Memories

[vintageromancereader]

Chism Talbert had loved her first, and best - but he had broken her heart. He was the caretaker's handsome son. She was Minta Westerly, the privileged girl who'd surrendered to him one starry summer night - then been abandoned when he abruptly left town. Now she was back in the big house where she'd spent family vacations - and suddenly, impossibly, Chism walked through the door, pinning her with mesmerizing eyes that burned with fury and desire. Both were haunted by the dreams they'd woven together, the promises they'd whispered under a willow tree - and both were devastated by a misunderstanding that still felt like a betrayal. But the years apart and the pain they had denied only fed the fires of passion that sizzled within. Minta longed to taste the magic of Chism's lips once more, even if he insisted that time had made them strangers. Could she make him see that she belonged in his world, and that he would have a home in her heart forever?

Original Publisher: Bantam
Original Year of Publication: 1991
Page Count: 177

The August 2022 #TBRChallenge is “Blue Collar.” Class differences aren’t something that I actively look out for in my romance reading (I don’t really feel strongly one way or the other about them), so this one was a bit of a stumper. It was also the perfect excuse to dive into the collection of Loveswept titles I’d picked up at the thrift store but hadn’t yet cracked into. This book seemed to be the closest to meeting the theme of a blue collar main character, so I went with it.

Minta Westerly is the daughter of a wealthy family who spends their summers at a mansion called Willow Hill in Haven Port, Maine. Chism Talbert is the son of the caretaker, a native son who knows that the “summer people” are a different class, and knows how to stay in his own lane. That works until the summer he’s 19, when he falls in love with 18-year-old Minta. The two spend the entire summer wrapped up in each other and even hatch a plan to run away and elope before she has to leave in the fall. Only something happens – the two never meet at the appointed time – and both feel heartbroken and betrayed, never to speak again.

Twelve years later, Minta has returned to Willow Hill on orders from her doctor to take a break from her hectic life in the New York advertising world. She steps onto the porch of the family summer home, all tingly with anticipation, and who should she run into but her former lover, looking gruff and handsome and surly on the doorstep? She’d heard that Chism’s father had died but is still surprised to see him opening up her house, and he refuses to tell her why he’s there. He does kiss her, however, which just makes her tingles increase.

He's pretty tingly, too, but he’s also angry with her because he believes that she just left him high and dry all those years ago because she thought she was better than him. These conflicting feelings don’t stop him from hanging around Willow Hill, falling back into his old role as the caretaker’s son, and reminding Minta of what she could’ve had all those years ago.

It doesn’t take long for them to fall into bed together again, even though they both swear up, down, and sideways that they aren’t in love – or, at least, they aren’t in love with the current versions of themselves, rather the memories from that sweet teenaged summer so long ago. They both say several times that they want to take things slow and try to figure out if they are still compatible, given how much their lives have changed since they were teens. They keep saying all this stuff, but in a 177 page novel, they don’t really have a chance to follow through with it – one crisis has Minta calling his number from memory for assistance because he always used to rescue her.

They realize that they were torn asunder twelve years ago by his father, who didn’t want Chism to throw his life away without direction. Daddy dearest tells Chism that the meeting place has changed, and when Minta shows up to the original spot, he tells her that Chism left straightaway for the army. Both leave in floods of tears, but since Daddy dearest is now dead, they decide that can’t hold a grudge because look how great they turned out in the meanwhile!

Meanwhile, Minta is also trying to decide if she wants to leave her fast-paced city career and settle down in Haven Port, where she has such happy memories of her childhood summers. She’s an advertising whiz and can work freelance from anywhere. Conveniently enough, Chism has made his fortune in computer games and can also work from anywhere, so why not move cross country and settle into his hometown again?

There’s also a parallel thread of diary entries from the first Minta in 1892, who falls in love with her family’s gardener against society’s wishes but has her parents’ blessing to marry him anyway and start the family tradition of naming the firstborn daughter after herself. These diary entries are OTT and ridiculous, and really could’ve been left out to give our present-day characters a chance to actually do what they say they’re going to do: re-learn each other as adults.

This book is so fluffy and light that it could very easily float away. It has comically bad purple prose sex scenes (including the obligatory silken chest hair for manly Chism), and was supremely tacky in places, but it only took about two hours to read. I now have a better idea of what to expect from Loveswept (my previous experiences having been Sandra Brown novels), and even went out and bought five more this weekend, but I don’t think this one is going to stay on my shelves.


⭐⭐

Comments

[impy]

Those names are very special. Normally I'm a big ol' fan of diary type entries in books but this sounds like it was definitely a waste of storytelling time and space.

I hope you know I mentally pictured you diving into a vault of books, Scrooge McDuck style. Cartoon, obviously, to avoid paper cuts.

[vintageromancereader]

I guess you can say there's no place for subtlety in a novel as short as this, so the diary entries were really not necessary, in any form or fashion. It was pretty irritating, in fact, as if this author didn't trust the readers to be able to follow the present-day storyline. Considering this is piece of fluff as airy as cotton candy and as cheesy as Velveeta, that's definitely saying something about the supposed target audience of this series.

The names of the characters in this book are actually almost dull next to some of the others in the Loveswept series. I put down many a book at the thrift store because I couldn't with the character names.

I hope you know I mentally pictured you diving into a vault of books, Scrooge McDuck style. Cartoon, obviously, to avoid paper cuts.

LOL!!