Discuss

Who is the first romance author you read who got you hooked?

I'll tell you mine this evening, after I throw a tantrum at a cement mixer (my current love affair).

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EDITED NOW THAT I'M HOME AND HAVE READ YOUR COMMENTS:

Ooh, what an assortment of titles you girls remembered! I think our first romance books "date" us and also tells us the emotions we were drawn to then, and perhaps, with our changing tastes, at this moment in our lives.

For example, I remember my first foray into romance were Harlequin-type books. In Malaysia, they were published under the umbrella of Mills and Boons and when us schoolgirls back home would fondly called them M&Bs. There was an "exchange table" outside the temple at which my mom worshipped and yeah, that was actually the very early version of a UBS! I had the greatest time rummaging through all these books from the 60s and 70s.

Being a naive teen, the dynamics of a male-female relationship was my prime interest and I was drawn to those books because they fed my curiosity. Emotionally, I was learning about this thing called male/female attraction and of course, the idea of the tall, dark and handsome in-charge Alpha male was very intriguing because those stupid boys on my schoolbus was nothing like that.

I think my first "big" book romance was Sweet Savage Love, that very, very old-school romance that horrifies readers now. But back then, it was THE book my girlfriends and I passed around. The story came around at the time I was getting bored of Barbara Cartland's elliptical heroines, so pure and sweet they gave me toothache. Steve Morgan's treatment of Ginny was awful but my God, did he give my teenage heart chills because he was so different from Prince Bland and Duke Yawn from Barbara Cartland's stories. And of course, there were no ellipses and closed door secretive groping, no, no, no, we got the real deal, what that Steve did to Ginny and what she did to him. I suppose, at that time, I was reaching my rebellious stage and wanted more than the mooshy syrupy idea being touted as twu wuv. The books after SSL opened a whole new world to me, not neccessarily politically correct, but damn did I have a good time imagining women slashing with knives or traveling the world alone without a chaperon AND having lovers. Woohoo!

I stopped reading romances for a long time. College and working for a living would do that to you. The romance author that pulled me back in was Nora Roberts. It was a rather silly but serendipitous moment too. I was helping an old neighbor clean out her closet and she had dozens of romance books and I recognized a few of the names from my M&B days. So I sat down in her garage and played books all afternoon, enjoying a particular title by La Nora.

I did not know how famous she was, that was how removed I was from the book world. I remember going to the store and on a whim, went over to the book shelves and thinking, "hmm, I wonder whether that Nora Roberts was still writing." HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. You can imagine my expression when I found she owned a whole shelf to herself. But yeah, La Nora hooked me back in with her wonderful stories and I must have spent all my meagre extra roofing pay on buying as many of her backlist as I played catch-up.

And thus begun my love for romances again and I came back just at the right time--the late 80s, when many of our current bestsellers were writing Harlequins and series romance and giving them unique twists--Roberts, Linda Howard, Iris Johannsen, Jennifer Crusie, Sandra Brown, Elizabeth Lowell, Anne Stuart, Kay Hooper, among many others, some of whom have moved on from their romance roots. That was the golden age of romance, with so many big names that every month was a feast of stories.

The emotions that drew me in those books were the idea of independent women, some of whom divorced or single mothers, taking care of themselves and taking on the most incredibly attractive and macho males. I loved the chase, the sparkling wit, and yes, the addition of the male POV made romance a lot richer.

In addition to my original question, can you look at your current favorite reads and point out to yourself what are the emotions in those books that draw you to those authors? I do think we can map our emotional changes/growth by the type of romance books we pick up.

For example, I'm now very much into urban fantasy type stories. I'll probably have to write another long post to dig out the emotions in these books that draw me to them.

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