****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
I read romances regularly. Contemporary, historical, time travel, supernatural. This is the first one whose content I have been deeply disappointed in.The author writes beautifully. She crafts three-dimensional characters and takes great care with her outline, plot, characterizations, dialogue, descriptions. She is clearly an experienced writer and one well-versed in delivering a manuscript suitable for publication.I can't help but wish she had written "The Man from Tuscany" as a mainstream novel rather than a Harlequin romance. The reason for this is simple: when I sit down to read a romance, I want to be transported into a fantasy world. I do not want to be confronted by the harsh realities of life.This novel is ANYTHING but a fantasy. It contained far too much reality for me to consider it a series romance, and includes such themes as (warning: SPOILERS AHEAD):- Marrying the wrong man (not the hero) for security rather than for love.- The death of a child.- The gradual aging, physical infirmity, and death of both hero and heroine.- A spouse who admits, after decades of marriage, that he is gay.- A heroine who stays in her marriage because of her children, and a hero who stays in his because divorce is not legal in his country.- Decades - from the 20s to the 70s - in which both the hero and heroine are apart, with lives that are completely unfulfilled except by his career and her children.- The death of an assortment of friends, parents, husbands, wives, and I already mentioned the death of a child.I could go on, but you get the idea. These themes are NOT fantasy fare: they are reality. The only thing this author didn't do is strip one or both of the main characters of their sanity a la Alzheimer's.The themes in this book belong in a mainstream novel, not in ANY series romance. Whatever editor decided to stretch the boundaries of Harlequin series books should find a different publishing house to work in. She has no business mucking about with an escapist-fare formula that Harlequin readers have depended on for years.This book did not live up to the light fantasy fare Harlequin has served up to readers for literally decades. The writer is clearly experienced, skillful, and ready to step out of the tight box series romances demand and make the leap into mainstream. She would have had much more room to play with the plot, and not been forced to employ an awkward third person/first person point of view throughout. She could have lingered over the romantic encounters of hero/heroine, and over the anguish of their lives as well.The writer also would not have been forced to use a contrived technique of letting the aging (we're talking in her 70s and in a retirement home, people) heroine narrate her back story for hours on a plane to her grand-daughter (whose fate in the book is tritely predictable and shoved into the last fifteen pages).In summary, it will be a very long time before I look on the Harlequin Superromance line with anything but disappointment and suspicion, much less buy another one. The greatest disservice of all, I believe, is having the author waste an exceptional plot in a fiction genre that was never meant to accommodate it. For a series romance, this book was impossibly real - and therein lies its greatest disappointment.Harlequin, how could you?And please, Ms. Spencer, know that you're more than ready to tackle mainstream fiction.
