Reading While Black

From the cover flap:

“Beautiful, impressionable Hellen North meets Oliver Marathon when he is on holiday. Blessed with looks, determination, and a family background so illustrious that is has smoothed his way into the upper echelons of British Government Service in colonial Hong Kong in 1920, Oliver sweeps Hellen away with a marriage proposal. They ignore the whispers and warnings of people who say that a simple farm girl is not an acceptable Marathon bride, and plan to marry in Hong Kong.So when Oliver is summoned back East peremptorily, he asks Hellen to follow. But her courage falters during her long voyage. The more she learns about Oliver’s family, the more she despairs of being accepted. In this vulnerable state she meets George Curtain, a man with a dubious reputation, but just enough gentlemanly behavior to fool Hellen. He lures her ashore in Singapore and entangles her in a cruel trap. Finding Oliver seems an impossibility as Hellen makes her way in a world of passion and intrigue, where anything can happen.”

I have a soft spot for the 1920s as well as China, so snapping up a romance set not only in the 1920s, but in China was a no-brainer. Not only does Worboys possess a knack for painting a vivid picture of life in upper class circles at “Home” and abroad in one of Britain’s many colonies, but also for creating exuberant characters with a minimal number of words. No elaborate back stories or heaps of exposition here; the plot moves at a brisk and lively pace despite the many obstacles strewn in Hellen’s path to Oliver Marathon.

The relationship between Hellen and Oliver falls on the Barbara Cartland side, with both of them instantly in love, certain they were destined to be with one another. In fact, throughout the book the two of them seem to exist in a sort of dream world where their actions have no consequences, and true enough, Worboys allows them the liberty of coming together in Hong Kong despite Hellen’s marriage to the louse George Curtain. Hellen is both naive and shrewd, an incongruous mixture of personality traits that somehow works in this book. While Oliver is never fully fleshed out beyond the charming and privileged young man with the world at his fingertips and the book grew predictable towards the last third, I couldn’t help but really enjoy China Silk and wish more romances were written with this much élan and wonderful use of an “unusual” setting.

I’m on an assassin kick having picked up this one, Kelley Armstrong’s Exit Strategy and Leslie Langtry’s debut. Call it a delayed reaction from missing Sydney Bristow.

I wish books came with disclaimers. For all the title and the blurb advertises, Selena McCaffrey is not an assassin. In fact, she’s only killed one man and it was in self-defense. Brain-washed and wounded, Selena is ordered by her “Uncle William” to pack up her bungalow in Key West and move to Tulsa, Oklahoma to keep watch on the cop assigned to the vigilante case tormenting the city.

Though the book spends a good deal of time covering the case and introducing the friends and family of Detective Tony Ceola, the book is pretty well-paced and interesting enough to keep my attention. The spine says “Romantic Suspense” and I’d say the percentage of romance to suspense is 45/55. I liked Tony–a pretty inoffensive, expectedly sexy male protagonist whom I found very likable despite his lack of depth. My trouble with this book? The very person the series is supposed to revolve around. Butler gave Selena a suitably wounded background what with being an abused mixed-race orphan whose life was manipulated by a complete bastard, but she never lept from the page.

The product of her mother’s infidelity with a black man, she was raised first in Puerto Rico, then in Jamaica and when her “uncle” finds her, in a Swiss boarding school. Pretty straightforward one would think, but I didn’t find it so. Tony, among others, kept describing Selena as an “island girl”(which I found highly annoying), but there was nothing about her characterization to suggest that she was from the Caribbean despite her explanations of her heritage. Another issue I found with Selena was her incessant moaning over her mixed heritage and how she didn’t fit in anywhere.

Quite odd considering the ties between the Latino and black communities in America, the presence of black Latinas (I’m baffled over whether her unknown father was a black Latino or a black American, and hello: Zoe Saldana and Gina Torres!!), the Caribbean’s acknowledged mixture of many ethnicities, and the fact that Selena wasn’t even raised in America to have the sort of hang-ups bi-racial Americans are alluded to share. Instead of treating Selena as an individual who has black ancestry, she came across as a “white” interpretation of what goes on in the mind of a black woman.

I’ve read the book twice over the weekend and while it does possess a certain charm that urges me to continue the series, it’s ultimately forgettable and disappointing when placed vis-a-vis with long-time thriller/suspense writers.