Becca's Baby

Shelter Valley Stories #1

by Tara Taylor Quinn

Meet Will and Becca Parsons, who've lived in Shelter Valley, Arizona, all their lives. Shelter Valley means everything to them. Home. Family. Security. Love. Everything that matters is right there in that town.

Will and Becca have been married for 20 years. It's a good marriage—a contented marriage—marred by only one disappointment: their inability to have children. But their dream of a baby has gradually been replaced by other interests, other goals.

In any case, Will and Becca are in their 40s now.

It's too late for babies.

Except it's not. Because Becca's pregnant. And that reality throws their carefully ordered lives into complete disarray.

A baby—after all these years.

Genres: Harlequin, Romance, Fiction, Contemporary Romance

304 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Tara Taylor Quinn began her love affair with Harlequin when she was fourteen years old and picked up a free promotional copy of a Harlequin Romance in a hometown grocery store. The relationship was solidified the year she was suspended from her high school typing class for hiding a Harlequin Romance behind the keys of her electric typewriter. Unaware that her instructor loomed close by, Ms. Quinn read blissfully on with one finger resting on the automatic repeating period key. She finished the book in the principal’s office. Forced to leave her romances in her locker after that, Ms. Quinn’s typing skills improved - a fact for which she is eternally grateful.

With over 80 original novels, published in more than twenty languages, Tara Taylor Quinn is a USA Today bestselling author with more than seven million copies sold. She is a winner of the 2008 National Reader's Choice Award, four time finalist for the RWA Rita Award, a finalist for the Reviewer’s Choice Award, the Bookseller’s Best Award, the Holt Medallion and appears regularly on the Waldenbooks bestsellers list. Ms. Quinn writes for Harlequin and MIRA Books. Reviewer, Cindy Penn, wordweaving.com says, “Amazing character development is the hallmark of author Tara Taylor Quinn’s work. Indeed, Taylor’s profound observations of human nature and intimate understanding of values and priorities lends extraordinary psychological depth to all her work.”

Tara Taylor Quinn was born and raised in Ohio. Though she wrote her first story at the age of seven, her professional writing career began ten years later when she was hired as a stringer with the Dayton Daily News in Dayton, Ohio. She attended Wright State University and graduated from Harding College in Arkansas with a degree in English and Journalism. She published several magazine articles before turning to writing as a full-time occupation.

Ms. Quinn is a Past President of the Romance Writers of America and served for eight years on the Board of Directors of that association. She has a wide range of experience as a public speaker and workshop presenter for writers groups around the country.

When she’s not home with her owners, Jerry Lee and Taylor Marie, or fulfilling speaking engagements, Tara loves to travel with her husband, stopping wherever the spirit takes them. They’ve been spotted in casinos and quaint little small town antique shops all across the country..

Reviews

[Marianne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Becca’s Baby is the first book in the Shelter Valley Stories series by American author, Tara Taylor Quinn. After years of trying, when she has finally given up all hope, Becca Parsons falls pregnant at the age of forty-two. Her husband, Will is overjoyed, but puzzled by Becca’s strangely lukewarm reaction and shocked when she talks of termination. The strong loving relationship between them suffers, but the support of close family and the Shelter Valley community helps them come to terms with decisions they both need to make. Sub-plots involve a colleague of Will’s whose behaviour warrants censure and a prospective colleague who is removing her sister from an abusive relationship. Quinn touches on several issues: late-in-life pregnancy, adultery, domestic violence, parental sexual abuse and student-teacher relationships. While this could have been a sweet romance, there is rather too much soul-searching on the part of the main characters, enough to make the reader want to shake them and tell them to stop being so self-indulgent and get on with life. Quinn has done better.

[reeder (reviews) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Before we get spoiling: despite being published under the Harlequin Superromance imprint, Becca's Baby isn't a romance novel. It's relationship fiction about a marriage in jeopardy due to two simultaneous mid-life crises brought about by an unexpected pregnancy.

As the description states: Will and Becca have lived their entire lives in Shelter Valley, Arizona, and have been married -- and childless -- for twenty years. When they couldn't conceive naturally, they went through fertility treatments. Neither of them was ever diagnosed with a fertility problem. It just didn't seem to be their fate to be parents, and their marriage was strong enough to cope with the disappointment.

Then Becca becomes pregnant at 42, long after they had stopped trying for a baby. Half-hoping she was going through early menopause, Becca arranges to go to a women's clinic in Phoenix (instead of to her regular doctor) to verify the pregnancy. The doctor at the clinic tells her she's pregnant and basically prescribes an abortion because of Becca's age and elevated blood pressure. (I'm not exaggerating. It's kind of insane, since I can't imagine a doctor being that intrusive on such a sensitive subject unless the foetus weren't viable or the mother's life were at risk.)

Becca drives home to tell Will about the pregnancy, and the interesting thing is her mind is so fogged with dread about all the problems and drawbacks of having a child at this age that she assumes his reaction will be the same. Will, of course, is thrilled about the baby and wants to celebrate. (As readers, I think we all predicted Will's delight, which is what makes Becca's negativity so telling.) Becca tells him about the doctor's advice and he can't believe she's even considering terminating the pregnancy, but he respects that it's her body and her right to choose. Becca makes an appointment for Friday at the same women's clinic.

She doesn't go through with it. When Will comes home that night -- late, with dinner ruined -- Becca is clearly hoping the news that she is going through with the pregnancy will ease the tension between them. Instead, Will reveals that he feels as if he doesn't know her; he's wondering if he ever knew her at all because she hadn't responded to news of her pregnancy as he had expected. Becca asks if he wants a divorce. "I don't know."

Becca and Will basically enter cold war mode while we read about their separate relationships with other denizens of the close-knit Shelter Valley community: his sister, her mother and sisters, an architect planning a new "signature building" for the prestigious college campus where Will is president, and -- setting up the next book in the series -- the woman interviewing for a faculty position in the college's English department. The prospective professor is introduced with ominous OW overtones. Will is creepily engaged by her, mentally comparing her looks to a young Becca and deliberately drawing out the interview because he didn't want her to leave his office too soon: "Christine Evans was having a strange effect on him. For the first time in weeks, he was starting to take a genuine interest in the world around him. He hired her on the spot."

Oh, dear God.

When Will isn't skeeving close to workplace sexual harassment himself, he's investigating accusations that a married, longtime friend of his who is a professor of psychology at the college is having an affair with one of his grad students. Surprise! It's true. Confronted with the evidence, the friend defends himself by saying that he and his wife married because it was the expected thing in Shelter Valley, but they had never been in love like Becca and Will. (Hmmm, Will ponders, maybe I should be more understanding, since I'm not sure I ever loved Becca. Somebody hand me a skillet, please.) Anyway, the friend is going to leave his wife and run off with the grad student who is "like an angel, sent to earth specially to speak to me" and I am getting spine creeps thinking about Will's response to the English professor lady.

But as horrible as these two men are, the scene underscores the most interesting aspect of the book, which is that Shelter Valley is alternately portrayed as a haven, an ideal community with lofty values, and a kind of Stepford proving ground where upper middle-class white people live out pre-programmed heteronormative lives and yearn to escape.

Meanwhile, Becca's off doing her local politics thing (she's a member of the city council, trying to get funding for a youth program while simultaneously planning the town festival which involves a play about the town's founder...who founded Shelter Valley on values of tolerance after his Black wife and baby were killed back East in the 19th century + there's a whiff of White Man culling the best from the southwestern natives' culture). One day, she nearly faints in the parking lot outside the mayor's office and calls Will for help. It turns out to be a migraine rather than a problem with the baby, but Will is now hyper-concerned about Becca having a baby at her age and claims he will support her decision if she still wants to terminate the pregnancy. Well, it's too late, Will. She's 17 weeks pregnant.

You might think that Will experiencing the same terror Becca had felt re: having a late-in-life baby would allow him to see that she was, in fact, the same woman he thought he married 20 years ago and they could get busy repairing the damage he has done to their marriage, but no. Will has moved into full existential crisis mode now. His doubts about Becca have now morphed into doubts that he knows himself: "'Sometimes I wonder if maybe I just had this image in my mind of what my life was destined to be, of who you were, of what we wanted--but that's all it was. An image. I never dug deep enough to find reality. Maybe even to know that it existed.'" (So, Will fears he's trapped in the Shelter Valley programming.)

Gah. I hate Will.

Then Becca does something wonderful. She blindsides Will with a request that he move out of their home. He frantically tries to argue her down from this position, and she says, "I need to know that my desperation to have you here is because I love you, not because I'm afraid to be without you." Then she declares (how I love this), "You aren't sure why you married me. Well, I'm not sure why I married you, either."

My joy is only slightly tarnished by Will eventually thinking she was right, he did need the time to figure out what he wanted. I really wanted him kicked out against his will.

During their separation, Becca experiences her long dark night of the soul, where she goes emotionally numb recognizing her aloneness, then realizes she can survive this and speaks comfortingly to the baby about how they're going to be fine no matter what happens re: her marriage to Will, and that Will is also going to be a good father. Eventually, she tells the baby that she has contacted an attorney in Tucson to start divorce proceedings to "free" Will and she hopes the baby will forgive her for that.

Will, meanwhile, has been hosting poker nights, getting hit on by the town tramp (the book literally labels this woman "the town tramp" *eyeroll*), asking his new Psychology faculty member for the clinical definition of love, and playing golf with his architect friend. During their latest golf game, the architect and Will discuss his marriage and Will realizes he does love his wife. He races to their home with a memento from the earlier attempts to have a baby and tells her,

"The love's always been there, Bec. ... It's what kept us together through all the bad times."

Dude, you made it through 20 years of presumed infertility and you just put your wife through 6 months of misery in the middle of her high-stress pregnancy because you couldn't remember this earlier? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

Two individual midlife crises that interfered with a marriage. Solved separately, not together. Not a romance. As relationship fiction, this might be stretched to three stars. Since it's masquerading as a romance, I'm docking it to two.

Oh, and about the OW?

One night Becca is lying in bed thinking about the friend's infidelity and the fact that she and Will haven't had sex for more than four months (because he won't make love to her when he doesn't even know if he loves her) and she starts to cry. This wakes Will up, and he asks her what's wrong. She asks if he's ever slept with anyone else, and he says no, he doesn't want sex with anyone else: "'...if I was ever going to want another woman, it would've been the new English professor I hired, and I'm not the least bit tempted.'"

And I don't know if I'm angrier at Will or the author at this point.

I'm angry at Will because the not-OW wasn't even on his semi-estranged wife's radar, and now she has to go through doubts and fears about his feelings for this woman.

I'm angry at the author because we've been in Will's head all this time and she did nothing to defuse the idea that he was sexually attracted to the not-OW. Just 16 pages earlier, Will had been talking to the not-OW on the phone and thinking "She was a breath of fresh air, a trip to younger days, easier times. She was his twenty-year-old idealized memory of Becca personified."

I feel played, and I don't like it.

[Lotte · Rating 1 out of 5]

The plot and crisis were so ridiculous that I skipped swathes of this book to get to the end. Too reminiscent of a soap opera to be worth a full star. I wish the author would have focused on highlighting a very important truth in life which is: time washes away 'untended' feelings... if you wake up and you're suddenly not in love anymore, it's because you didn't tend to that love, you expected nature to take care of its longevity and that's just not reality.

[Peggy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one was a little heartbreaking for me... but was so happy for the end results. I'm not much of the softy side of things but I'm telling ya, this one got to me. A great summer read!

*Received for an honest review*

[Tia · Rating 2 out of 5]

This novel for me, seemed really silly. I didn't like it or the crisis the hero and heroine went through. Overall I felt very disappointed.

[Steve Bender · Rating 5 out of 5]

Becca's Baby is another excellent book from Tara Taylor Quinn. Very realistically explores some of the difficulties with deciding to have an abortion. Really gripping.