TEST
I’ll be honest. Diana Palmer’s Heart of Winter, despite its pretty cover, includes a novella called Woman Hater, and I had to see just how bad a story that wears its misogyny on its face would get. Spoiler warning : very bad. So let’s start.
Woman Hater
(O riginally published in 1987)
Nicole White works as a secretary for Gerald Christopher, who’s planning to spend a month in rural Montana at his older brother Winthrop’s house. Nicole can use a month’s pay, so Gerald takes her with him. It’s obvious, though, that Winthrop dislikes having her around, because three years ago, Winthrop was injured in an accident, and after that his fiancée dumped him.
Naturally, he now hates all women, but he also hates rich people. Nicky realizes that if he knows her father is rich, she will instantly become Satan, even though she refused even a dime of her father’s money. So she allows Winthrop to believe she’s not related to her well-known father. Of course, he finds out and then hates her for lying to him. By the way, get used to Nicky being constantly referred to as a girl (and occasionally, a little girl). Winthrop also thinks of her “firm young breasts” and “sweet young body”, and I put on To Catch a Predator reruns for appropriate background ambiance.
Winthrop is eleven years older than Nicky, but seems about twenty years younger in terms of maturity. At one point, he makes Sioux hand signals to tell her what he thinks of her, aware that she doesn’t understand them and will need to find someone to translate. Their romance follows a predictable pattern where she shows him she’s kind, generous and sweet, but then he sees her be pleasant to his brother and he goes right back to loathing women. I feared for any daughters they might conceive when I came across this line in an intimate scene :
“Do you want a son?” she asked in a husky, loving tone.
He confirms that he wants a son, and she goes to bed dreaming about “little boys”. I don’t want to imagine what steps they might take to avoid having girls. Until the end, he refuses to marry her, because he doesn’t want a woman in his house (but he tells her to grow out her hair, because he likes long hair). Nicky’s reaction to the red flags is best summed up in this quote :
Poor, tormented man, she thought. So much love in him, all wasted on the wrong woman. And now he was driven to hurt back, out of fear that it was going to happen again. But it wasn’t, she thought, her heart blazing with compassion. It wasn’t, because she’d never hurt him.
I just felt sorry for her, because the abuse will only get worse from here. Even the intimate scenes didn’t work for me, because Winthrop is a smoker, so when they kiss, she notices “the tobacco tartness of his tongue”. Nothing against smokers, but I don’t want to taste that. In summary, I can’t recommend anything about this deeply disturbing story, and it gets an F.
If Winter Comes
(Originally published in 1979)
Carla Maxwell works for a newspaper that made a mistake in a story about mayor Bryan Moreland, and when she attends a party where Bryan is a guest, he wastes no time in tearing into her. Throughout this confrontation, he seems constantly on the verge of exploding, and he doesn’t even allow her to finish a sentence, let alone explain that it wasn’t her mistake.
I’ve never particularly liked politicians who insult and threaten reporters, but he then puts the cherry on the top by discovering the truth and asking her why she didn’t tell him she wasn’t responsible. Whatever happens, it’s her fault in some way. Sadly, this sets the tone for yet another abusive relationship, and I only read through to the end so I could write a review.
Bryan is your typical old-skool alpha. He’s fifteen years older than Carla, so he calls her “little girl”. He was in an accident which killed his wife and daughter, therefore he will Never Love Again, but he secretly follows Carla out to her car so he can fight off a would-be rapist. He constantly smokes in her presence despite her not liking this, and when he suspects she saw another man before he met her, he demands details, “his fingers biting into her soft flesh”.
Carla is happy to be the rug he wipes his feet on, and this culminates in an intimate scene where she has to say no more than once. When it’s obvious she doesn’t want to have sex, he freezes her out. But actually, he didn’t realize how innocent she was, so once he does, he turns on the charm again. The message is that if you’re a virgin you can say no, but if you’ve been around the block, there’s no excuse. Naturally, she’s a complete contrast to his first wife, whom he only married because she was pregnant. This story was written in 1979, but if something is re-released in 2006, expect it to be held to more modern standards. So it gets another F.
In conclusion, I like to try winter romances at this time of year, but Heart of Winter made me want to fill a stocking with coal and hit both heroes with it. Admire the cover, avoid this book, and read something, anything else.
Buy it at: Amazon
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Grade: F
Book Type: Contemporary Romance
Sensuality: Warm
Review Date: 17/12/20
Publication Date: 11/2006
Recent Comments …
Yep
This sounds delightful! I’m grabbing it, thanks
excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.
I don’t think anyone expects you to post UK prices – it’s just a shame that such a great sale…
I’m sorry about that. We don’t have any way to post British prices as an American based site.
I have several of her books on my TBR and after reading this am moving them up the pile.
I'm Marian, originally from Sri Lanka but grew up in the United Arab Emirates, studied in Georgia and Texas, ended up in Toronto. When I'm not at my job as a medical laboratory technologist, I read, write, do calligraphy, and grow vegetables in the back yard.
Related Reviews
There was a time when throwing a Diana Palmer book across the room was part of the rite of passage of being a romance fan. I would find myself throwing the book down, and then picking up the book moments later to see what that crazy hero would to next.
I wish the heroines had been stronger and more able to stand up for themselves. But maybe the books worked better because they were so innocent and beset-upon? Anyway, for me, reading this sort of book was formative because I was able to vicariously experience being confronted by an alpha heel — and I was able to figure out in my mind how to stand up against that sort of conflict.
I got all excited when I saw the cover, because I love winter and I love horses. Now, having read the review, which is excellent by the way, I’m left scratching my head wondering how a book with stories like that ended up with such a lovely cover. It’s like buying a box of chocolate and realizing it’s filled with meatballs or something. It’s just wrong. Except that meatballs can be quite good in the right context if you don’t mind meat in your diet, but I’m failing to see how these particular stories could be good for anyone.
I read my first romance novel in 2017 and I read other genres too and am a slow reader so it’s a slow process familiarizing myself with this genre. It is so interesting to hear thoughts from people who have read considerably older romance novels back when they were originally published, because I have no personal experience of such books at all. I mean, the story descriptions in the review sound mind-bogglingly unpleasant to me, but stories don’t exist in vacuum, and getting information on attitudes of the time and place as well as history of the genre provides the kind of context that helps a great deal with putting things into perspective and understanding the why behind stories like these.
Yep, that’s a very Palmery Palmer.
I knew from AAR that her books had grades ranging from B+ to F. Guess the coin came up tails for me.
She’s one of those authors where you have to like a certain set of tropes – like the pushy alpha who eventually grovels, and the waiflike heroine. And sometimes her characterization of indigenous men ugly, to say the least.
I think what surprises me is that Harlequin thought this was a good thing to republish. Why not put that beautiful cover on another, more worthy, book?
Yep, these old, very popular books give us a picture of the values in the past. They show how much our society has changed. I remember loving Palmer’s books, along with the iconic “The Flame and the Flower.” (Please don’t hate me.) But I believe that these old skool romances actually helped women.
Now, hear me out.
Yes, their trope was rapey, abusive hero, overcome by his lust at the virgin heroine’s beauty, as her virtue finally unlocked his decency. Yes, you can argue–and you are so right–that these books encouraged women to accept, and even expect, abusive men. But they were the first popular novels that showed women enjoying sex, explicitly, outside of marriage, even!
Seven is also the number I remember, too, as the division between good girls and sluts. But, here’s the thing: the number used to be one. If you had sex once, even if you were raped, it was your fault and you were ruined for life. Which is what you really deserved because you put yourself in that position (with your makeup, your miniskirt, your being in a bar–or just by being female–or just a having sex before marriage with the man you thought you were going to marry). That good women were not sexual beings until husbands unlocked them was reinforced constantly.
These romance books changed that dynamic. They reflected the change that the pill and common birth control brought, but also the impossible tightrope for women who had to walk between tradition and change. For the first time, in its abusive ways, these books showed unmarried girls having sex that they enjoyed. The rapes were not “real” rapes. Instead, the girls–and yes, they were girls– enjoyed the sex, but they were still good girls. That was a real change in books and in our society.
We laugh and cringe at these old skool romances, and that’s a great thing.
I’d add that reading all those women having happy orgasms changed the expectation of women. When my mom got married in 1959, she was supposed to go immediately from pristine virgin to sexy wife. She told me once it took two years to figure it all out.
But when 13 year old me read about Ginny Brandon’s overwhelming pleasure at the hands (and other body parts) of Steve Morgan, it made me sure to have that too in my life… and not after any two years into a relationship.
Change happens incrementally and the bodice rippers, flawed as they were, are part of the positive change for women and sex.
Thoughtful analysis, Lynda X.
This makes me cringe, too, but in fairness to the author, this was fairly typical romance of its time. This reissue was from HQN, so the author probably had no say in putting it out again when times have so clearly changed. I know a number of long-time authors who have said they would prefer their early books never see the light of day again for just this reason, and I have some old favorites that I absolutely loved 20-30 years ago that I keep but don’t reread for the same reason.
I’m not totally comfortable with holding older books to modern standards. Context is so important, and I believe books, as with everything else, have to be looked at in the context they were written/published. There have been huge ugly swaths of events and attitudes and acceptable behaviors in our world. To expect a book written 41 years ago to align with today’s attitudes and mores and morals? To me, it’s unrealistic and unfair.
The one at fault here, imo, is HQN, who will try to squeeze a penny from every book they ever bought the rights to. But I also think readers should automatically see a mental “Buyer beware” when they see a reissue from years past.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that even forty years ago, most people would have felt it was unrealistic/bigoted to hate every member of a group or population for what one person in that group did. And that it was also rude to smoke in the presence of someone who didn’t like it.
I can remember a LOT of books like this where the hero hated women because their mommy was mean/their stepmother was mean and/or tried to seduce them/their girlfriend/wife cheated/died (leaving them broken hearted and it was clearly her fault she didn’t think that through) – you name it, it was entirely acceptable to hate all women for what one woman did. I’m pretty sure I’ve read some recent books like this, too, although I can’t recall them. Probably DNF’d them and purged them from my mind. :-)
I’ve read such books too, but they usually didn’t portray this hatred of all women as something realistic and fair, such that in the end, the hero still maintained his hatred for all women (except perhaps the heroine) and this was justified.
Oh, yuck. And with added cigarette smoke for extra yuck.
What is it with horrible men possessing precisely zero (0) redeeming features who have perfectly nice women falling in love with them? I am reminded that I enjoyed a fairly recent book by Sara Craven, with a heroine who had a good sense of self-worth despite her introversion, so I chased up one of her older books, about an arranged marriage. And whoa, it was so very, very not good. The heroine is nervous and unsure on their wedding night and resists her husband so he just… rapes her. It didn’t even have that classic old-skool it’s-ok-she-gets-into-it-by-the-end thing going on. Just… straight out assault. And at the end, he says how desperately he’s always loved her and I’m wondering, how was she meant to know this because you have spent this whole story being unpleasant and abusive. But they’re in love at the end so it’s OK.
Sorry. That rant’s been brewing a while.
It is good to see how Craven’s stories have changed over the years, but that earlier book was one hell of a low bar to clear.
This is an impression rather than any sort of scientific study, but I feel like a fair few books from the seventies and even the eighties seem almost to want to punish any heroine who doesn’t instantly bow down to the hero. It’s so chilling when I come across one that basically shows a woman having their spirit and independence crushed in the name of ‘love’.
I tend to think the message was–and I was in my teens and twenties in the 70s and 80s–that women’s enjoyment of sex had to be forced on them, at first, in order for them to not be seen as slutty.
If you read the bodice rippers of that era–The Wolf and The Dove or the much maligned Sweet Savage Love–the heroines all had to have their first few (!!) orgasms forced upon them. This is because popular culture, post WWII, had an outright hostility to the idea that women should be as sexually free as men were.
In college, in the early 80s, we girls would try and figure it out–how far could you go and with how many boys before you’d get labeled as a slut. Many of my peers believed that as long as you didn’t have actual intercourse, you were safe… unless you had multiple partners a semester. It was just miserable and deeply sexist. Romance reflected that tension.
There’s an episode of the old Mary Tyler Moore show where her boss, Lou Grant, is dating a woman “of experience”. The men in the studio tease him about this, but Mary, who likes her, becomes angry and finally asks “how many relationships does it take to make a slut” (or words to that effect — it’s been a long time since I saw the show). The answer is (IIRC), 7. It’s a great episode about sexism in terms of how women are labelled (slut) compared to men (rakes, players) and how that affects their lives: Lou breaks up with her because he can’t deal with her past life and the way other men comment on it.
In 1980, I decided a woman could sleep with no more than ten people before she got married and not fall afoul of that terrible metric. (It was a more traditional time.)
To me, sexism (especially the labeling of women) is like the corporal punishment of children. Both were more acceptable in the past. But I still don’t want to read about a hero hitting his children, just as I don’t want to read about a hero who has a double standard regarding sex.
I’m currently reading Beyond Heaving Bosoms, which analyzes romance from the bodice-ripper era onward, and yes, that’s one of the reasons why heroines had to be forced to have sex. It showed her purity and his virility.
Oh, yes, good girls didn’t. Or shouldn’t, anyway.
Mind you, I still see modern plotlines where the guy assumes that the woman has had sex before so will OBVIOUSLY put out for him, but lo! She is virgin, pure & untouched, so worthy of his respect (insert eyeroll emoji of your choice). At least the lust is mutual nowadays, and I’ll take that as a small victory.
In contemporary romance? That would make me DNF a book!
Just have to say I LOVE your nom de guerre!!
Thank you! Aiming for a similarly tranquil life as my namesake.
Well, Lord Emsworth would be proud of you for sure!!
A few years ago, I wrote a rant review for SBTB about a book where the hero rapes his wife (the evil other woman) when she’s drunk. The story makes it clear that she doesn’t want to have penetrative sex because she doesn’t want children, but… well, man’s got needs. One reader responded that she felt the hero didn’t do anything wrong because in a marriage, it was reasonable to expect sex.
The problem with this reasoning, for me, is that firstly, it can be extrapolated to a lot of situations where one person feels it’s reasonable to expect sex, but the other person doesn’t. And secondly, sex without consent is still rape. If I work for someone and they refuse to pay me, so I hack into their bank account and take what I feel I’m owed, isn’t that stealing?
This happens less often now, but it still crops up occasionally. I recently read a historical romance published in 2012 where the heroine longs to settle down and have a family, but the hero is an adventuring committment-phobe who’s happy to have unprotected sex with her throughout the story, but won’t go any further. She keeps wanting her white-picket-fence dream until the end, when she tells him she’ll go with him wherever he likes, and if he only wants her as a temporary mistress, that’s fine too. Because, y’know, love.
So frustrating. Especially in a historical context.
I’ve said it before and I’ll undoubtedly say it again, but let’s think of those “old skool” romances the way we think of puberty: something we had to go through to get where we are now, but not something we’d necessarily want to repeat.
Hah – I think that’s a perfect way of looking at it :)
I am often glad I didn’t start reading romances until around 2008. I missed the old skool romances and never went back to “catch up.” Also, coming to romances in my 40’s already in a longterm loving relationship definitely influenced the type of romances I enjoyed, and still enjoy.
At the same time I’m so glad I did start reading romances, because reading them and discussing them with others (as well as with my children) has been so important to growing an understanding of sex, sexuality, feminism, misogyny, and by extension, gender identity and related issues. Discussing romance novels helped normalize talking about sex and gender issues and helped make their “coming out” to me a natural thing instead of an issue.
Gag. Vomit. Retch. Throws Up. Barfs all over the Christmas pudding. The author never did for me when I read a few of her books decades ago. Cartoon characters wading through dismal swampy plots with doormat women and testosterone-overload men. And smokers digging their nicotine-stained fingers into “soft flesh”. There MUST be a Book Hell for trashy books like this. Good review, Marian, go tell it like it is/was!!!
Thanks! I hadn’t read Diana Palmer before, and am not likely to do so again.
“Heart of Winter made me want to fill a stocking with coal and hit both heroes with it.”
Don’t even give them the coal! They might build a fire with it! ;-)
Seriously, though, two stories with tobacco? What is this, a smoking fetish anthology? Yeah, I know smoking used to be a lot more socially acceptable- and I have no problem with smokers- but the idea of the hero blowing smoke in the heroine’s face wouldn’t appeal to me. Some people like the smell of tobacco though, so maybe the author was appealing to those readers…?
Everything about the “little girl” and “sweet young body” comments? Creepy. Same with the turning on the charm because she’s a virgin, not because she deserves, you know, respect like anybody else? Ick!
If these were the kinds of romances I found while doing research for my get rich quick scheme, it would have colored my view toward the genre even more negatively than I originally thought. Thankfully, I started off on Beverly Jenkins and got hooked on good HR.
Thanks for slogging through this, Marian, so the rest of us didn’t have to.
When it comes to characters who smoke, I think of Sherlock Holmes and his pipe, Rhett Butler and his cigar, Django puffing on a cigarette as he watches Candyland blow up… iconic. I once wrote a romance with a hero who smoked, because that fit his personality (and he wasn’t aware of the health effects of the habit).
But none of them continued to smoke in the presence of a person who wasn’t comfortable with it and who said so. You can be a smoker without being a jerk.
As for the creepy fetishization of young women, I now want to reread LaVyrle Spencer’s Years to see a May-December romance done well.
“But none of them continued to smoke in the presence of a person who wasn’t comfortable with it and who said so. You can be a smoker without being a jerk.”
Oh, definitely. The description in the first story though, “the tobacco tartness of his tongue” sounds like the heroine might like the taste (unless I’m taking that line wholly out of context).
“I once wrote a romance with a hero who smoked, because that fit his personality (and he wasn’t aware of the health effects of the habit).”
I wonder if you’d be allowed to get away with that today in mainstream romance publishing- even if it’s historically accurate.
Well, it was actually an m/m fantasy set on another world, and I was planning to self-publish it in 2021.
The hero in Anne Stuart’s Black Ice smokes, but it’s clear he only does this occasionally as opposed to being hooked on it, and there’s a scene in Pamela Morsi’s Simple Jess where the hero admires a pipe in the town store, because his own pipe is a corncob. Though he doesn’t smoke at all during the course of the story.
So yeah, smoking references are rare indeed. There is a series where the MC has a drug abuse problem, Stacia Kane’s Downside books, but those are urban fantasy.
I’ve encountered smoking in some contemporary romance. Which is silly because everyone under 40 vapes instead of smokes….
I know plenty of young people in my community who smoke cigarettes rather than vape. Probably some kind of retro statement . . . .
Where I live, they’re banned everywhere but vaping is not so all the kids vape.
Here, too, although I see people smoking outside. Perhaps they do both? I’ve never asked. :-)