Romance Roundup: Location, location, location!

Any batch of new romance novels will certainly feature a few whose narratives are grounded not on people but on places. Their covers feature landscapes and promise to be “A [Location X] Novel,” and a newcomer to the phenomenon might wonder at the appeal. When we look at three of them chosen at random, that appeal ends up seeming curiously elusive:

One of These Nights by Kendra Leigh Castle – In this third volume in the Harvest Cove series, after For the Longest Time and Every Little Kiss, Castle’s main character, Zoe Watson, moves from Atlanta, Georgia, to the idyllic small New England town of Harvest Cove, where she runs an art gallery and seeks to soak up the small-town peace and quiet of the place … until her new life is upended when ultra-handsome park ranger Jason Evans breaks his leg and suddenly needs her help despite irritating her:

Even now, laid up with one leg in a clunky cast and wearing a pair of ragged old cargo shorts and a T-shirt that had seen better days, Jason was too appealing for his own good. Nasty, miserable, inappropriately attractive dirt farmer. He lifted his face from his hands to look at her, and it was hard not to feel sorry for him. Well, a little sorry. The rest of her was too busy being furious with him right now.

Castle does a peppy job with the sparks that fly between Zoe and and Jason, and that chemistry carries the book, with Harvest Cove itself, its nature as a place, fading almost completely into the background – to the point where a newcomer to the series might wonder why the whole series is centered in one place at all.

All of Me by Kelly Moran – This is the second volume in Moran’s series set in Covington Cove on the beautiful North Carolina coast, and here the location seems to move much closer to center stage. Novelist Alec Winston is living in New York City and banging his head against a crippling case of writer’s block and yearning for some small-town mystique:

He had to admit, people recognized him wherever he went. He brushed elbows with producers and screenwriters. Booksellers and editors and marketing people, all willing to bend over backward to accommodate him. Adoring fans with blogs and websites and Facebook pages. But there was no one he could tall at two a. m. just because. No one to argue with over a bad call in the Yankees game or grab a beer to discuss their day.

Naturally, the simplicity he’s hoping for gets complicated – in this case, in the person of Faith Armstrong, who’s likewise come to Covington Cove in hopes that the small-town comforts of the place will help her reinvent herself. All of Me is a bit somnolent, but at least it works a bit harder to justify the prominence of its geography than One of These Nights.

In Moondance Beach, Susan Donovan’s new “Bayberry Island” novel, we zing right back to New England, in this case Bayberry Island off the coast of Massachusetts, where Navy SEAL Duncan Flynn returns home to recuperate from an injury. Donovan does a good job consistently touching back to the Nantucket-style atmosphere of the place:

It was a recent June evening on Bayberry Island. Shop lights flickered. The old-fashioned gas streetlamps cast a warm glow over the bricks of Fountain Square. A crescent moon peeked over the horizon. And right on schedule, the last passenger ferry of the day made its unhurried approach toward the public dock.

But once again, once Flynn meets reclusive painter Adelena Silva and they begin a fairly standard romantic give-and-take, the island setting itself (and its wacky Mermaid Festival) becomes increasingly irrelevant to the story. It’s a strange thing – a rhetorical gesture that quite a few romance writers feel they need in order to start their books but not that they need in order to keep those books going. On one level, it’s predictable and understandable: locations anchor memories and quite often put a floor under nostalgia, and nostalgia powers so many romance novels in the bookstores today. But on another level, I almost always find it puzzling; I don’t quite understand why Zoe Watson can’t find satisfying romance in Atlanta, or Alec Winston in New York, or even crusty Duncan Flynn back at his base’s hospital. There’s a low-key delusion of Eden running through these books, a persistent implication that urban complexity is antithetical to emotional health – and that where you are can overcome who you are. Personally, I’m not holding out much hope for any of these couples.