NR, continued

So.... apparently I wasn't done reading Nora Roberts.  A couple of years ago, I had my summer of Georgette Heyer, this summer it is Nora.  It's been fun.  What she is really good at:  creating believable, engaging characters with interesting dilemmas and issues to deal with, and also she's pretty dang good at creating a sense of place.  What usually doesn't work so well for me:  the endings.  It's a rare NR ending that leaves me feeling satisfied.  They're just a little too pat, a little too set up.  It's not always true (Northern Lights), and sometimes that's a minor thing and easily overlooked (Angels Fall and Birthright), sometimes--especially when it's layered on top of a plot that didn't work so well for me anyway, it's the (reverse) icing on the cake of book that I didn't like  (The Search).

Angels Fall.  This one gets some grief on Amazon for a heroine who is TSTL (too stupid too live)(and I admit I did think at some point really? it hasn't even occurred to her that someone is setting her up?), but still this has moved up there with Northern Lights as my two favorite NR reads.  But like several others of hers, you can predict the heroine's growth-toward-the-climax from about the third chapter.  In this case, the heroine (a chef) is the only survivor of a brutal killing spree at a restaurant in Boston.  Utterly and understandably shattered, she has been traveling around the country, stopping occasionally to work, never staying long. Her car breaks down in Wyoming, so she gets a job as a short order cook to pay for the repairs. The town, and a hunky writer named Brody, pull her in.  But you know that somehow she is going to have to confront the killer and shoot a gun to prove to herself she can do it because all along we've been told how broken she was by feeling helpless when she was shot in Boston.  It wasn't awful, just predictable.  But I still loved this book and especially the hero, Brody.  And what did surprise me was the identity of the villain, which I thought was a perfect plot twist.  Apparently I was alone on that because many reviewers on Amazon said they could see it coming a mile away.  (which possibly puts me in the category of TSTL?)

Birthright.  I really enjoyed this one, too.  The protagonists fell madly in love, married on a whim, and divorced after a few months.  One year later, they have to work together on a dig (she is an archaeologist and he is a cultural anthropologist).  To complicate matters, she finds out that her beloved parents are actually her adopted parents, and she was stolen by a baby snatcher from her birth parents who still grieve for her loss.  The characters are engaging and believable, and the work that the protagonists have to do to get back together is really well done.  My only gripe is that the "resolve your past" thing gets beaten into the ground.  Good grief.  Oh, yeah, sure, an archaeologist gets in trouble for digging into her past.  Get it? GET IT?  But still, overall this one is worth reading.

The Search.  This one is three separate stories with a lot of potential:  there's the story of a canine search-and-rescue team and the dog trainer, Fiona, who started it (which involves detailed descriptions of several searches and way too much detail about dog training); there's the romance between Fiona and a reclusive carpenter named Simon (which gets short shrift); and there's an FBI procedural as they try to track down a copycat killer who is reproducing the crimes of the serial killer who tried to kill Fiona years before.  There are parts of it that are really, really creepy.  The three stories are each interesting on their own, they just don't mesh very well. And then at the end it completely falls apart.  There is just no way it is a good idea to allow the woman who is the object of a serial killer's obsession to go into the woods with her untrained boyfriend to track the killer down. The FBI would never allow it, and saying twenty times that no one can talk Fiona out of something once she's set her mind on it doesn't change the fact that it would never be allowed, and also it is stupid. But again, it has been telegraphed since the beginning of the novel that Fiona must confront the killer and Simon has said "he's not going to get to you" so many times that OH!! SURPRISE!! the two of them have to confront the killer and Simon is going to bash his face in!  It's just a dumb ending.  So, this one is not one of my favorites. I'd skip it, unless you're interested in dog training, because there is a lot of detail about dog training (I'll admit to getting a few ideas to use with our one-year-old lab).

And I did wonder if the relationship part of this one was maybe based on NR's real life--dog lover and carpenter fall in love?  Isn't that her and her husband?  Of course I've never met her and don't know anything about her other than what you read on her website, but it did occur to me.

And lastly, I read the Key trilogy, which I did not like.  The characters and their challenges were all so similar that by a few days after I finished, I couldn't remember who was who and which relationship bit had happened to which couple.  Also, you know I don't care for paranormal, and in this one, you can't skim over the paranormal stuff, because that's the whole plot.  I kept trying to skim, and it would end up being pages later and I'd have to go back and read through all the supernatural fluff to find out what was happening.  Not my cup of tea, but this trilogy is much beloved among NR fans, so don't let me stop you if you're into it. The one intriguing thing is that she uses the paranormal plot--a quest to find three mystical keys to free the souls of three young women that have been trapped for hundreds of years in an alternate dimension by an evil being named Kane--as a metaphor for the heroines to face up to some of their own issues, and that was interesting in a heavy-handed sort of way.  If pressed, I will admit that the second one, Key of Knowledge, was my favorite.  The protagonists are a librarian-turned-bookstore-owner and a writer of suspense novels, and well, what's not to like about that? and their relationship is the tried-and-true "together before, screwed it up, resolve the past, fall in love again" type, which apparently really works for me because I often like those.

But I have to confess that this is the second time that a romance novel that I didn't particularly care for and can't really recommend affected me in a deeply personal way (the other was an early one by Elizabeth Lowell).  About twenty pages into the third book of the Key trilogy (Key of Valor), I found myself so emotionally conflicted that I had to quit reading it for a couple of days (conflicted in a good way--it helped me deal with some of my own shit).  It didn't really have anything to do with what actually happened in the book, because the heroine has an entirely different personality than mine. It had to do with imagining how I would respond to her dilemma if it was me and why.  I almost sat down to re-write a couple of scenes to see how they would play out if someone with my personality was the heroine (introverted wimp instead of plucky survivor), but it would have taken too much re-writing. Not to mention that the resulting plot would have been so insanely boring that it would probably have put me to sleep while I was writing it, let alone anyone who might happen to read it.

And that's it.  I went through the list of NR books on her website, and I don't think I'm all that interested in any of the ones I have left to read.  There is one more trilogy (the Circle trilogy) that I might try once I've had a break for awhile. It's paranormal, but there are several reviewers on Amazon who start with "I don't usually like paranormal but I loved this," so I might give them a shot sometime. I think the thing I appreciate most of all about NR is that she writes men who seem to bear some resemblance to men that I know.  Not entirely--there is no way I will believe that men have some of the conversations among themselves that she writes.  In my experience, when men want to talk to each other, they go for a run or play basketball, and grunt out half sentences as they sweat.  "So, she's the one?" "Guess so."  "Gonna marry her?" "Looks like it."  End of conversation.  There wouldn't be any of these three-page-long soul-searching things.  And they especially would not all go shopping together for rings for their girlfriends *shudder* (as they do at the end of Key of Knowledge).  But that said, for the most part, Roberts' men have normal interests, they get irritated at their lovers, they pick fights when they're grumpy, they have careers and hobbies that sometimes take precedence over catering to the heroine's every need, they screw up and have to apologize, and they hate apologizing.  That's different than some romance novels, where the author's main concern seems to be creating men who are so perfect that they're irritating.

Wow.  When I sat down this was going to be three quick paragraphs.  I guess I got to typing there, didn't I?  I have to confess that I'm considering a third post in which I categorize Nora's plots and gently ridicule her predilection for certain words ("tidy" is practically her favorite word, and I've decided that no one, not even the grande dame, should be allowed to use the word "sexy" in a romance novel).  But I think that would be a bit too obsessive even for me.  So, I'm done.  Try Northern Lights or Angels Fall or Birthright if you need a fun read for the beach or a plane.