Book Review: Never Trust the Rain

Title: Never Trust the Rain 

Author: Laura D. Bastian

Publisher: Laura D. Bastian

Quote: "He didn't know how much time Chris and Jessie would need, and he had to keep her busy until after the baby came."

It's the ultimate pretty-face job. Not quite a professional "escort," Duncan is the guy people ask to guide their visitors around Edinburgh when they're not doing it themselves. This means, of course, that he's too handsome and popular for Ami to take her attraction to him seriously. 

So Ami doesn't try too hard to attract Duncan. They can just relax and enjoy seeing the sights when Ami's not actually helping her sister with the new baby. As so often happens when people try just hanging out and being friends instead of trying to rush into "love," they find themselves enjoying each other's company more than that of anyone else either of them has ever dated. But is that only because they've tried being friends first? Can long-distance romance work? Should either of them consider immigrating to a different country so they can be together? 

Is this a Christian Romance? I'm not sure...characters do refer to God where, if they were Jewish, they'd be more likely to refer more "modestly" to life, love, or providence, and Duncan does invite Ami to go with him to a friend's wedding, which is unconventional but still presided over by a minister. No moralizing, though. Just a simple Sweet Romance where two twenty-somethings give an attraction time to build up, as it does in real life, at the pace that's realistic for many women of any religious tradition or none. 

Women can, of course, decide at first glance whether a man looks handsome or not. But, as Ami keeps reminding herself in this book, women don't necessarily want a man whose looks and popularity might turn out to be more of a liability than an asset. Who wants to watch other women throwing themselves at her date? An ordinary-looking man might react to a woman in a way that's far more attractive than a mere accident of physical conformation. How interested in us a man looks to be, especially after realizing that we don't flop into bed on the first date, is a much bigger part of his attractiveness than a mere photograph could capture. So, instinctively and automatically and without any conscious effort, many--perhaps most--of us don't start to feel a strong physical attraction to one man more than others the first half-dozen, or dozen, or hundred times we see him. There are a lot of bodies in the world. The way a man behaves toward us, over time, is what makes him attractive. 

This pattern of feeling (and behavior) is common to women around the world, and frequently develops with a little life experience even in girls who formed intense "first crush" reactions to boys who weren't pursuing them. Most religious traditions encourage caution about acting on physical attractions, but women's tendency to wait and see how men behave toward us is instinctive, not produced by religious teaching. If we kept a level head about the fact that we felt attracted to these boys, and waited for them to notice and pursue us, and noticed instead that they were asking other girls for dates or just acting so silly and juvenile as to squelch our attractions, as high school boys so often do...each month's secret attraction felt less intense until we reached a stage of maturity where our emotional feelings just naturally waited to be evoked by the way men pursued us. It's part of our sexual identities. It is not to be confused with asexuality, in which blood hormone levels physically don't produce the biochemical reactions associated with physical attraction, at all, ever, for anybody. Women for whom physical attractions develop slowly often, like Ami in this short novel, feel a general interest in sex and motherhood. Around the midpoint of their hormone cycles this interest may feel quite intense, but still, attractions to one man more than others take time to form.

Nothing kills this slow-building, stable attraction that allows women to be monogamous faster than a man's rushing ahead to ask "Do you want me? Answer yes or no!" Phew. Even Jim Reeves' "velvet" voice couldn't make that kind of question less fatal. The answer is always no, because the question was asked too soon. 

When the question is not asked too soon, as in this novel, the answer may depend on other factors besides hormones. For a considerable part of this novel Ami knows she's attracted to Duncan but doubts his willingness to commit to the monogamous marriage she wants. It's a Sweet Romance, so according to the current rules for the genre he'll have to find a way to convince her before the last page, but this couple will spend a lot of time enjoying the special pleasure of a frustrated attraction. Which makes this book a good choice for women who want to remember what having to wait felt like.  

Some may feel that I should have saved this review for a Sunday. I just don't feel that way. Neither "Christian" nor "Presbyterian," which is the default affiliation for Scots, appears in the text. The characters probably are Presbyterians but they don't talk about it.