The Rana Look

She had a "look," a style that went beyond beauty, a gift that had made Rana Ramsey a modeling legend.

But when she began to feel like a precious object, always sought after but not for herself, she ran - to a rickety boarding house in a small Texas town, where nobody knew her and she could be somebody, anybody else.

But when quarterback Trent Gamblin chose to recuperate just down the hall, Rana learned she couldn't hide from the world forever. Trent accepted her new identity and promised to be a friend she could trust. But when a loving friendship blossomed into a thrilling, intoxicating romance, Rana yearned to tell him the truth. Would he understand that the look that mattered was the one in her lover's eyes?

Original Publisher: Bantam
Original Year of Publication: 1986
Page Count: 185

Now here's a 1980s romance that has held up since its original publication date. If you can look past the author's trademark purple prose and hilarious obsession with male chest hair, it is ultimately a sweet story about two people who discover what love truly means.

Rana Ramsey is an internationally known model, famous for the titular 'Rana look.' This life of supposed fame, fortune, glamour, and money makes her absolutely miserable, mostly because her mother is an absolutely horrible. Rana finally has the guts to turn her back when her mother proposes selling marrying her to a multi-millionaire old enough to be her grandfather. Fed up, she runs away from the world she knows, settling in as a frumpy spinster in Galveston, TX. She disguises her body in shapeless clothes, her eyes with tinted eyeglasses, lets her hair hang long and lank, and quite naturally gains 20 lbs (by eating like a normal person) to fill out her figure.

She's made a life for herself as a fabric artist, and sells her handiwork through a connection she made during her modeling days. She lives in a boardinghose with her landlady, who provides the bumbling comic relief in this piece. She is horrified when said landlady's arrogant professional-football-playing nephew comes to convalesce for the summer prior to his training camp.

Trent Gamblin is a complete asshole at the start of the book. He thinks he's God's gift to women, and since dowdy ol' "Miss Ramsey" is obviously a lovestarved spinster, he decides he'll have fun with her during their time together in the boardinghouse. He starts pulling his usual obnoxious bullshit, but Rana calls him on it in an amazingly kickass way. Like, this is a feminist rant that resonates today, thirty-odd years later. It is truly a thing of beauty, and a complete breath of fresh air, considering even the strongest women tended to fold under their love interest's thumb the second he showed any interest in this era of romance novels.

Trent can't avoid his baffling attraction to his neighbor, though, so he agrees to become her friend, and then freely admits he doesn't know how to be friends with a woman. Rana educates him on how to treat a woman as a human being instead of a sex object, and slowly but surely a friendship blossoms between them. They are still attracted to each other, but their instalust deepens into something resembling love, especially when Trent actually starts apologizes for arguing with her over stupid and petty shit.

Trent doesn't completely escape his alpha/asshole ways, including a long scene where he sulks because of his sexual frustration and how Rana (whom he knows as Ana) is obviously either frigid or a prude, and he is pushy when they finally start having sex, including overriding her initial "no" their first time. But for the most part, he is a remarkably likeable hero for an 80s-era romance. Forced to develop feelings in order to sate his sexual needs, he manages to grow as a person as well. He falls in love with plain little Ana and doesn't care who knows it - his aunt, his teammates, the world.

There's a great scene were he introduces Ana to his best friend, and said best friend rails at him after the fact for using Ana just to stroke his fragile male ego. Ha! Excellent comeuppance.

The tragedy mentioned in the back-cover blurb is Rana's agent dies suddenly, and her mother heavily implies that said agent committed suicide after Rana turned down a lucrative contract, because her mother is a colossal bitch. This ultimately is what brings Rana and Trent together, in a comforting-embrace-leads-to-more kinda way. They both throw caution to the wind, fall head over heels in love, and have tons of mind-blowing sex, and Rana worries that if she ever reveals her "true" identity - that she's not just plain Ana, but glamorous Rana - that Trent will hate her and push her away.

Ultimately, she does just that, and he is indeed upset, until she convinces him to kiss her to prove to him that she's the same woman he fell in love with. I admit it, I'm a sucker for these sorts of things - the body knowing on a primal level what a stubborn mind tries to resist. I really like Rana's growth arc, because she is a love-starved individual, as for the entirety of her life, no one could see past her looks to see the real her until she went underground, so to speak. Trent fell in love with her in spite of her plain features, and it meant more to her than anything in the world. I really connected with that, and thus were happy for their happily ever after.

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