Hit the Blood Sisters Book Club emergency button now! We have a DNF!!!

To be clear, I read the lengthy medieval epic A Kingdom of Dreams from 90s superstar Judith McNaught from its first forced marriage to its last knightly joust. For Kelsey, however, there was a fortress of morality that no trebuchet of love could penetrate. What? Trebuchet. Those big windup and sling things people used in Ye Old Times for sieges. Look, just watch Lord of the Rings again or something. Anyway, there was, to continue with the engineering analogies, a bridge which Kelsey was not prepared to cross. I’m taking about the Age Gap bridge.

Damn. It all started so well too.  First scene and the feisty heroine Jennifer is having an argument… with God. And – wait for it – God is answering her back. IN ALL CAPS. Maybe that explains the preference among all-knowing individual on the internet for all-caps. The days of instant rancorous anonymous chats was as yet unimagined in 1989 when McNaught penned this story of the convent-shelter, yet supremely confident, Jennifer and the battle-scared, bigwig knight Royce. But we were about to have our bold font moment.

Oh Christ she’s 17?!!! Fucking medievals, man.

To backtrack, and to get serious for a moment, Kelsey read a deeply disturbing book by another big Old School Romance name, Katherine Woodwiss, when we were teenagers where the heroine ended up chained to the banqueting table and being fed scrapes. The hero did this to her. It put Kelsey off medieval Romances forever. This is a legacy all of us who came of age with Old School Romance must face. We either eroticized the captivity and bondage components that were so much a part of Dark Age reads then – and I’ll have to cop to be one of them* – or we were just turned off forever. So I was nervous that Royce would turn into one of those vengeful fuckers I’d read again and again, but as the less-triggered Book Club member, I needed to ride ahead and tell Kelsey whether the road was clear.

I definitely had fun reporting back on Jennifer and Royce’s first confrontation in his makeshift camp and hypothesising that her convent-issued footwear morphed into Doc Martins when she needed to kick him in junk.

Hero hair: black

Check.

Hero clothes: black

Check.

Want to place a bet on his eyes? Hint: not black

Shocking blue?

That would have been my guess

Silvery?

Close! ‘Molten silver coals’

Do they see right through her?

Of course, But I want to know what kind of mines they had in Medieval times?

Silver mines… Gold mines…. She’s mines

 

But while I could assure Kelsey that Royce was a true Parfitt Knight who would never chain Jennifer to anything, there was no way for us to leap the age-gap. No amount of GIFs of Rufus Sewell in Knight’s Tale could rally the troops.  I, just like Fated Mates’ Jen and Sarah, round up a bit as I read. I try to imagine a character who’s in her early twenties, our imagined modern equivalent of a medieval seventeen. Really, I just try not to think about it. And that’s Kelsey’s point. We don’t really allow the heroine’s age to inform our reading of our story. Kingdom of Dreams is a totally different book when you make Jennifer’s age a key character trait rather than an inconvenient fact. When you read the central romance as a twenty-nine-year-old making the moves on a seventeen-year-old, all the sweetness of the seduction falls away. We’re just looking at a predator.

That’s why the majority of us readers slip past that ickiness with only a cursory glance. Because we’re here for the Romance. We’re here for the plucky, Doc-Martin-wearing heroine. And we’re especially here for a hero who will literally die for his love. The jousting tournament at the close of this book where Royce nearly pays the ultimate price is absolutely perfect. It’s not surprising the rest of are willing to sacrifice our scruples a tad.

But not all of us! This week was such a great reminder for me of why it’s such a privilege as well as complete pleasure to do this Book Club with my bestie. She’s totally fearless in voicing her feelings and her objections – even when she wants to swoon just as much as the rest of us! Like Kelsey, none of us should apologise when we DNF a Romance. We’ve built up these defences for a reason. And very often it was the Old School Romance writers made it necessary in the first place.

Next time: Can we keep our Old School Historical Romance thread going without Jen and Sarah’s help?

* I blame Johanna Lindsey’s Prisoner of My Desire and her Haardrad Viking Family saga. Kidnapping was evidently the only way to get a bride back then. Also, the sexiest.