliff is one of several romantic relationships depicted in the novel and it is the one that everyone remembers. The wild sweeping passion, the unrequited longing and the strength of the love that transcends even death is not easily forgotten. The puzzling thing is how such ungoverned emotion emerged from the mind of an unmarried, sheltered twenty eight year old woman.

Surrounded all her life by death, alcohol/drug abuse and madness Emily knew all about passion and she knew about love and grief but surely she must have experienced love at first hand to be able to gain such a deep understanding of how being in love feels.

The recurring themes were shocking to the nineteenth century world but she neither promotes nor judges but merely presents the negative facts of life as she sees them. The resulting novel is such a whirl of emotion that it is impossible to logically account for every element of the story and the plot remains largely indefinable, just as love is.

The love she presents between Cathy and Heathcliff is a destructive one. We are never quite sure of the reasons why they cannot be together but we have our suspicions although we know that, ultimately, they belong together. Cathy’s matter of fact statement, ‘I am Heathcliff,’ is the most revealing of all. Emily doesn’t have her say, I want Heathcliff or I love Heathcliff but ‘I am Heathcliff.’ And it comes from the heart. For Cathy, Heathcliff transcends everything; he is her soul, her body, her breath, her blood, her life, her passion.

We cannot choose who we love. It is something quite outside human control. We can deny it or we can walk away from it but the emotion will always remain. There is an academic school of thought that believes Cathy and Heathcliff are siblings, either he is her bastard brother brought into the home by their father or that, because they have been raised as siblings, there is a legal bar to their union.

I am not in the position to state this as fact but it is an interesting hypothesis to explore. Emily Bronte has been quite oblique about the detail of the situation and she would have been aware that indelicate matters such as incest were not for the pages of a novel. But, when you consider all her other controversial themes, race, religion, gender, madness, then it wouldn’t surprise me if she had also quietly embraced the subject of incest. If her intention was to examine forbidden love then I can’t think of a love that is more forbidden than a romantic attachment between brother and sister.

There was a bar to sexual relationships between those brought up as siblings, there may well still be today, but even if there was no blood tie their relationship still contravened social and moral boundaries of the time. But does that matter? Their love is never consummated; what Bronte is doing is examining the feeling of forbidden love, the desperate wrenching pain that it inflicts upon those involved.

Bronte uses the impetuosity and tempestuous behaviour of the couple to demonstrate that forbidden love is a part of the human condition just like all the other unpleasant social taboos that the Brontes chose not to omit from their work.

For me, Heathcliff is a hero to end all heroes. He may be a dark, threatening antithesis of what we have come to expect in a romance and his actions may make it difficult to sympathise with him but he loves Cathy, unreservedly.

Unconformist in every way, it is a simpler matter for him to ignore the bar to their union but Cathy, more conventional than Heathcliff, denies their love because of the social taboos that surround it. Or maybe I should say she tries to deny it, for their love does not end with death and she does not find rest until Heathcliff’s demise many years later. Their unfulfilled love drives Cathy to an early grave and turns Heathcliff into a bitter, cruel man.

I have read Wuthering Heights many times. It is a puzzle and a storm – a whirling cyclone created by the uncontrollable passion of the forbidden love of two souls who belonged together. For me, the enigma is increased by the fact that the novel was the work of a unique young woman who’s soul, in the words of her sister Charlotte, was made up of ‘a peculiar music -- wild, melancholy, and elevating.’