April TBR Challenge report
by Sunita
I signed myself up for SuperWendy’s TBR Challenge as part of my effort to read more of the books I already have. I’ve reviewed the first three months’ books at Dear Author, and I’d planned to do the same for this one. April’s category is Contemporary Romance, which means I had a lot to choose from, so I chose a contemporary Harlequin romance that also filled a category in my PopSugar Challenge. It was by a new-to-me author, Sophie Pembroke, and it was her first book for Harlequin after a contemporary trilogy at a smaller press. I used to read a lot in the Harlequin Romance line but then fell away from it, so I looked forward to seeing what the more recent books looked like (this was a September 2013 release).
Spoilers for the book follow, so don’t read if you don’t want to know.
Stranded With the Tycoon started out promisingly. Lucinda (Luce) is a university lecturer who runs into an old acquaintance from college when she’s attending a conference in Chester. The hotel has lost her reservation, but Ben is providentially standing by when it happens. This is providential because Ben’s company owns the hotel, and he just happens to be booked into a suite with two bedrooms. He offers one of them, she accepts, they spend a chaste night together, and they make plans to drive Luce to her home in Cardiff the next day. But a snowstorm requires them to divert to Ben’s cozy cottage in the Brecon Beacons.
Luce is academic, uptight, and the rock of her family. Ben is carefree, never spends two nights in a row with a woman, and does his hotel job well but it’s just a job (despite being the family business he runs with his brother). Opposites attract indeed. But Pembroke’s writing is smooth and she does the familiar with just enough individual touches to make it a good read.
I was enjoying this until the last quarter. The academic parts didn’t ring quite true, but they were close enough that it wasn’t a big deal. Luce and Ben’s will-they-won’t-they was augmented with plenty of scenes that brought them to life as individuals. I enjoyed when they finally got together (mostly fade to black, since the book is in Harlequin’s sweet-romance line), and I was glad Luce made it home to make a slapdash but well-received Christmas Eve dinner for her family.
And then there was a plot twist that made me stop reading. Completely. As in, I may have yelled, and I certainly put the book down. Then I reread to make sure that it was what I thought it was. And it was.
Luce is a committed academic researcher. She has a very good position and she’s good at it. She’s single and always has been. Ben has participated in many a short-term encounter. But we’re supposed to believe that not only did Luce not care about contraceptives, she was unfazed by the outcome of not caring. Here, in its entirety, is how the information is presented:
She needed to tell someone her news, and Ben was still away. She’d thought about calling a few times, always late at night when she was tucked up in bed, but she couldn’t tell him this over the phone. It wasn’t fair. But Dolly… She seemed more of an ally than she ever had before lately. She’d always been the baby, the one who needed the most looking after, but recently she’d been more of a friend than an obligation. Someone who cared about Luce rather than just needing things from her. She could tell Dolly.
‘What’s going on?’ Dolly let her chair tip onto four legs again, leaning forward to rest her wrists on her knees. ‘Come on—tell me. It’s obviously something big. You’re actually blushing.’
Luce’s face grew immediately hotter in response. ‘Okay. But you can’t tell Mum. Or Tom. Or anybody just yet.’
Dolly’s eyes widened. ‘Now I’m really intrigued.’
Gripping the edge of the table, Luce summoned her courage and said it out loud for the first time. ‘I’m pregnant.’
For a long moment Dolly just stared at her in silence. Then she clapped her hand over her mouth, not quite muffling the squeak that came out.
Luce sank into a chair. ‘I know. I know. It’s absurd.’
‘It’s wonderful!’ Jumping up, Dolly wrapped her arms around her, and Luce relaxed into the hug. ‘I’m going to be an aunt!’
‘You are,’ Luce said firmly. She’d considered the other options—of course she had. But this was her baby—hers and Ben’s—and it might be her only chance. She was financially capable of looking after it, she had her family around her…
Not buying it. Not buying it at all. This is 2015. Career women are not stupid about contraception. I don’t care if it’s a fantasy category romance. That plot point jerked me right out of the fantasy.
I am so, so annoyed. Reading romance has been touch and go for me lately as it is. Categories are my comfort reads. I guess I should expect this kind of plot development in a Harlequin, but come ON. Don’t give me multiple chapters about how much Luce cares about her book and its strong female subject, to the extent that visiting a key historical site is part of the storyline, and then tell me she’s fine with something that has the potential to completely upend that life.
I don’t know why this time the baby plot made me angry, when I’ve read so many sweet romances and Medicals from Harlequin with unexpected pregnancies. I guess it hit too close to home, because I’ve been living with academic women and the complexities of integrating children and careers for my entire adult life. I just wanted it taken slightly more seriously than it was here. I wanted either foreshadowing, or a “Holy hell, now what?” moment. Instead I got “oh hey, I’m going to have a baby and it’s fine whether the father is around or not; career, what career?”
Maybe she works it all out, maybe it gives her a concrete deadline to finish her book (that’s certainly happened). But I just couldn’t reconcile the sudden change with what had gone before. I didn’t believe it. I don’t know any academic woman who didn’t at least think about the consequences of what such a major life change would have for her career.
I DNF’d. I tried to go back to the story after the initial shock and anger had subsided, but I couldn’t. I thought reviewing it at Dear Author in the usual way, but I’ve never posted a DNF there and this was so much about my hot button that I wasn’t sure I wanted to draw that kind of attention to the author. [Aside: This is another thing I find difficult about author-reader intersections in Romanceland. I had no prior knowledge of Pembroke, but I looked her up and read her blog and she’s a lovely person. So I feel bad about hating where the book went.]
My compromise was to write up a review at the site where I keep track of my year’s reading, but without giving the book a star rating. And then I decided to rant some more here.
That’s the TBR Challenge for you. You never know what’s lurking in that stack.
ReaderWriterVille 
A couple of years ago I read a news bit somewhere about ‘educated’ career women who get pregnant by accident. (I posted about that here) While I was pretty upset at the sheer carelessness of getting pregnant like that, at least the woman in the article had a more logical reaction than what you describe. Better luck for the next book!
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That’s an interesting article, thanks for the link. Unplanned pregnancies are more frequent than unwanted pregnancies, for all the reasons the article reveals. And I wouldn’t have had any problem with Luce had she given me some fairly big hints in the early parts of the book that unplanned /= unwanted, or impossible to accommodate in her life. Maybe they were there and I missed them, because I was paying more attention to the academic parts. We don’t get that many scholar heroines who are well depicted, and this one was.
I will probably go back and read the whole thing at some point, just to see if I was being unfair or missed obvious clues. But not right away. 😉
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That’s a shame. I was on the point of one-clicking until I got to the plot twist, because that sounded exactly my sort of thing.
I find that in Presents, I forgive more because the whole thing is so extreme and fantastical. But in the Romance line, there is more reality in the setting and characterisation, so I expect more in terms of the plot and how it’s handled, too.
I might look and see if she has others, though.
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Yes, exactly. I found Luce believable and her world relatively realistically depicted, and so it hit me harder.
Pembroke does have other books, including the trilogy, which is being reissued by Carina, I think? And she has a handful with Harlequin as well. Do read her blog, she talks about her books there as well as her family and life more generally. It’s very enjoyable.
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I think any woman serious about her career thinks about how to integrate children (even if she also makes mistakes!). But many academic careers are so inflexible–and by the time you are “safe” in a job, if you’re lucky enough to have that happen, most people are into their thirties. I don’t know anyone who has not thought very, very carefully about how to make it work. My own second child was postponed until I had a position that offered maternity leave, for instance–and that was partly on the advice of my chair, who’d done the same balancing act and gave me a heads up that I could benefit from waiting a bit longer.
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I have such respect and admiration for women who have children during the early parts of their academic careers. I’ve known plenty of women who survived and thrived even having children during graduate school (they just didn’t sleep much). So I think part of my reaction was that I wanted to see their experiences acknowledged. I didn’t want Luce to not want kids, or not want to have them, I just wanted a hint of one of the emotional and mental processes that is so common to women.
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Yes! That’s what is almost always missing. They’re not even allowed to consider any other possibilities.
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Or even to think “Oh my God, how am I going to make this work???” I had (have) a husband and two very planned children and I still had many, many moments like this and times when I was scrambling.
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Right. I had lunch with my brother and his wife yesterday. They have two very much wanted children, the second of whom is 3 weeks old, and S-i-l is panicking hard about how they are going to manage childcare when her maternity leave is up.
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Thanks to Scribd and your recommendations, I started reading around in Penhally and St. Piran’s medical romance series. And for the most part, I’ve found the series enjoyable. But I think my biggest problem with Harlequin medicals is exactly the whole unexpected baby (which then may or may not become the secret baby) plot when the romance is almost always between 2 medical professionals (and often between 2 people in their late 20s or 30s).
By about the fourth book in the Penhally/St. Piran’s series, all I could think was that I would never, ever let any of these doctors or midwifes run a family planning clinic or demonstrate how to use a condom. The number of condom failures, failures to use a back method of birth control/emergency contraceptive by medical professionals practicing in one small part of Cornwall just began to strain belief. I guess it’s one way to solve the depopulation of rural areas.
OTOH thanks to Scribd again, I read a Harlequin Presents where the couple fall into insta-lust (nothing surprising there) and then realize that the condom had broken during sex. And she actually takes the morning after pill the next day because hey it’s a smart thing to do — they were strangers who had had a one-night fling and they weren’t planning to see each other again and she was not interested in being a single mother. And he supported her in that decision and even more importantly she took the morning after pill and that was that. There was no drama about the whole decision and the rest of story carried on. And in the end they did get together for a HEA and there was no hand wringing about the choice from the first night. I meant to save the book in my Scribd library because it was first time ever that could remember seeing that in any romance, but I can’t locate it now and I can’t remember the author. I wish I could find it, if for no other reason, to reassure myself that I wasn’t imagining it.
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LOL, yes, I do remember that about Penhally Bay. So very and so very unexpectedly fertile.
That’s part of what finally burned me out on both Medicals and the regular sweet Romance lines: the sheer number of babies. I like reading about babies, but they were just *everywhere*.
That Presents sounds familiar. Maybe someone will remember it and chime in. I’ll look around as well.
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I’m not certain but I think that HP might be an old Lucy Monroe. I’ll see if I can track down the one I’m thinking of.
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Hmm, the one I was thinking of ends with a pregnancy so I guess that’s not it. Google reminds me that Lucy Monroe does have a morning after pill in The Sheikh’s Scandal, but the circumstances are not precisely standard. Kate Hardy also wrote a book where it’s taken, Once A Playboy, but I haven’t read it. I think it’s one of her medicals.
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If I had read this book, I would’ve been so happy about the line that “of course she’d considered her alternatives,” I wouldn’t have minded the rest. In my category world, the mere thought of other options is shorthand for instant vilification. Both hero and heroine would be mortally offended that the other could have even thought them capable of considering it.
I’m thrilled to hear there’s an HP with a non-momentous use of the morning after pill.
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I appreciated that too, but obviously not enough to offset my hot-button issue. I didn’t keep reading so I don’t know how Ben reacted, but he seemed pretty decent up to that point.
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I’ve often said I don’t need “The Condom Moment” in romance novels. I simply imagine that the couple used protection before getting down and dirty. However you don’t always have this luxury because sometimes the author smacks you in the face with “They Didn’t Use Anything And Now There’s A Baby!!!!” Notice it’s never a scorching case of herpes – it’s always, oopsie! They’re pregnant.
And that gets on my last hot nerve. Because honestly? There’s no excuse. Yes it sucks that women end up with the motherlode of responsibility when it comes to birth control – but to tell me the heroine is driven, smart, competent, logical and then, oops! Let’s just have sex and not worry about any pesky consequences that could arrive will have me DNF’ing a book pretty fast. And then there’s usually some nonsense of “I’ll always have a piece of him after we part” tripe that has me throwing up in my mouth more than a little. Books with that line has literally hit walls in the Bat Cave. Which is a dangerous practice in this day and age of digital reading. So far I have not broken any electronic devices…..
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