Paperback Reader

So, rather than making myself cranky, I swore off the author. Then, due to a timing error on my part, I found myself in dire need of a book to read. I also found myself faced with a fairly dismal selection of potential titles. After rejecting James Patterson on principle, it was Kurland or nothing. I’m sure you can imagine that nothing was not appealing.

So I bought the Kurland, When I Fall In Love. She’s a really good writer, very smooth with a great sense of humor. When she’s on her game, you can devote many hours to her stories. Maybe, I thought, I was a bit hasty when I broke up with her before. I mean, what if it was me, not her? Shouldn’t every author get a second chance?

When I Fall In Love tells the story of beautiful and talented concert violinist (and baby clothes maker) Jennifer McKinnon, the sister of various other novels by Kurland, and Nicholas de Piaget, who has the distinct honor of being just about “the most perfect knight of his day.” No knightly virtue, including extreme handsomeness (presumably a virtue, I don’t have my knight handbook handy), escapes him. He is also related to many other Kurland novels.

Which is lucky for Jennifer as she time travels right into a big problem: the land of the novel’s erstwhile villain. Said villain, based upon evidence such as Jennifer’s materializing from thin air while wearing odd clothing, concludes that Jennifer is a witch. The only good witch, he surmises, is a crispy one, and he begins to build a bonfire just for her. Nicholas, naturally, saves the day, takes Jennifer home to his decrepit castle, and then ignores her because she’s, I believe, too beautiful to talk to. Also because he realizes she’s from the Future and he doesn’t want to talk to her about that sort of thing.

Nicholas’s moldering castle – apparently, he’s been in an emotional funk which lead to serious lack of oversight which lead to a lawsuit waiting to happen – is just the sort of place designed for ignoring unwanted houseguests (or wanted but ignored). Luckily for Jennifer, Nicholas has his younger brothers along, which allows her to master Norman French (she conveniently speaks Gaelic, as does Nicholas, but he’s decided to hide that bit of information. Why, I have no idea, but he does). When Jennifer works up the gumption to try the time travel portals and head home, he, uh, sort of helps her, but mostly ends up preventing her from becoming a burned witch.

Jennifer is an accomplished musician in this century, but other than that, I can’t tell you a whole about her. She has sisters (as noted), she’s fond of her parents, and she’s learned something about healing herbs from her time-traveling relative Jamie (another Kurland novel). She knits. She’s beautiful. She’s worried that she’s going to have to take employment as a serf in medieval England. Oh, did I mention beautiful? That seems to be her chief skill.

Nicholas, you will recall from a few paragraphs ago, is the knightliest of knights. We are told up front that he has a murky past, which prevents him from finding true love and all that. It’s actually that he’s technically a bastard and that he was in love with his (not-related-by-blood) sister. Things were different in the olden days. Anyway, she married a time traveler and is blissfully happy. Nicholas has apparently been brooding since then.

I think I’ve summed up these characters rather nicely, don’t you? I'll save you the rest of the characters; suffice to say there are many and they all appear in other Kurland novels and I simply can't recall the level of detail about them that Kurland seems to think I should in order to follow all of the people flitting in and out of this story.

After rescuing Jennifer, the novel settles into a fortnight of wooing. For those keeping track at home, that is fourteen days of Nicholas – who knows that Jennifer is from the Future because she exhibits the same traits as his brother-in-law – trying to convince Jennifer to fall in love with him and stay in the Past. If only they could, oh, have a conversation of substance during this period (forbidden under the rules of engagement), then Nicholas would realize that he had Jennifer at “pardon me while I rescue you from this bonfire”. Instead, we live through each and every day of wooing. The monotony is broken toward the end when Nicholas’s marriage-minded grandmother returns to the family keep with a new batch of potential brides.

This potential bride thing is just irritating. Grandma wants her grandson married so she brings wagonloads of rich, eligible women from the far corners of England to Nicholas. He then suffers their presence until they’ve worn our their welcome. Wash, rinse, repeat. There isn’t much in the way of story development behind this scenario, which is fine because it doesn’t add a thing to the tale. I believe my takeaway was supposed to be that there was no woman alive in medieval England who was worthy of Nicholas’s love, so only the Future could help.

It is amazing how little happens in a novel that is mostly comprised of two weeks of wooing. And I have to stop typing the word “wooing” because it makes my head hurt.

The ban on heart-to-heart conversation means that Kurland effectively sidesteps any manner of substantial conflict: the fact that Jennifer is from another century and wants to go home, the fact that Nicholas is still nursing a broken heart, the fact that there’s a crazy dude who seeks revenge on the de Piaget family due to stuff that happened in another book, the fact that Nicholas apparently has wreaked havoc in abbeys and has uncomfortable relations with the clergy, the fact that Jennifer is unknown and untitled and yet treated like royalty (it should go without saying but you know me: she’s immediately accepted and loved by his family). Even the fact that Jennifer has left her beloved and valuable violin in the Future is room for great conflict, music being her life and all that.

Not only does Kurland fail to sustain conflict, she fails to build it. That makes it almost a relief when the big reveals happen. To greet the various and sundry revelations as earth-shattering rather than “so, yeah, what of it?” would be to lie to the reader. I mean, there’s a lot of lip service paid to the extreme angst Nicholas feels over the possibility that Jennifer might decide the Future is a better deal, what with indoor plumbing and all. If only these two kids could have a serious talk, so much worry (bad for your skin) could have gone unwritten.

Presumably the lack of serious discussion about where the couple with make their future home is due to the fact that history recalls Nicholas as a brave and true knight. There is no way anyone involved in the story even considers that he might become a 21st century man. He is too great a knight. I’m taking this at face value as, well, he’s doesn’t really do anything knightly over the course of this novel. I guess it’s sort of like his so-called murky past. I’m still scratching my head over that one.

There is a serious danger to making the romance the actual story: in addition to no conflict, there’s no action. Kurland tried valiantly to fill the space with lovely little vignettes of medieval life – picnics on the beach, dancing, friendly jousts in the name of traning, chatting with the family over roasted beast – but she soon runs out of excuses to prolong the novel. Thus, she (half-heartedly) introduces (or, rather, reintroduces) the notion that Jennifer, a perceived witch, is in mortal danger. Suddenly, our villain, absent for three-quarters of the novel, returns to wreak havoc. You can well imagine how this ends for our characters.

But wait, there’s more! In what can only be the result of consulting her “Romance-by-Numbers” reference guide, Kurland pulls out a classic plot device. Was it:

1. A time travel twist, sending all the characters back to the Stone age?


2. A mystery disease that only Jennifer, using medieval tools, including her hand-carved knitting needles, and ancient herbs, can cure? Or,


3. A wicked, immoral, appear-out-of-the-blue, will-do-anything-to-be-Nicholas’s-wife virago?

Please submit your answers below. I’m going to give it away, but submit anyway. Do you have a better twist?

Yeah, the virago. Out of nowhere, there is a woman who desires, above all else, to be the wife of Nicholas, the perfect knight. She has spent years plotting her, uh, seduction. She’s going to win. She’s going to win. She’s going…go down without even a token fight. Sheesh, it’s like Kurland isn’t even trying. Both villains are dispatched quickly, but, possibly, not as quickly as their entire plots were developed.

Because there wasn’t much story to tell here, Kurland presumably found herself faced with a dilemma when it came to word count. And, bless her heart, she managed to solve the problem in a most unique way. Yes, my dear friends, she wrote not one, not two, but three endings. The blasted book had three endings. Also a prologue, but the three ending thing, being far more egregious, has me worked up.

We had the traditional wedding at the altar with the obligatory blissful deflowering of the virginal heroine (yes, Wendy, all of that and the kitchen sink, too). Then we had the traditional epilogue-esque ending, the one where we are treated to a glimpse of the happy, growing family. Nothing says “it’s over” like tiny cherubs teething on their big, strong daddy. And then there’s the third and final ending where Jennifer’s sister waxes emotional, hoping her sister lived out her life in happiness.

Unless I miss my guess I believe this third ending falls under the category of “setting the stage for future novels”. Please, get me into a twelve-step program before I do this again.

You can find Lynn Kurland here. You can but When I Fall In Love here or here.