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Loves Me, Loves Me Not by Katie Fforde (Editor) and Sue Moorcroft (Editor) (view source)
Revision as of 16:04, 25 February 2010
, 16:04, 25 February 2010no edit summary
Have you ever seen the guidelines for submissions to traditional women's magazines? The narrow parameters of acceptable plots, themes, characters, morals, language and word lengths, and many no-go areas, means that writers are forced into ultra-conservative variations of the boy meets girl theme and formulaic writing can be a problem. Yet the RNA writers craft fresh-sounding stories around the traditional female stereotype of marriage, monogamy and happy families ever after. How far this conventional framework interacts with a contemporary, multi-cultural society is beyond me, but these authors retain an enthusiasm for bringing romance into our everyday lives that makes it churlish to mutter about the political incorrectness of ethnic and gender imbalances in the stories.
So there are secret lovers who turn out to be husbands and husbands who turn out to be not-so-secret lovers. There are single men in possession of fortunes (in fact, quite a few of them) and in want of wives or not wanting wives but about to meet them come what may. There are lovers at all stages and from all ages. There are heroines with fairy-tale backgrounds and fairies who step forward from the background. Always that gentle nod favours the European tradition of enduring love, the idealized picture of one perfect partner out there, waiting, for each and every one of us. To the occasional surfeit of syrup I yelled ''Bollywood'' and rushed back in.
I like writers who poke fun at their characters, such as the forty year old who finds she looks like a ''celebration dumpling'' in Jane Wenham-Jones' ''Wolf Whistle'', or the inept car parking fairy in ''The Angel with a Wet Black Nose'' by Rita Bradshaw. And I love the schoolboy humour in [[:Category:Debby Holt|Debby Holt's]] ''Wind of Change'' where Lily falls abruptly in then out of love with her father-in-law due to circumstances beyond his control.