Author: Darla Rose
Date: 2023
Publisher: Darla Rose
Quote: "I want to wait till marriage to have sex."
Laura is from rural central Canada, her parents are "very conservative," and her best friend is a single mother, so she has abundant reasons to make this statement. She's just afraid it will make her a social outcast at the University of Arizona, where she's been assigned a room in a mixed-sex dorm, and the cutest guy on campus is well known for sleeping around. She's sure that telling him her commitment will put him off, and she thinks that's even the right thing to do...but this is a sweet romance, so instead of the predictable "Well, forget about that little cowgirl--or do I mean cow," Matt the Player instantly starts thinking "Do I want to marry Laura?"
Is there just something about that name? Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books presented the author's younger self as a nice child but not a saint, so why does "Laura" just sound like a name for a girl who makes open and notorious sinners want to reform?
I'm not sure I believe this story. And if I do believe it, I'm sad, because so much has been lost. In my day nobody, female or even male, thought twice about saying "I want to wait till marriage to have sex." Saying it to a really fanatical Catholic might lead to a bit of heavy weather, but the normal response was, "Good for you! We can still have fun."
Whereupon we immediately began to play Scrabble. Well, that and whatever else came to our prudent but in no way naive, normal, red-blooded, filthy twenty-year-old minds.
But it's a sweet, wholesome, teenage fantasy. It's always a mistake to take romance novels too seriously. The genre is all about fantasies, and Darla's and Matt's fundamental niceness is a charming one.
But it's a sweet, wholesome, teenage fantasy. It's always a mistake to take romance novels too seriously. The genre is all about fantasies, and Darla's and Matt's fundamental niceness is a charming one.
Thanks for peeking in on me today. I have opened up to Anonymous as I was shutting steady old blogging friends away.
ReplyDeleteThat is a good idea. Sometimes my 14-year old granddaughter reads this blog, or my other, but I can send it to her. We also see her quite often, her family lives about a 15 minute walk from us.
Your review of this book reminds me of a girl in my HS class who made the remark to a few of us in the typing lab, "I don't want to marry and I'll wish all my children to not either" Shocked me. But later I found her bulging big time and I thought of her saying again. But the next thing I knew her wedding announcement was in the local small town newspaper. When I heard the name, it was a fellow worker, I was only having a summer help job, on our out-of-town construction company. Small world, and our words can haunt us. Even from a book we might read.
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Glad the baby had a daddy...I hope their real life imitated a romance novel and they're still together today!
DeleteGoogle is calling me "anonymous" here on my own blog...