Author: Katharine Sadler
Date: 2023
Quote: "I've gone...to a fishing lesson in a town I swore I'd never return to."
Goldenrod (Goldy) Weston is a nice, discreet young Southern Lady. She's helping with a fundraiser for a preschool when she signs up for the fishing lesson; later she'll take her fly-fishing instructor for dance lessons to help with a fundraiser for a small business.
She's a succesful novelist. The only trouble is, her genre happens to be "erotica."She started writing it to relieve her feelings about men after her father called her bad names and her former fiance backed out of the wedding. Goldy likes sex--enough to have intimidated her ex.
Her father is a well-known "con artist." When he became well known, he left his daughters, having insulted each one in a different age-appropriate way that hurt because he hadn't been a verbal abuser before. They're all still non-speaking to him and they're all still single, at the beginning of this book.
It's a romance in the best Harlequin Temptations tradition...now you know where to find the torrid bedroom scene. (Men, that means before the quarrel and reconciliation, about two-thirds of the way through the book.) It's a little more detailed than the bedroom scenes in the Harlequin Temptations of my adolescent years, with liberal use of vulgar words for the parts of the body it's vulgar to mention outside of a medical clinic.
Are there messages to young women that are more empowering than "Everyone should enjoy sex and feel free to tell the whole world all about it"? Yes. Would a book that presented those messages qualify as a romance? Probably not.
Anyway, you know how this must end. Everyone in Goldy's small town will find out exactly what she's been doing in the city. The only people who really mind will be tiresome types she never wanted to talk to. The male lead will end up, like any good competitive Southerner, competing with Goldy to see who can propose first.
Relationship advice rating? 7 out of 10. Full marks for recognizing that small town gossip, though vicious, subsides when a new scandal comes along and that the people gossipped about often have more supportive friends than the ones doing the gossip have. If you have money, or even better if you can raise money for others, you can epater les bourgeois bountifully, be called a high-spirited rich brat, and be loved. What about the chance of Goldy having a good marriage without some sort of reconciliation with her father? I don't know that it couldn't happen, nor do I know that it could.
Comedy score? 8 out of 10. I laughed out loud several times, though the scene where Miss Holier-Than-Thou and her little darling catch Goldy's dog chewing on an adult toy Goldy and her instructor fished out of the river would have been improved by the author's having decided whether the object is made of rubber or plastic (it's described as both).
Fidelity to genre rules? 10 out of 10. If you liked Harlequin Temptations or Silhouette Desires, you'll probably love Cast and Caught.
