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Iconic Mills and Boon mid-century trope: Man’s literal job is to destroy the only thing the girl holds most dear, usually a house. Sometimes a hotel or other hospitality institution, like an orphanage.
In the case of the Enchanted Trap, it’s both – a hotel for children whose parents are going abroad for a month or so.
A kennel for children.
The house is called Monkani and it sits on a parcel of land needed for a road. Why the road has to go right through the house and not around it is unclear.
Monkani means ‘many thanks’ in the aboriginal language of the Australians who lived there when the house went up 120 years before, when the land was granted to ther heroine’s great-great grandfather by the government in thanks for the discovery of silver. Many thanks!
Kathy Starr’s prose is terribly good.
Listen to this intro.
But the man is Not Nice.
Yes, he has a way with the children staying at the hotel, so the reader is meant to recognize a tender heart beneath, but he uses his physicality to brow beat and disarrange the heroine.
I don’t like it when a man squeezes a woman’s shoulder until it hurts to make her do something she doesn’t want to do or picks her up bodily to take her somewhere she doesn’t want to go. Especially in real life, and not in a romance novel.
But I kept reading because the heroine is strong in more interesting ways than muscle.
Benison “Benny” Fairland decides to charm Dominic Boyd the road builder and make him believe through repeated bouts of subtle interest cunningly withdrawn that she is submitting to his bulldozer.
There is very often a moment in these old texts where the author has the hero say something that doesn’t time-travel well, like this:
For a moment you forgot and followed your heart and not your mind…Admit it, now. Admit, too, Benison Fairland, that deep, deep down you’re not really resenting all of this as you’re so obviously trying to. That, like the rest of your sex, you fundamentally prefer to be regulated and controlled.”
This time she could not plan any answer, she simply had to burst out. “You — you—“ she flung, as red in the face as the red handkerchief round the neck of the man in the electric drill.
“All women like authority,” he said kindly. He lit a cigarette. “Don’t explode,” he advised her. “I like you nice and intact as you are, not disintegrated. I’ve enough disintegration on my road.
A lot to unpack. At least he doesn’t want her ground up.
This exchange is followed by another moment when he picks her up and for the second time in the book’s first act carries her against her wishes.
So.
What is the reader supposed to make of Benny’s impotence in the face of Dom’s authority?
Really hard to say.
Am I supposed to feel the feminist in her inarticulate rage? And/or should I find Dom’s appeals to her heartfelt desire to be controlled exciting. At this point in the book, I have no idea.
Kate Starr, the author has made the heroine impotent in so many ways that I wonder if Benny can only come out on top in the end. Otherwise, what’s her trajectory? Could it be that she starts out a “fish-spinster” resisting the patriarchy, and turns into a submissive guppy?
Alas, it ends with a ritualistic finale for this era’s romance: the heroine wins, but only by getting the chance to destroy the thing she holds most dear by her own hands, a sacrifice for the evidence bag of love.
And in 1963, no sex. Not even as awesome make out session.
I read it all the way through, but in the end two thumbs down.
GIULIA TORRE 