Book Review: Freedom to Love by Carole Mortimer
Just to round out a couple of months devoted to romance novels, I’m going to review some Mills & Boon books that were a formative part of my young adult reading experience. That sounds a little weird but I am talking about the latter end of my teenage years. I don’t read romance anymore but I have reread these books for the purpose of these reviews. Enjoy!
*****
This is the first Mills & Boon book I ever read. For some reason it was in the library at the senior campus of my high school and whenever I had a free period or nothing better to do, I would sit in the aisle and read it (circa the early to mid-1990s).
First published in 1981, it hasn’t dated well. It’s full of “How dare you!” and embarrassment at the thought of pre-marital sex and punishing kisses and contrived plot points. Katy Harris is eighteen and the third wheel on a camping trip in the Canadian mountains outside of Calgary. Her twenty-year-old sister, Gemma, and Gemma’s icky fiancé, Gerald, are using her as cover to keep their parents happy. On the plane on the way over from London, Katy is seated next to Adam Wild, a famous photographer in his mid-thirties who wasn’t able to get a seat in first class. Things don’t start well when Katy digs her nails into his arm, thinking it is the armrest, as fear kicks in on her first time in a plane. They bicker and bicker and bicker about everything, anything and nothing at all, setting up a love/hate dynamic with the love component based primarily on their mutual physical attraction.
From then on, they’re thrown together at every turn. Seeing her discomfort at sharing a campervan with her sister and her sister’s partner, particularly given their nocturnal activities, he offers for her to spend her holiday with him instead. She’s mortified at the idea and turns him down flat, particularly in light of his reputation as a womaniser. But one evening after a walk, she mistakes his campervan for Gemma and Gerald’s and goes to sleep in the back of it. By the time she wakes, they’re a day’s drive in the opposite direction from where Gemma and Gerald were heading. So Katy’s forced to be his travelling companion.
They tour lakes and mountains as Adam takes photographs for a book and Katy manages to fall in the lakes and down the mountains, bringing out his angry but caring side. He treats her like a child but that’s hardly surprising given their eighteen year age gap. They can’t go a single day without arguing, not even when Katy falls ill and he treats her feverish sufferings.
But just as Katy is on the verge of declaring her love, Adam informs her that he can’t give her the kind of relationship she deserves – one that involves devotion and a home and babies. They part reluctantly and head back to their normal lives. Will they ever work things out? Of course, they will – I don’t think I ever read a Mills & Boon where the couple don’t end up happily ever after.
Adam is a stereotypically middle-aged angry male, taking out his pent-up frustrations on Katy’s virginal but kissable lips and ample bosom. Gemma is a selfish sister and Gerald is so crude that he wouldn’t get away with saying the things he does today without having his face constantly slapped. There’s some attempt at character development with both Adam and Katy having a form of PTSD from incidents in their histories but there’s almost no plot and the dialogue is wooden. Katy’s tantrums can almost be forgiven considering her age but there’s no excuse for Adam’s.
Still, it holds a special place in my heart simply because it was the first and because it was reading Mills & Boons and thinking I could write better ones that really started me on my path to becoming a writer. In a word: nostalgic.
2 stars
*First published on Goodreads 14 January 2017
