Book of the Day Roundup: February 12-16, 2024
You’ll Do
A History of Marrying for Reasons other than Love
Marcia A. Zug
Steerforth Press
Hardcover $29.95 (352pp)
978-1-58642-374-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Marcia A. Zug’s detailed social history You’ll Do covers the evolution of marriage via its economic and cultural motivators.
Though the book examines other non-romantic motivations for love, such as colonists marrying Indigenous women to gain access to tribal lands, its primary focus is on marriage as a means of financial security. For women in particular, it notes, money remains a big reason for entering into a marital contract.
Referencing literature, legal rulings, and documented anecdotes, the book explores how attitudes toward marriage have both evolved and persisted throughout history. In the opening chapter, for example, the book references how Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice demonstrated diverging opinions of marriage as seen through the characters of Charlotte and Lizzie. The book delves further into the idea of women marrying for money rather than love with an in-depth analysis of coverture, a seventeenth-century English law adopted by the American colonies that made a husband and wife one person under the laws of marriage and ensured that a wife had no legal claim over her husband’s money or property; in turn, she lost control over her own fortune.
Demonstrating how historical motives for marriage persist, the book revisits the marrying-for-money motive later in the book. It cites Melania Trump as one of the more famous examples of a modern “gold digger.” But it also argues that—with the exception of forced marriages featuring child brides and other abusive situations—non-romantic unions should be respected and understood in the context of the social, cultural, and economic environments that continue to make them necessary.
You’ll Do is a fascinating and thorough historical review of the institution of marriage.
GAIL HOFFER-LOIBL (December 27, 2023)
Meant for Me
Tay Marley
Frayed Pages
Softcover $18.99 (328pp)
978-1-998854-39-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A Beverly Hills event planner navigates her grief in Tay Marley’s romance novel Meant for Me, about an impromptu trip that sparks healing.
Addie was raised by her half-sister Margo; rending flashbacks reveal both Margo’s complicated feelings of longing and the trauma that Addie experienced as a teenager. As an adult, though, she self-protects; Addie also enjoys romantic stories in secret. But after Margo dies, devastated, vulnerable Addie boards a bus from California to Texas, carrying little more than her phone and backpack.
Once she’s in Texas, Addie seems to be subject to the machinations of fate—though she also feels some ties to home. A compassionate policewoman, Raine, notices Addie wandering in town and invites her to her family’s farm. There, Addie meets Zac, one of the farmhands. Both he and Raine are hospitable as Addie helps them with daily farm chores. Though she bonds with them, love isn’t foremost on Addie’s mind; instead, she finds respite in nature, horses, and her growing rapport with Raine’s fiancé’s daughter, a precocious girl who derives wisdom from avid movie-watching. Among this warm makeshift family, Addie begins to heal.
Zac is often present as a person who is concerned for Addie, and they develop romantic feelings for one another. While the novel’s racy scenes are tonally at odds with their otherwise sweet romance, there are sympathetic parallels between Zac’s experiences and Addie’s—both sidelined their personal passions to maintain their family’s businesses, for example. Their relationship and others are enriched by heartfelt conversations, practical instances of assistance, and people’s willingness to grow.
Celebrating women’s friendships, the stirring romance novel Meant for Me follows the bittersweet choices that a woman makes after a hard loss.
KAREN RIGBY (December 27, 2023)
Of Love and Treason
Jamie Ogle
Tyndale House Publishers
Softcover $16.99 (400pp)
978-1-4964-7967-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Love blooms between a renegade Christian and a jailer’s daughter, but is threatened by controversies, in Jamie Ogle’s invigorating romance novel Of Love and Treason.
In third-century Rome, Iris was blinded in an accident. She longs to regain her sight, but her father is in debt, no remedy has helped, and their pleas to multiple gods failed. When she meets Valens, he promises to pray for her. Then Emperor Claudius bans marriage to force unmarried men into army conscription, prompting Valens to feel concern about women, widows, and ex-legionnaires who’ve lost their rights. As both a notary and an underground church leader, he navigates the gulf between legality and moral conviction, performing marriage ceremonies in secret.
Meanwhile, Iris and Valens have encouraging encounters with one another. His prayers draw her toward faith, even while fears about her father’s debts and his superior’s threatening proposition loom. Iris’s courage when she’s facing unknown prospects is striking. Iris learns the tenets of Christian beliefs and witnesses sincere conversions, and the couple benefits from the support of their loyal friends and a perfumer, all working within the clandestine house churches of the period.
Indeed, the dangers that Christians faced are made clear: in the Roman empire, people believe in sundry gods, live with hardships, and reckon with what loyalty to an ever-shifting empire should look like. To many herein, the Christian God is unfathomable. When Valens faces charges of treason, and some of Iris’s people stand to gain from the event, the book’s sense of suspense increases. The plot’s turns are unpredictable and tense, though there are rewards to pursuing faith even when hope is distant.
In the historical romance novel Of Love and Treason, a new couple faces perilous trials and learns the meaning of sacrificial love.
KAREN RIGBY (December 27, 2023)
Love Novel
Ivana Sajko
Mima Simić, translator
Biblioasis
Softcover $15.95 (112pp)
978-1-77196-598-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Ivana Sajko’s Love Novel plunges into the difficulties that occur after a couple without means gives in to desire.
The story is told from the points-of-view of an unnamed man and woman living in an unnamed city and country. The man, a well-educated aspiring journalist, first sees the woman, an actress, performing on stage. Afterward, he approaches her in the theater lobby and attempts to woo her with his knowledge of Dante. The woman is flattered and succumbs to his charms. They spend the night together and conceive a child.
The couple’s history is conveyed in flashbacks, opening with an intense argument centering on their dire financial situation while their baby sleeps in the next room. However, the man and woman do not listen to one another, and their dialogue is not provided. Instead, the couple’s streams of consciousness unspool in lengthy sentences, filling the short book with dense paragraphs. The effect is immersive—even at times oppressive, much like poverty itself.
Flashes of absurd humor and flights of fantasy leaven the hardships, as when the man loses a shoe while indulging in a political protest. He returns home with a plastic bag on his foot. The woman earns extra money for her family by dressing up in costumes, including those of a panda and a vampire, and handing out vouchers in front of the cinema.
There are no happy or even tidy endings here; still, a ray of hope peeps through. The lack of names and the generic title suggest that political oppression and penury could happen to anyone, anywhere. Love Novel is a universal story about passion and poverty that’s told in rich language.
SUZANNE KAMATA (December 27, 2023)
How We Named the Stars
Andrés N. Ordorica
Tin House
Softcover $17.95 (356pp)
978-1-959030-33-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A first-generation Mexican-American college student is altered by love in Andrés N. Ordorica’s elegiac romance novel How We Named the Stars.
Daniel’s freshman year at an elite Ithaca university was marked by tumult—including the death of his roommate, Sam. At the novel’s outset, he addresses departed Sam, retelling the story of how they met. At first wary and anxious on campus, Daniel was a scholarship student living far from his California home; his early impressions of athletic Sam were influenced by such fears in unfounded ways. Nonetheless, they became friends.
Still, the ordinary challenges of young adulthood were compounded by Daniel’s background. He recalls experiencing racist assumptions in class and feeling pressured to pretend that everything was fine for his family’s sake. He wrestled with fears about coming out, too, handling hateful comments while remaining hyperaware and cautious. He also developed near-reverence for Sam, whose everyday kindness is amplified in the wake of his loss.
The tense, rearward-gazing narration takes heightened turns through the school year’s cinematic autumn. It is interspersed with thoughts about Daniel’s Uncle Daniel, who died when he was young but whose story paralleled his namesake’s. Hesitations and unspoken yearnings gather, generating anticipation about how the boys’ fleeting, confusing love will end. A poignant motif that surrounds the naming of constellations further hints at the beauty and constancy of connections across time, even as the seasonal movement of the book’s background pushes the story toward its inevitable end.
A sensitive story of a first love, How We Named the Stars is a nuanced coming-of-age novel about hiding, heartbreak, and healing.
KAREN RIGBY (December 27, 2023)
Barbara Hodge
