Walgreen's is not meant to be an intimidating place. Usually a guy can get his on-a-whim-groceries or prescription drugs without any hassle and be gone before the clerk can remember his face. The place shouldn't make a man feel like blushing when he is purchasing an item.
All that changes when a guy picks up the biggest-breasted and beefiest harlequin romance novel he can find. When the raised lettering and sensuous pictures of the cover glare at the check out, any college guy has difficulty stomaching his purchase. The clerk can be bursting out in laughter on the inside and the purchaser can feel like he's a 16-year-old purchasing condoms. However, in the interest of Valentine's Day one guy had to see just what a romance novel is all about.
Lisa Kleypas' new novel, \Worth Any Price"" fits the mold of the romance genre right down to the sculpted skin of its characters. There are not any ugly people in the entire book, and it seems as though it is occupied by the doctored people found in any fashion magazine. Like any good Hollywood fantasy, the book exists in the realm where wrinkles, misplaced scars and even bad skin have no place. Every woman's body is statuesque and every man's biceps bulge. Yet somehow the people within the novel construct something that can be construed as a plot.
The prologue opens in the most obvious of places--a brothel. Nick Gentry, a 24-year-old virgin, enters because the... ""urge to mate had finally become stronger than fear."" Stop right there. The book actually uses that phrase. It's enough to make a guy, or any sane person, put down the thing and immerse himself in a nuclear physics textbook. But the next 300-odd pages remaining had to get better.
Nick manages to find the Madam of the brothel and apply his carefully contrived wit to her waiting ear. The Madam, Mrs. Bradshaw, falls under Gentry's gaze and the two head upstairs. It really is not necessary to repeat what happens next, because the two definitely did not play chess.
Three years later, Nick and Mrs. Bradshaw part company when Nick sees her with another man. (Really? In a brothel?) By this time Gentry has become the ""most skillful lover in all of England"" under Bradshaw's tutelage. He has learned all the tricks of the prostitute's trade and is ready to go about his business as a Bow Street runner. The runners are a private police force doing the bidding of Parliament and operating on their own terms.
Surprise, surprise. This sets up Gentry to be a passionate rogue who, somehow, fits into a romance novel. His chiseled face and concrete pecs conveniently fit in with his sense of danger and desire for chance. Admittedly, ""Worth Any Price"" requires a man of Gentry's build to pull off his feats. Some ordinary Joe non-Millionaire just could not afford to buy and seduce his way through the first few chapters.
Gentry winds up on the trail of one Miss Charlotte Howard. She has escaped from a man who desires to direct every detail of her life and takes refuge in Lord Westcliff's mansion. Miss Howard probably never had a bad hair day in her life. All the descriptions of her craft this Helen-of-Troy-meets-Kate-Hudson into a creation that exhibits beauty even when she is crying. She would probably be appealing even while kicking puppies.
Sadly, the book keeps limping along with further events that only serve to connect sexual encounters throughout the astonishingly thick book. Somewhere a marriage proposal is thrown in. It does not make much of a difference, this being a book about romance, not fidelity. Mostly revolving around Gentry and Howard, ""Worth Any Price"" goes from a blushing embarrassment to a tedious trek after the first hundred pages.
The author made some attempt to make the dialogue and the people speaking it believable, but the words sound like the worst possible poetry when spoken out loud. For all the concentration on Gentry, the man seems like some hulking flesh-creature throughout. Howard suffers a similar fate as Kleypas tries to make her womanly, but only turns her into an airbrushed mannequin of femininity.
Somewhere, off a dirt road that is off a dirt road that is off a dirt road, there has to be a graveyard for all books like this. A few altruistic individuals must have taken it upon themselves to bury all the trash that becomes novels like these. It is the only solution to such a horrendous genre that should be removed from Walgreen's and put in an unmarked grave.
