The Will and the Way

The Will and the Way #1

by Rita Clay Estrada

He swore he hasn't marriage material... April Flynn loved Jace Sullivan withall her heart. He was warm, generous, kind... and the perfect lover. Withhim she had everything--except a commitment. She'd find a way to change hismind on that score, April vowed. She'd show him what a great wife she'dmake-both in bed and out!

221 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Rita Clay was born on 31 July 1941 in Michigan, U.S.A.. Her mother was a former Miss Michigan, while her father was a U.S. Air Force pilot. She spent much of her early years living in Europe.

Rita married very young with her high school sweetheart, James Estrada, and she stayed at home to raise their four children. In 1977, when she had been married about 20 years, her husband brought her a typewriter and said, "'You said you always wanted to write. Now write." She and her mother, Rita Gallagher, accepted the challenge. While beginning to write, they learned how to publish books and made great friendships with other writers.

Rita's first attempt of publication was a long historical romance which was promptly rejected. Her next manuscript, a contemporary romance, was like wise rejected. But her third manuscript, Wanderer's Dream, was sold to Silhouette Books. She used her maiden name, Rita Clay for her titles for Silhouette. In 1982, she moved to Dell to write for their Candlelight Ecstasy line and she wrote as Tira Lacy, an anagram of Rita Clay, because Harlequin owned her pen name. In 1985 she resigned from Harlequin and asked to use her fullname, Rita Clay Estrada, on all future books.

Rita, her mother, and 35 other authors, decided that an association was needed to defend their published members. They founded the Romance Writers of America (R.W.A), that years later persuaded Harlequin books to register copyrights for authors' works and to allow writers to own their own pseudonyms. Previously, the authors were forced to leave their pseudonym behind if they switched publishing houses, making it more difficult fortheir fans to follow.

R.W.A. signature award, the RITA, which is the highest award of excellence given in the genre of romantic fiction, is named after her. The R.W.A. also awarded Estrada their Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000.

Reviews

[elstaffe]

If you are looking for a romance where the couple is already established and the main conflict is them not using their words, then this is the book for you. It was different from the average category romance from that era that I've read, I will give it that, but for me...I felt a bit of the tension of the book implied from the back cover (how will Flynn get her man to marry her?) was undercut within the first few pages, where we find out that the man in question has decided he wants to marry her.

"It was time to make a public commitment. To Flynn." (7)

This is the first scene of the book. I truly felt after reading that scene a sense of "oh...well...what happens in the book, then? Because that's the entire plot laid out on the back cover."

Answer: basically "how long can one author string out having two characters in a long term relationship not talk to each other?" Which may be realistic to how some real human people's relationships function, but the reasons for it in this book felt like they were all based around prolonging the plot, rather than any kind of internal consistency with the characters.

It somehow took 210 more pages to get to this:

"All the manipulating she had tried, and she had never thought of telling him the truth! She should have let him know she wanted marriage. She had gone through this heartbreak for nothing...." (217)

This might be one of the instances where it feels like the character is talking to the author (and in this case, chastising her for the flimsiest of plotting).