Four Smart Authors Part IV – Beverly Sommers

This guest post was submitted by Magdalen. Many thanks to her for this wonderful series!

This is my final guest post on the subject of four authors (Leslie LaFoy, Glenda Sanders, Mira Stables, and Beverly Sommers) I think are smart.  Many thanks to Sarah here at Monkey Bear for letting me hijack her blog for a few days.

The last author is Beverly Sommers.  She wrote for the Silhouette Intimate Moments and Harlequin American Romance lines in the late 80s.  (For a fascinating exchange of comments — including some from Beverly Sommers herself! — read this bit from Smart Bitches.  The book titles they discuss there are different from the ones below, so even more good suggestions.)

Re-reading them today, I’m struck by three things:  first, they seem much more dated than Glenda Sanders’ romances from the same period (Sommers has lots more descriptions of clothes, including a turquoise jacket in Accused that is pure Miami Vice).  Second, her romances are so unique in voice and technique that they verge on not being romantic.  Oh, people fall in love and there are happy endings, but because her characters seem more real in certain respects, they struck me as more independent and less likely to stay colored neatly in the HEA box when the book ends.  So it may be a trade-off with her books:  you get livelier characters and snappy dialogue, but you’re way less likely to get the “awwww” effect at the end of the book.  (No tissues were crumpled in the reading of these books.)

But the third thing I noticed is the most fascinating.  She’s always thinking.  For anyone who’s worked in the sort of corporate atmosphere that employs “brainstorming,” you’ll know what I’m talking about.  Someone says, “What if –?” and everyone at the table has to think of answers, suggestions, etc. to advance the discussion.  Most people run out of ideas pretty quickly, but Sommers would be the person still thinking out loud, rattling off ideas as fast as she could list them.  Her books seem as though they were a series of imbedded “What if?” challenges.  That makes for creative and intelligent characters and situations.  As before, I’ve listed them in the order in which I re-read them.

Outside In (1989)

What if – - You went back to high school ten years later to find out why your teenaged sister died?

First off, you wouldn’t remember how to do algebra!

Jill Peters is 27 and just back from working in Ethiopia for the Peach Corps.  Her sister, Susan, supposedly committed suicide, but Jill doesn’t believe that.  So she moves into the apartment over the garage of family friends, enrolls in high school, and tries to figure out what happened to Susan.  In the process, she discovers she’s not the straight-A student she used to be.  She goofs off in class, develops a crush on Doug Lacayo, her civics teacher, and defies some of the unwritten rules of high school by sitting with the jocks and being friends with the fat girl.

Obviously, you can’t build a romance around a “schoolgirl” crush, even if the teacher is only two years older.  Eventually — but a lot farther along in the book than you might imagine — Jill comes clean with Doug and they work together to figure out what happened to Susan.  The solution to the mystery isn’t a big surprise.  What is a surprise is the way that Jill behaves as a faux-teenager.  She’s pretty feisty, the way we might have wished we’d been able to behave in school but were too self-conscious or afraid of reprisals.  In one scene, Doug is doing his laundry at the local laundromat when Jill walks in with a copy of Lolita under her arm.  He’s so concerned that she’s a student who’s coming on to him that he abandons his laundry in the dryer and leaves.  When she calls and offers to return his clean, folded clothes, he freaks out and calls her “young lady.”  So she starts wearing his shirts to class.  Now, admit it — wouldn’t you have loved to done something that ballsy in high school?

After revealing her true age to Doug (not so easy to do, given how cynical he is about phony IDs), they explore their mutual attraction while we get to see how two smart people handle the angles of their unusual situation.  Sommers enjoys throwing them a curve ball or two.  In one scene, Jill has to dress as a middle-aged woman, complete with wig, in order to go out with Doug in public, but when they go to check into a motel for the night, he sees a member of the school board in the lobby with a woman who’s not his wife!

In the end, Outside In is an intriguing and thought provoking romance.  What would you do if you had to go back to high school?

Accused (1990)

What if – You came home one day, the woman you lived with was gone, and two days later you were arrested for her murder?  – Or -

What if – You are told by your boss to represent your torts professor, who has been starring regularly in your nightmares ever since law school?

Jack Quintana at first thinks that Marissa’s shopping, then that she’s just left him (which is a relief, really; all they did was fight), then eventually it occurs to him that maybe something’s wrong.  He calls a friend he went to law school with, who recommends that Anne Larkin represent him.  Anne had Professor Quintana for Torts — doubly terrifying because he was a hard-ass professor and also drop-dead gorgeous.  In her nightmares, she shows up for class unprepared and he humiliates her.  Having him as a client?  Really?  Does she have to?

Of course she does.  And after her initial distaste for the assignment, she gets into it.  It helps that she has a friend on the police force and a friend at the newspaper; the three of them make a mini-brainstorming team of their own.  With less help from Jack than you might imagine — because what does a torts professor know about criminal law? — Anne and her posse are able to solve the crime.  (Don’t worry, you will solve it as soon or sooner than they will.)

There’s one clunker in this book — something implausible that Jack does for innocent reasons but which adds to the circumstantial case against him — otherwise it’s pretty cool watching these four people get on with what they’re good at.  In addition to Jack (smart and handsome), Accused gives us three strong, confident women for the price of one.  It’s a foregone conclusion that Jack will fall for Anne, although Sommers clearly subscribes to the opposites-attract theory of romance:  When Anne mentions that she and her friends have practice, Jack assumes she’s a classical cellist.  In fact, the three women play softball.  Jack can’t stand baseball; Anne can’t stand classical music.  But I think I can see them making it as a couple, mostly because they won’t ever bore each other.

They didn’t bore me.  In the interest of full disclosure, there is a fair amount of “Law & Order” style criminal procedure, but it’s pretty digestible, and there’s always Anne’s hats to admire.  (Seriously, her costume choices are almost a character in themselves.  They lend a certain Krystal Carrington flair to the book.)  And Sommers’ writing shares that quality that law shows on TV have: all the boring bits have been eliminated.

Teacher’s Pet (1988)

What if — Someone has rounded up all the cats in a sleepy California town, Seal Beach.  What would the police chief do, considering he’s a dog person, when a pretty teacher came to report her cat missing?

In anyone else’s hands, this book is over in 60 pages.  The alpha hero police chief wastes no time getting the pretty teacher into his bed and his heart, while following the three clues he needs to find the missing cats.  Case closed, book done.  Not in Sommers-ville.  In her hands, this book is as aimless as a cat’s path around the furniture.  What we get instead of an alpha male and a pretty female in need of some alpha help is a riff on divorce and single parenting a pre-teen son, long conversations about dating, and a fair amount of action with three young boys who have a distinctly unique moral code.  We even get the catnapper’s POV.

Police Chief Con Willoughby is attracted to teacher Arlie Cooper, but when she and her roommate and fellow-teacher, Emma, score him on the ratings test they devised for men, he gets a zero for compatibility.  (It’s that dog-person vs. cat-person thing.)  And that’s about as much as I can tell you of the plot.  Just like the best shaggy dog story, Teacher’s Pet is not well served by being condensed or summarized.  So I’ll give you an excerpt instead.  In this scene, David Cox (the father of Billy, one of Arlie’s students) has joined Emma, who has joined Con and Arlie on a non-date.  Or a sort-of date.  Or something.  Emma is attracted to David, who seems attracted to Arlie, but is actually carrying a torch for his ex. Con isn’t carrying a torch for his ex, but he and Arlie haven’t quite gotten to the “we’re a couple” stage.  To save space, I’ll just give you the dialogue:

David: So how goes law enforcement in Seal Beach?

Con: Slowly.  I feel rather like the queen of England: I’m there as a figurehead, but there’s really nothing to do.

Arlie: There’s the cats.

Con: Don’t remind me.

David: Cats?

Emma: It was in the papers.  All the cats in Seal Beach are disappearing.

David: Our cat ran away a couple of weeks ago.  I figured it was because Bill usually forgot to feed it.

Con: If we’re going to talk about cats all through dinner . . .

Emma: We could always talk about kids.

David: Let’s not.  It’s nice enough not having to eat with one tonight.

Arlie: Well, since those are our primary sources of conversation these days, you’ll have to come up with something else.

David: That’s all you talk about?

Con: They also talk about men.  They even have these tests they use on the men they meet.  You ought to ask them about it.

Arlie: Ask Emma about it.

Emma: Con has a very big mouth.

Arlie: I noticed.

Emma: I wonder if that’s a police trait.

Arlie: No doubt.

Con: They’re going into their act now.  What I think is, they’re getting tired of teaching and have decided to put together a comedy routine instead.  You girls going to take it on the road?

David: They let you get away with calling them girls?  The women lawyers in my office would sue you for less.

Emma: Unlike you, David, Con is just an ignorant cop.  He’s in one of those ultra macho professions where equality hasn’t caught on yet.

Con: See?  They love me, so they make excuses for me.

David: I got used to it early.  I have this sister who was such a feminist in high school, she’d punch me out if I called her a girl.  It’s gotten so I call any female over the age of ten a woman.

Arlie: The kids in my class are hardly men and women.

Con: Back to kids.  Let’s see, if we can’t discuss kids and we can’t discuss cats, how about the weather?

Emma: There’s no such thing as weather in California.

Arlie: Unless you count the fog.

Emma: Which we don’t.

Arlie: It comes with living on the ocean.  You take the good with the bad.

Con: They’re going into their routine again.  How about baseball, David?  You follow the Dodgers?

David: The Angels.

Con: What about you guys?  You like baseball?

Arlie: You notice he’s referring to us as guys now.

Emma: I picked up on that.  The word women just seems to stick in his throat.

Con: Speaking of which, here’s the salads.  I guess we have a safe topic of conversation for the rest of the meal — we can discuss the food.

David: Is this what dating’s like these days?

Con: You tell me.  This is my first date since I got divorced.  If you can call it a date.  I guess I should be thankful she’s sitting on my side of the booth.

David: I haven’t dated yet.

Con: I’m not saying I’ve been a monk.  I just haven’t been out on a real date.

David: I guess you’d have to put me in the monk category.  But it’s only been a few months.  My ex is dating, though.  A young guy.

Con: Same here.  A tennis pro.  Looks like he’s still in school.

Emma: They seem to be getting up their own routine.

Arlie: Let them go on.  We might learn something.

Emma: I think what we should be learning from this is that these two got rejected for younger guys.  Maybe I should take up playing volleyball with you.

Arlie: Those guys look good but I’d hate trying to have a conversation with them.

Emma: It couldn’t be any worse than this.

Nothing laugh-out-loud funny, but nothing’s forced or scripted.  Sommers’ characters seem plausible and personable — a great combination.  As for the rest of Teacher’s Pet, you can guess what happens:  the catnapper is identified, Con introduces his son to Arlie, Emma may or may not get anywhere with David, and Con makes a decision about his career.  It’s all good.

Time and Again (1987)

What if – The “Big One” hit California and caused you to wake up in the same place but another time?

Lauren Hall is eating at McDonald’s outside San Francisco when a massive earthquake happens.  She’s knocked out and wakes up in the same spot in 1906.  She’s got $67 in mostly useless money, has a duffle bag filled with clothes all wrong for the period, and needs to survive.  She meets a reporter, Early Cruz, who has inherited his parents’ huge Victorian house and needs a servant.  Lauren also writes a column based on “Dear Abby” and makes a little money that way.  Then one day she sees a pair of red Adidas shoes and figures out she’s not the only one from the future walking around San Francisco.

There are so many places a time-travel book can take the reader — and I’m not just referring to various time periods, either.  In Sci-Fi novels, there’s some focus on how time travel works.  In romances, though, the trope usually involves the misplaced character managing to get back to his/her real life just after falling in love with someone in the other time period.  Tears and hearts-rent-asunder ensue until something allows them to be reunited.  That’s not Beverly Sommers’ style though.

Most of the pleasure comes from the reactions of the various characters to these bizarre events.  Sommers approached the problem completely straight:  she imagined what would happen to a person, or people, in this situation.  There’s no right or wrong solution to their problems.  In fact, one character truly believes that the 1906 San Francisco earthquake will magically transport her back to 1987, while another thinks the answer is to trick all the residents of San Francisco to leave town that night.

As a romance novel, this is an odd book.  Yes, there’s an HEA for Early and Lauren.  But at one point Lauren reflects how, after new people move into the house, she and Early don’t spend as much time together.  So if you love Lauren and Early, you might feel a bit cheated that Lauren doesn’t jump into his bed a lot sooner.  (After all, she’s the one from 1987, so she wasn’t bound by the strict conventions of 1906.)  But the ending is actually pretty romantic, complete with heartfelt longing and such.  It’s just “romance” Sommers-style.  And her style is truly unique.

Tagged as: Beverly Sommers, Four Smart Authors, Guest Review