Bee and her posse of church ladies and the nurse’s nephew who’s being picked on by a bully in school are delightful in this story of love being found where it’s least expected. What makes it even more quirky is that the novel’s only voice is that of the pilot who’s a down-home boy on the rebound from the woman he thought was his one true love.Ĭalvin “Bugs” Doyle’s relationships with his landlady Mrs. About mid-book, I had to ask myself if this was really a romance or if Osborne was just playing with me.Ĭheryl Reavis’ The Older Woman features a romance between an early-30-something, convalescing Black Hawk pilot and a 40-something nurse. What ensues is at times funny, at times sad, and always quirky. Unluckily Max McCord, engaged to a beautiful girl back home, is the guy who must put up or shut up. However, what Low Down wants more than anything in the world is a baby.Īck! That means one of the prospectors will have to marry and impregnate her. When she nurses her fellow prospectors during an epidemic, they promise to give her anything she desires thinking she will ask for gold or land or something they can get easily. In Maggie Osborne’s Silver Lining, Low Down is a big, strapping, Colorado woman prospector who dresses, curses, and acts like a man. Since romance demands a believable path between the lovers, finding that path for Christian and Maddy turns out to be a work of brilliance by Kinsale and the book has become much discussed in romance circles.īut what about other quirky romances? Without giving spoilers, these books top my list of those kinds of romances: His avenging angel, Maddy Timms, is even more improbable since she’s a Quaker whose father, another mathematician, regards Christian as extraordinarily talented in the field. Laura Kinsale’s historical Flowers from the Storm, one of the best known representatives of this type of romance, features rake and mathematician Christian Langland, Duke of Jerveaux, as the most unlikely of romantic heroes, especially since he suffers a stroke rendering him incapable of speech at the beginning of the book and is clapped into a madhouse. Then we have what I call a quirky romance, the kind of romance story I seek out and love. That about sums up the typical romance, right? But what if that’s not exactly what happens? What if the plot and/or characters, the tone or voice are so different from the usual romance that for a while the reader might wonder if what’s being read really is a romance at all? The complication or the misunderstanding is cleared up.

A complication or two, or a misunderstanding or two separate them.

The formula: Boy meets girl girl meets boy.

Marry Me by Susan Kay Law