/ en-US Tue, 18 Dec 2018 01:01:01 -0800 60 / 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg /author_blog_posts/30677-is-there-a-home-for-lacey Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:46:00 -0700 /author_blog_posts/30677-is-there-a-home-for-lacey Lacey Took a Holiday has been published, I can go ahead and express a concern I have about this atypical romance. Since anyone who reads it is going to find out anyway, I might as well confess that Lacey Grady, the main character of the novel, is in her own words “a woman of leisure.� This does not mean the book is full of sex. And her “romantic interest� in the story—Andy Warren—actually kidnaps her out of the brothel where he meets her.

Well, let me fill in a few more blanks: Andy is actually a WWI veteran (the story takes place in the Blue Ridge Mountains of northwestern North Carolina in the mid 1920’s) whose wife and only son both died during childbirth. Eventually the reader discovers that nearly everyone Andy has loved throughout his life has died tragically. He’s really a bitter and jaded fellow. He kidnaps Lacey on impulse because—well, okay, not only is she a prostitute, but an alcoholic. Andy recognizes that she is drinking herself to death. In a perverse sort of rescue attempt, he takes her out of “Curly’s� the bordello where she works and spirits her away to his mountaintop.

The problem with the story is this: who ever heard of a romance where the two main characters were so flawed, so downright “sinful.� On the other hand, the love that develops between them is so sweet. Not to give away too much, the romance that emerges becomes the one pure, innocent part of their lives. Of course, there are some dangerous and difficult complications. I’m not promising that they live happily ever after.

So can Lacey find a home in the midst of the other romance novels of and on the bookshelves of Amazon and other places? Is it too realistic to be a romance novel? Does love redeem even people as abused and used as Lacey and Andy? I suppose only time will tell.

posted by Lazarus Barnhill on December, 18 ]]>