Forever And A Baby

Cover

Title Forever And A Baby

Author Margot Early

ISBN 0373709129

Publisher Harlequin Enterprises Limited

Category Fiction -- Romance

Shira's Rating

<== Buy from Amazon.com in the U.S. (Prices quoted in U.S. dollars, shipped from U.S. warehouse.) Not available from Amazon's U.K. store.

What It's About

This is a romance novel. Dru Haverford's rich husband, rendered sterile by an accident, sends her out to find a man to father a child. The events of the present are told against the background of a traumatic event that occurred in the past in Sudan. The characters all have a strong Middle Eastern connection. Dru and her cousin are both belly dancers, her husband is Bedouin, handsome Ben Hall (the sperm donor) grew up living in the Middle East as his anthropologist father studied the tribes, and there was that horrifying event that occurred when they were adolescents in the Sudan.

The book is set in Massachusetts, and ensconced in the rhythm of people who fish for a living.

Its Good Points

So far as romance novels go, this one offers much more complex character development than most of the ones I've read. It was satisfying to read it, and by the end I found myself caring about the characters more than I usually do when I read a romance novel.

For those of us who love Middle Eastern dance, there were references throughout the book to Middle Eastern dance, music, instruments, and culture. Although the dance was peripheral to the plot, the characters did dance in a couple of places where it seemed to fit. There were many tidbits about the cultures of the Middle East and North Africa which were interesting, although I must admit I wondered how accurate the details were after having caught a couple of "facts" that I questioned.

The author clearly did a great deal of research about the Middle East and North Africa. For example, she correctly placed the guedra as a ritual of blessing performed by a tribe of Tuareg in Morocco who wore clothing dyed blue with powdered indigo beaten into it.

On The Negative Side....

As noted above, the author did perform extensive research to support this book. However, occasionally a detail would emerge that would seem wrong. For example, she referred to guedra as sometimes being used as a love dance, which doesn't match what I learned about it in the workshops I have taken.

Probably my biggest complaint about this book was that it relied heavily on the use of flashback as a tool. Each flashback revealed a tiny bit about the events of the past that contributed to the behaviors of the present. I found it frustrating to have that part of the plot revealed as slowly as it was, and after a while I found it tedious. Don't get me wrong--I can appreciate flashback when used in moderation. But in this book, it was frequent and made both the past history and the current story seem choppy and fragmented.

There were so many characters, that at first I found I needed a scorecard to keep track of who they all were and how they were related to each other. Fortunately, the author provided such a scorecard at the beginning of the book!

Final Comments

This is a romance novel, and romance novels do have a dose of sex in them. For that reason, I would not recommend this book for younger readers. However, the sexual references in this novel were much, much more discreet than what I've seen in most romance novels, so readers who dislike extensive sex scenes will find this one more to their liking than most.

I should disclose that the author used my web site as a reference when she researched the book, and she mentions my name (my real name, not my dance name) in the acknowledgements at the beginning. She did secure my permission ahead of time to use material from my site, and I am comfortable with how it appeared in the book.