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Still having no luck finding that special someone? Why not take a break, sit back and relax with a good book. Check out these selections from Amazon.com.

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  Tara Road
  Maeve Binchy
  List Price: $24.95
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  Hardback - 512 pages (March 2, 1999)
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  Outlander
  Diana Gabaldon
  List Price: $7.50
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  Paperback - 850 pages (July 1, 1992)
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  Dragonfly in Amber
  Diana Gabaldon
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  Paperback - 947 pages Reprint edition (December 1993)
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  The MacGregors: Serena-Caine (The MacGregors)
  Nora Roberts
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  Mass Market Paperback - 505 pages (December 1998)
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  Mirror Image
  Danielle Steel
  List Price: $26.95
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  Hardcover - 426 pages (November 3, 1998)
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  Voyager
  Diana Gabaldon
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  Paperback - 1059 pages (November 1994)
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  What Dreams May Come
  By Richard Christian Matheson and Stephen Simon
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  Mass Market Paperback - 278 pages (October 1998)
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  Ransom
  Julie Garwood
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  hardcover - 486 pages (February 1, 1999)
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  Waiting for Nick
  Nora Roberts
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  Mass Market Paperback - (March 1997)
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  Baby I'm Yours
  Susan Andersen
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  Mass Market Paperback - 375 pages (May 1998)
  Reviews

by Alix Wilber, Amazon.com

The Bible was right. There really is nothing new under the sun--especially when it comes to romance. Since time immemorial poets and playwrights have celebrated variations on a theme: boy (or girl) meets love interest. Boy (or girl) loses love interest. Boy (or girl) then either gets the love interest back again (or doesn't), with results that are either happy or tragic. From Achilles and Patroklos right up through Clark Kent and Lois Lane, the refrain is pretty much the same--so why are we all such suckers for a love story?

Perhaps because in literature it's the journey that counts. We read Anna Karenina or Wuthering Heights for the first or 10th or 100th time knowing things aren't going to turn out well for our heroines, but still we count the world well lost for a dance with Vronsky, a stolen moment with Heathcliff. It doesn't matter that, in real life, we'd be recommending Anna see a therapist or Catherine call the stalker hotline--this is fiction by gum, and we like our lovers star crossed.

Who in their heart of hearts, for example, doesn't prefer the first three-quarters of Jane Eyre, featuring the undoubtedly bigamous but irresistibly attractive Mr. Rochester, to its insipid though irreproachably moral ending? One can't help but suspect from Jane's rather dampened tones in the final chapter that she, too, secretly favored the unchastened version of her lover. And surely Charlotte Brontë had much more fun writing the rascally Rochester than the saintly St. John. One wonders how Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights might have ended if the Brontë sisters were writing today.

At the opposite end of the romantic spectrum from Star-Crossed are those lovers who were Made for Each Other. We read their stories not with anticipatory dread but with the charm of discovery as each page unfolds the next tentative step the objects of our affection take towards one another. In a book such as A.S. Byatt's Possession we have the double pleasure of star-crossed 19th-century lovers bringing together a 20th-century made-for-each-other couple through the twin devices of literary conundrum and academic snoopery. In fact, romance loves a mystery; Sebastien Japrisot built his unforgettable World War I-era story, Very Long Engagement, around young lovers torn asunder, mistaken identity, and a cache of letters. Letters and telegrams also feature prominently in Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, the tale of a young man who swears eternal love--and means it--waiting out the 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days of his innamorata's marriage to another, until he can begin to court her again.

But even lovers who are made for each other don't always recognize it from the start--witness all the mileage Shakespeare got out of Beatrice and Benedick (the Doris Day and Rock Hudson of their era) in Much Ado About Nothing. Arguably the most famous case of a literary couple "meeting cute" is that of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice: he snubs her at a dance; she happily believes the terrible stories she hears about him. It is a truth universally acknowledged that under such circumstances love is as inevitable as it is eventual. Helen Fielding followed the spirit if not the letter of Jane Austen's novel in crafting Bridget Jones's Diary, a rollicking tale of Mr. Wrong, Mr. Right, and all the disastrous dates in between. And in A.L. Kennedy's surprisingly tender Original Bliss, who among the fictional Mrs. Helen Brindle's acquaintances would have guessed that this depressed and repressed Glasgow housewife would find true happiness in the arms of her pornography-addicted admirer Edward E. Gluck?

In the end, it doesn't much matter how the love affair turns out--we're just as satisfied when Anna Karinina throws herself under a train as when Elizabeth Bennet trades in her maiden name for Darcy--it's the story that counts. The hero of Murray Bail's charming Eucalyptus knows this; this modern-day Scheharazade wins his lady's heart with a barrage of stories-without-endings. In the literature of love, as in baseball, it's not whether you win or lose that counts, but how you play the game.

Alix Wilber writes reviews and articles for Literature & Fiction at Amazon.com.


Romance Essential Bookshelf

• Bestsellers
• New in Paperback
• Coming Soon
• New in Hardcover
• New Women's Fiction
• Romance Writers of America Top Ten
• 1999 RITA Winners

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