My faithful fellow blogger, Bookstooge, is doing a readalong of a book someone, possibly as a prank, recommended to him: Love Saves the Day by Barbara Cartland. I went so far as to order this book from Amazon in order to participate. I don’t usually read in the romance genre, but I have read a few, and I don’t despise the genre or its readers or anything like that.

I waited to post this until after Bookstooge’s first reaction post went up on Friday, but I am composing my reaction before I see his.

First, let’s talk about this cover, eh? The word “terrifying” comes to mind. The guy looks more like Dracula – or a 60-year-old uncle- than like a romantic hero. Note that he is grasping the heroine by the upper arms. She, for her part, appears to be very concerned and trying to get away. I don’t mind the fact that this is impressionistically rendered – I don’t even completely mind that her hair is not, as it is described in the book, curly — but the emotional tone of this cover does not match the promised content.

I am, as of this posting, almost all the way through Chapter 4 because I mistakenly remembered that Bookstooge was going to be writing about chapters 1 – 6 in his first post. My impression so far: the plot is a very capable romance plot. The heroine is young, brave, idealistic; the hero is a little older, world-weary, etc.; there’s a rival romantic hero in the picture who is young, blond, and charming; financial circumstances are forcing the couple into co-operation they wouldn’t otherwise undertake. There’s even a bitter, scheming housekeeper a la Rebecca. I can’t see any big holes in the plot.

My first impression of the wordsmithing is that this is a first draft.

There are a ton of comma splices. There is head-hopping. (Though that may be intentional; sometimes it’s hard to tell head-hopping from an omniscient narrator. I omnish, myself.) The tone of the dialog is slightly inconsistent. It’s as if Cartland wants this to be an Edwardian-era novel, like Austen, or even earlier, but it’s set in 1903, and sometimes it comes off as if the characters are pretending to be from an earlier era. I can’t tell whether clothes, technology, and so forth, contain any anachronisms. The clothes are fairly generically described, but there are “omnibuses.” (Edit: I just looked it up, and oops! Edwardian is 1901 – 1910. So, spot on. So, the language sounds like it’s going for … Victorian? But obviously I’m not very savvy about this, so perhaps her language is also period accurate.)

Anyway, after noticing that this read like a first draft, I then went back to the introduction (which, like a good fiction reader, I had skipped), and, lo and behold …. it is a first draft.

Dame Barbara Cartland[‘s] most amazing literary feat was to double her output from 10 books a year to over 20 books a year when she was 77 to meet the huge demand.

She went on writing continuously at this rate for 20 years and wrote her very last book at the age of 97, thus completing an incredible 400 books between the ages of 77 and 97.

Her publishers finally could not keep up with this phenomenal output, so at her death in 2000 she left behind an amazing 160 unpublished manuscripts, something that no other author has ever achieved.

Barbara’s son, Ian McCorquodale, together with his daughter Iona, felt that it was their sacred duty to publish all these titles for Barbara’s millions of admirers all over the world who so love her wonderful romances.

So in 2004 they started publishing the 160 brand new Barbara Cartlands as the The Barbara Cartland Pink Collection, as Barbara’s favourite colour was always pink — and yet more pink!

The Barbara Cartland Pink collection is published monthly exclusively by Barbaracartland.com and the books are numbered in sequence from 1 to 160.

–the introduction

Barbara Cartland was cranking out about one novel every two weeks for twenty years. I’m not even mad, I’m impressed. And I am now a little bit jealous of her. Imagine having such high demand for your books that you can just dash off all your ideas and the publisher will publish them as fast as they can.

Also, I’m tickled. That selection above gets funnier every time I read it. I mean, it sounds made-up, like something from a Bertie Wooster novel. Even the names of Barbara’s son and granddaughter sound like characters from her books. And the fact that they are calling it the pink collection because that was her favorite color … the fact that she loved pink so much … the fact that her author photo looks like this:

Now that I think about, the section above might be my favorite part of the book. The romance between Tiana and Richard is going to have to get awfully good in order to compete with Cartland herself.