As I’m sure some of you know, I’m an avid reader. No genre is safe (except Westerns, but I’m trying to overcome that). For over a year I searched for a book I had read when I was younger. I tweeted about it, Facebooked about it (or Facespace as my husband calls it), inquired online, asked authors, etc....I could NOT find this book. But it called to me because I had enjoyed it so much when I first read it. I finally found out the title and author thanks to a post on a blog. So imagine my happy joy when I was able to procure the book: Linda Howard’s After the Night.
I adored this book when I read it for the first time. Set in the steamy sensual bayou of Louisiana, it tells the story of two families bond by tragedy, deception, and love. A romantic contemporary revolving around a dirt-poor girl in love with the handsome son of a Louisiana town’s wealthiest family. Loving Rouillard men seems to run in the Devlin family. Twelve years ago Faith’s mother, Renee Devlin and Guy Rouillard disappeared one night. The entire town assumed the longtime lovers had eloped. Guy’s handsome young son, Gray, was so enraged, he had the remaining Devlins driven out of town, leaving 14-year-old Faith to care for her fatally ill baby brother. Now Faith is back, all grown up, financially independent, and ready to even the score. Especially when she learns that the elder Rouillard may have been murdered that fateful summer night. Faith decides that it’s up to her to reveal exactly what happened that fateful summer night. Even at the risk of her own life and Gray’s love.
When the book arrived, I sequestered myself in my reading room—aka the bathroom—and preceded to read. Hmmm...
Is this the right book?
I checked the title, cover, and back excerpt. Yup, it’s the right book. But it doesn’t read the same. Or does it?
And so it happened. I went home but home had changed. Or rather my feelings towards home had changed. I was heartbroken to find myself disgusted by the hero and ready to smack the tar out of the heroine. Is this what I thought romance and true love was as a young woman? That it was okay for a man to stalk, insult, and force a woman to have sex with him because he feels the attraction and feels she does too?
“Would it help if I told you that I don’t want to have an affair with you here or anywhere?”
”You know I can make you.“
If I ever heard a man say that to my daughter, I would go medieval on him. Throughout the book, the heroine justifies the hero’s actions because of the lust and powerful attraction they feel. Is this where some of us get the idea that forcefulness equals love? That as long as we end up loved and married, then the ends justify the means? It hurts and embarrasses me to think that at one point in my life I read that and thought, ”Oh...how romantic.“
This is a longtime theme in historical romances. I can handle it better in here, sometimes, because of the accepted attitudes of that era. But there are times when even they cross the line. Catherine Coulter crossed that line in a two-part series she wrote—Devil’s Embrace and Devils’s Daughter. In Devil’s Embrace, the hero kidnaps the heroine and repeatedly sexually assaults her, under the guise of love, in order for her to accept their destiny. In Devil’s Daughter, the daughter of the couple from Devil’s Embrace is kidnapped and forced into a harem because of her father. She is treated terribly by her ”master" as she refuses to accept her fate.
What bothered me about these two books is that in each book the hero treats the woman like absolute dirt. Believing everyone else but the women they profess to love with every beat of their souls. They rape without conscience or remorse, insult, degrade, and humiliate. All in the name of honor and love.
And then the heroines fall in love with them.
WHAT?
I find it all offensive, condescending, and, quite frankly, creepy now that I have gotten older. I don’t want my daughter thinking this is what loves is. I don’t want her accepting of this type of behaviour from a man. I want her to give her heart and love willingly. I think too often we forgive the storyline, telling ourselves that it’s fiction so we know it’s not true. Yet how much of of that bleeds into our subconscious? How often to we read, read, and reread only to find that it no longer offends us? And when we are no longer offended...then what?
By the end of my reading I felt used, abused. Almost like I’d lost a part of my younger self. But maybe it was for the best. I no longer need that much angst and despair anymore. I do like some emotional pain in my romances, but not the never-ending kind. I have found my true love and know that while pain will find its way into every relationship, the romances of the past are not the route I need to follow for a secure and happy life.
Tori Benson, Smexybooks and at Twitter.
