Call up the storm

by Jane Donnelly

Book by Donnelly, Jane

Genres: Harlequin Romance

243 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Jane Donnelly began earning her living as a writer as a teenage reporter. When she married the editor of the newspaper she freelanced for women's mags for a while. After she was widowed she and her 5 year old daughter moved to Lancashire. She turned to writing fiction to make a living while still caring for her daughter, she sold her first Mills & Boon romance novel as a hard-up singleparent in 1965. She wrote over 60 romance novels for Mills & Boon until 2000. Now she lives in a roses-round-the door cottage near Stratford-upon-Avon, with four dogs and assorted rescued animals. Besides writing she enjoys travelling, swimming, walking and the company of friends.

Reviews

[Naksed · Rating 2 out of 5]

With the third Jane Donnelly book I have read, I find that each reading brings me an even more unlikable heroine than the last one. This one, in addition to being mercenary (gold digging the hero shamelessly in order to renovate her bed and breakfast) and callous (dumping her steady boyfriend without so much as a Dear John letter when a richer prospect arrives on the scene), is also too stupid to boot, holding on to a white lie until it becomes a stinking pile of caca that jeopardizes both her much beloved inn and her great lurve. There is a cheesy backstory with a Spanish, witchy, ancestress named Carlotta that seems to have been plucked directly from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. I should have spent the time allotted to this book re-watching that masterpiece instead. I like Jane Donnelly and would like to read more books from her but this was Gobble, Gobble, big time.

[Fiona Marsden · Rating 4 out of 5]

Felicity knows all about David Holle before he turns up on her doorstep. Her old school friend Deirdre had told her every minute detail about him while having a nervous breakdown at Felicity's B&B on the Cornish coast. Yes we are talking Poldark country. Deirdre is obviously a leaner and when David dumps her, she falls apart. There is even a suggestion she may be pregnant so it was a physical relationship. This is 1983 after all.

When Deirdre gets over her crisis and vanishes off to the Riviera to sponge off Mummy, Felicity is surprised when David finally turns up in response to her friends desperate letters. There is an instant attraction between them, but Felicity is still primed with all the horrible things David did so she resists.

She contemplates a number of ways to revenge Deirdre but it comes to nothing, especially as the wealthy David is keen to help her out with the B&B which needs quite a bit of money spent on it.

You can imagine how he's going to feel when he realises Felicity has been hiding her close friendship with Deirdre from him, and Deirdre isn't one to give up easily if she finds out the man who got away has turned up on her friend's doorstep.

This was a fairly traditional romance with the suspicious heroine resisting her attraction. David is rather lovely until the secret comes out in the worst possible way. I enjoyed the story despite the ickyness of Deirdre having history with the hero.

[RomLibrary · Rating 2 out of 5]

“There’s a wild streak in you.”

Felicity had reason to remember her grandfather’s words when David Holle entered her life. She knew all about his womanising, and being the descendant of a legendary sea witch, she vowed to repay him for the way he had broken her friend’s heart. But Felicity became tangled in her own black spell. By the time she fell in love with him, he knew her as a cheat, unworthy of his trust—and his love.

[Sarah Mac · Rating 1 out of 5]

Felt like the same story & characters as my previous experience with JD, i.e. Spell of the Seven Stones. We have the annoying wannabe-dominatrix-moo of a heroine, the obsessive clingy whiner of a friend, the mysterious hero who gets villainized for correctly labeling the clingy whiner as such, the boring bucolic English countryside with some vague mystical thread of backstory to make the heroine seem deeper than she is, etc etc.

Blech. Methinks I shall avoid JD in the future, as (yet again) I hated every single person except the dog & the hero.

[Trenchologist · Rating 2 out of 5]

2+

Donnelly's storytelling has immediacy in emotion and event. The place, characters, and actions are vibrant. Emotions are tied to these places and actions. It all feels a bit over the top, teetering on the edge, and then falling falling into love. And it doesn't always work.

Also a bit over the top is her heroines' ongoing internal asides. She's always thinking what she should have said instead, or wish she was brave enough to say, or could interject to let the guy know she's ready to climb him like a tree, so on so on. But she never does... until the very end and it all comes spilling out. The asides are also for the reader, for us to forgive, understand, go with, the heroine's instincts and decisions (ex, realizing Gordon wasn't for her and why). I've read some JD's where it works okay; in this one it undermined, rather than strengthened, the heroine.

I don't mind the asides, per se, but M&B/H never bothered with good formatting for it to make sense while reading along. The asides blend in with the heroine's dialogue, or even the hero's, and I find I have to double back to make sure I've parsed what she's said vs what she's only thought.

This is not a favorite of JD's for me; I'll have to think up the ones of hers I do like best, as those were read well before GR existed.

Meeting a guy via him sleeping with and then moving on from your friend, seeing you and thinking "yes good," gets odder and odder as you start examining it -- particularly for a romance (maybe more particularly for the kind I prefer lol).

And starting a book giving so many pages to such a wet rag as school-chum Deirdre's broken heart over said guy didn't get things going that well either. It wasn't enough to set up and then forgive the heroine's scheming plan to get even with the guy, it just made for two ladies being unlikable taking up a few chapters.

The credulity strains in this one. The heroine is a whirlwind for sure and if she acted as she thought she'd have been more sympathetic. As it was, I didn't feel too kindly toward her much of the time, including the ride she took the hero on.

I felt cheated--and felt it was a editorial mistake--to allow them to "we're in love it doesn't matter!" dismiss a final say-and-hear explanation from both about what had happened to clear the air ahead of their HEA. Sure, they could have it later after the big swooning moment has passed, but *I* wanted to experience it. And it was needed given the not-rock-solid foundation their relationship had started on.

Are they on their start of a secure HEA given how it all began? Once they get being real horny for each other out of their systems, the forecast seems uncertain.

I'm not sure what was so great about the hero, exactly, aside he seemed a decent guy. I liked him and he clearly had magnetism. Again though--kind of odd to build your hero as the type to show up looking for a final goodbye (?) with the girl he had a brief affair with to then shrug and take on the girl in front of him instead--even if that's implicitly explained as 'bowled over with want at first sight, but this time it's real' as events move along and finally culminate.

What I think I liked best was the idea of Gull Rock House. Too bad it's not real. I'd book a room for a few weeks, pronto.

Trivially, some books get me going thus: I wonder what the heck happens with her rooming house venture now that they're in love and getting married and her future is set. It doesn't matter a jot! lol -- there's good reasons romances don't cover the practical ground of what comes next in life after the revelations and sealing it all with a kiss. And it was necessary to the plot to see the renovations to their bitter end in service of hero & heroine staying together before the truth came out -- but I still sit there going okay, after all that work and money spent and publicity he went to the trouble for--for her--does she keep running the place for a season or two, at least for show? Does she close up immediately and they live there as a family who sometimes ventures to London? Is there even need for her to now that she's got plenty of money and also a man who loves the house as much as she does and hopefully they'll be contented there together in the Captain's Room as he writes and she organizes shells and rocks? Who cares; I still wonder.

[Karen · Rating 2 out of 5]

The characters of both the hero and heroine were not great. The heroine uses the hero to renovate her guest house, justifying this to herself later by saying that she wanted him to invest so that he would keep an interest in the place and therefore in her too. The hero’s character seemed okay but what was his relationship with the heroine’s ‘friend’ from school. That person seemed unhinged but the author did not take the time to explain what actually happened there and it seems that the hero had had a physical relationship with this woman.

[Griffinyarn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a nice, light, predictable read with a typical 1980's 'vintage' romance feel. The plotline of the heroine trying to get revenge on the hero, only to find out (almost) too late that she has fallen in love, is a familiar one, but the pacing was good and the heroine refreshingly different from the standard harlequin romances.

The only significant problem I had with this story was the unnecessary amount of pages devoted to the misery of the "friend" Deirdre who has had her heart broken by the hero. Maybe the point was to purposefully make her annoying... I was ready for the heroine to be all:

"If someone you love hurts you, its okay to cry a river just make sure you don't forget to build a damn bridge and get over it."

Unfortunately, the best we get is:

'You stupid cow, did you do that on purpose?'

Recommended for: those who want something fluffy to snack on between meals.