Title: First Love
Author: Michele L. Matthews
Date: 2017
Publisher: Beach Girl
Quote: "To those women who want true love, take your time finding 'the one.' Trust me."
This one is...badly mis-marketed. It's advertised as a romance. It's anything but that. We're told that Elizabeth eventually finds romance; we do not see it happening. We could infer that it's about Elizabeth having a major crush on the brother's friend who pushes back any possible interest in every scene he gets, but actually the author doesn't say that, either. What the author actually says, in this mini-novel, is that Elizabeth is going through a romance-free stage of life and people tell her to go out alone and be seen as a dateless woman, and eventually, probably in a full-length novel by the same author, someone is going to ask her for a date.
So, failure of writing or failure of marketing? I say marketing. This is a credible story.
Elizabeth sounds about fifteen, though she's twenty-five; maybe that's to keep her story suitable for fifteen-year-old romance readers. A real 1980s girl who watched the Muppet Show on TV, she went to college and found enough part-time jobs to put together to make a messy full-time job, only without the "benefits" real yuppies demanded in the 1980s. Elizabeth will never be a realk yuppie. She came along too late. After an ex-boyfriend dumps her without warning, the boy who always was her brother's friend more than her comes around to give her a "pep talk," demanding that she go out and be seen alone because that's the only way she's ever going to "meet people." She doesn't meet anybody of any interest to her, in this book.
It's so sad that even though we now expect women to succeed in "career" jobs just like men, so many voices are still out there telling women that they and their "careers" aren't interesting until they find True Romance with men. Many of whom have been driven "gay" by overcrowded conditions, if not physically "feminized" by atrazine. There aren't enough real men, who know how to wait, observe, choose, and pursue real women, to go around.
From the 1980s atmosphere I kept thinking that Elizabeth was going to tell us how she stopped looking for boyfriends, accepted being the school band manager as her vocation, and then, probably in the 1990s, married the math teacher and lived happily ever after. But no. Matthews tells us that she's a single mother, so the ultimate message seems to be not even "wait for 'the one,' as I did" but "don't try to force love with 'the wrong one' just so your family and yourself will stop haranguing you about finding a man."
For whom would this non-romance bring back fond memories? Obviously, for someone who was single, possibly lonely, possibly asexual (quite a few of us had symptoms of mononucleosis for more than a year after having the MMR vaccine that was being pushed in the mid-eighties) in the 1980s///and got used to it...and then found romance in the 1990s. I'm not the only one. If you're another one you will probably like this book.
And let it remind us not to talk to the young the way those emotional abusers talked to us. Take an interest in what they are doing. Help them focus on the successes they're having in a crowded world where Nature is delaying, if not extinguishing, a lot of people's reproductive instincts as they sense that there are too many humans in the human-friendly parts of this world. If they're teaching English and managing the school band, that's success! They're working! Cheers!
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