Reviews of Late Bloomer
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South Florida Sun-Sentinel - December 19, 2004
"Best of 2004: Late Bloomer."
Against her better judgment, a creative writing teacher in Arizona takes over writing a series of steamy American Indian romance novels. As the novels grow more torrid, her own love life becomes increasingly complicated.
Anniston Star - July 25, 2004
"Romance Roundup: Poisoned by Cupid's Arrow"
Many people believe romance has no place in literature, that it should be relegated, permanently, to the back shelves of fiction. To them, romance translates into stereotype: bodice-busting stories about gloriously beautiful women ravished by stout men in kilts, or flowing pirate shirts or miniscule breechcloths.
These critics don't know the modern romance novel, or realize that it can encompass much more. Often, these books are set within historically rich times and teach people the rudiments of history; or they are set in contemporary times and touch on serious social issues.
In any case, the modern romance is nothing like its much-maligned cousin of yore.
What's more, many of today's best-selling fiction authors started out writing series romances. Now these writers' books sell into the millions and are being consumed, quite obviously, by some of the very people who once mocked their existence.
Here is an introduction to the genre, along with a small sampling of the sort of modern romance novels that are drawing millions of readers these days:
Late Bloomer by Melissa Pritchard, Doubleday
In an unusual take on the classic love story, Pritchard's heroine is neither young, nor beautiful. Rather, Prudence True Parker is a middle-aged divorcee teaching New Age philosophy at a local community college. While visiting the local library, she meets Digby Deeds, the author of the wildly popular Savage Passion series. He is dying and would like Prudence to take over the series. She declines, but when financial circumstances force her hand, she starts writing. In the meantime, while visiting friends in Texas , she meets Ray Chasing Hawk, a strange young Comanche artist. He eventually moves in, bringing with him a caravan of equally strange people. The allure of the young man soon wears off and Prudence must decide between love and peace. Rather than write a traditional romance, Pritchard writes a real-life story with warts and all, with a good dose of humor and a touch of sarcasm.
Authors similar to Pritchard: Elinor Lipman, Jo-Ann Mapson, Jane Heller, Sherman Alexie.
Other Books Reviewed in this Article:
Slightly Dangerous by Mary Balogh, Delacorte Press
To Have and to Hold by Jane Green, Broadway Books
--Reviewed by Beth Cason
BookPage, America's Book Review Magazine, July 2004
"Writing Romance"
Debt-ridden survivor of a failed marriage, single mother and proud teacher of Advanced Personal Journey at her local community college, Prudence True Parker is a firm believer in the value of stories. However, romance novels, which she considers "lurid bromides" and "foul sop," do not count. In a chance encounter, dying romance novelist Digby Deeds makes Prudence heir to the 40 unfinished plots of his wildly popular Savage Passions series. Increasing financial desperation convinces Prudence to put aside her intellectual pride and accept Digby's bequest, and the stage is set for Melissa Pritchard's entertaining romantic satire, Late Bloomer . As she begins her first Native-American bodice ripper, Prudence's love life unexpectedly blossoms. She becomes passionately involved with Ray Chasing Hawk, a much-younger Comanche activist. Even though Ray serves as the unwitting muse to Prudence's novel, their relationship is markedly unsuited to the formulaic plot that Prudence types in secret at night. The often-unemployed Ray moves into her home and creates strife between Prudence, her teenaged daughter and her aging mother. Once it is time for close-kept secrets to be revealed, both Ray and Prudence have completed their own journeys of self-discovery, leaving each with the maturity and strength to recognize the cheapness of perfection and the value of forgiveness.
Late Bloomer
By Melissa Pritchard
Doubleday, $23.95
384 pages, ISBN 0385503040
--Caroline Richardson
Empowerment 4 Women, May/June 2004
Late Bloomer
By Melissa Pritchard
(Doubleday, 384 pages, $23.95 U.S.)
Any book that starts off with a 13-step women's studies diagram of a typical romance novel ("Table 4.2/The Narrative Logic of the Romance") has already won my heart without even writing another word.
The romance's conclusion promises her that if she learns to read male behavior successfully, she will find that her needs for fatherly protection, motherly care and passionate adult love will be satisfied perfectly. The explanatory structure of this argument is represented in Table 4.2.
—Janice A. Radway from Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture as quoted in Melissa Pritchard's novel, Late Bloomer .
It's obvious that Melissa Pritchard is a women's studies academic (she is actually the Director of the M.F.A. Creative Writing program at Arizona State University and a faculty member at Spalding University). As she tells the story of Prudence True Parker, a middle-aged teacher and single mother, Pritchard continually quotes women's studies sources, both for intellectual integrity as well as a source of dry humor. For instance, don't be turned off by the book's cover; the clichéd romance novel-ish image is simply yet another of Pritchard's feminist jabs at traditional romance novels.
Prudence's life almost methodically goes against every numbered "rule" in the above-referenced "Table 4.2." She is exactly what you'd imagine a single, middle-aged community college professor to be—a real woman, right down to the emotional insecurities, average looks, and uncanny ability to fall in love with the "wrong" man. Her teenager daughter, Fiona, who embarks upon her own journey of self-discovery, manages to follow right along in her mother's footsteps. Late Bloomer is an eye-opening coming-of-age story of both mother and daughter. Yet it is also proves to be a very profound feminist insight into the world of the traditional romance genre.
At one particularly intelligent point in the novel, Pritchard includes yet another diagram, the "Romance Reader Survey" in which the reader is asked to rank the three most distasteful elements that in their opinion should never be included in a romance. There are several choices, labeled a. to k., representing everything from rape to pre-marital sex, from the physical abuse of the heroine to "a heroine who is stronger than the hero." In the section that follows, Pritchard labels her book with corresponding letters, a. to k., wherein each of the "distasteful" plot angles is incorporated into Prudence's story. It's a fascinating insight into literary feminist exploration and is captivating—albeit sometimes hard—to read.
Late Bloomer isn't a book for everyone. Even I had to struggle to remind myself that this is not your typical easy-to-guess-what's-coming, sure-fire happy ending book. Pritchard doesn't follow any preconceived literary structures other than her own. And she is using the book not so much as a story-telling device but as a thought-provoking feminist tool. At times disturbing, other times fascinating, Late Bloomer is a one of a kind book that any women's studies scholar—novice or academic—should be sure to read.
—Carly Hope
on "Bookworm: KCRW Arts & Culture" a book review radio show,
May 13, 2004
Melissa Pritchard
Late Bloomer: A Novel (Doubleday)
Melissa Pritchard's Late Bloomer is funny. She's taken her ongoing interest in creativity and transformation, and placed it in counterpoint to a lively parody of New Age spirituality. New questions arise: How can you tell the real path from the fad? How can you believe in love without falling for romance?
--Michael Silverblatt
The Washington Post, April 11, 2004
"The pleasures of courtship -- and the puckish joys of sending them up -- figure prominently in these novels"
"Dear Prudence"
Melissa Pritchard rejects the emotionally heightened meeting scene between heroine and hero, a portent of things to come in this satire on bad romances that is nonetheless a romance in its own right. Instead she begins Late Bloomer (Doubleday, $23.95) with a shot across the bow of reader complacency. She quotes romance scholar Janice A. Radway's warning about the false promise that, in her view, the genre makes to the reader: "The romance's conclusion promises that if she learns to read male behavior successfully, she will find that her needs for fatherly protection, motherly care, and passionate adult love will be satisfied perfectly."
Prudence True Parker is an unusual romance heroine. She is nearing 50, divorced and the mother of a young woman old enough to be a romance heroine herself. As a creative writing teacher at a community college and author of short stories, she disdains the "phony passions" of romance novels. An encounter in a library rest room brings Prudence into the orbit of the dying author of the Savage Passion Series of romance novels, a man who writes -- and dresses -- as a woman. He wills her his remaining plot outlines.
At first glance Ray Chasing Hawk, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned "Comanches, Lords of the Southern Plains," is everyone's image of a savage romance hero: a Native American with long hair, chiseled face and a perfect body. This idea is a stereotype, of course, and Ray turns out to be attractive in a self-admittedly androgynous way, vain about his looks and self-absorbed. We watch him pursue Prudence, and we watch her allowing herself to be ravished by him sexually. Along the way, the conventions of the genre get pointedly sent up -- especially when Pritchard alternates a schlock sex scene from the bad romance that Prudence is writing with a raw sex scene between Ray and Prudence. "I don't do Hallmark sex," says the hero, "It's a physical act." With this remark, Ray denies a convention of romance -- for most romance writers and readers, sex is also an emotional act.
Nonetheless, the courtship between Ray and Prudence advances steadily. Ray, haunted by personal demons, seeks spiritual strength and cleansing in a vision quest. As the woman in his life, Prudence attends to lend support. Heroine and hero reach a mutual spiritual and emotional understanding during the Sun Dance at which Ray fasts for four days and undergoes ritualistic piercing. But Prudence's latest Savage Passion volume jeopardizes this understanding, and this unlikely pair seems bound for serious trouble.
This sharply written romance offers cutting insight into the place of aging women in society, the definition of manliness and the dance of courtship itself. The joy that accompanies the happy ending of romance novels is restrained here by the gritty tone, the blunt presentation of cultural differences, and by Pritchard's insistence on the conflicting views that men and women have of courtship.
--Pamela Regis
The Journal News, March 28, 2004
"Ashley Warlick's Fictions"
Melissa Pritchard's new novel, Late Bloomer (Doubleday, $23.95), sounds absolutely fresh. Her language snaps with newness, sharp detail and goofy humor — at turns it's intensely specific, then unabashedly playful. A car wombles or blatts, a woman scritches her scalp with a pen, a piece of lingerie has "the loose open texture of beef tripe." Two women gossiping become "a sort of hard-nosed knitting, with Sam purling one snide row, Bernice picking up the next." This freshness, this vitality, lends the book a self-supporting animation — she's created a world where a man might offer great phone sex in three languages, where a father's ashes might sit daily atop a pair of ironed boxer shorts, where Prudence True Parker teaches a community college class called Advanced Personal Journey.
You buy it — all this past-life, aura-infused flakiness; the foretelling of events with strong feelings, dreams or symbols; the way everybody knows yoga and keeps tarot cards in their purse. You buy it because then Prudence talks about the gloomy armpit of her un-air conditioned house in Tempe, and you'll believe anything she says. You can feel that house, and it feels like an armpit, and besides, the idea is kind of funny.
Prudence True Parker is a magnificent character, both smart and vulnerable, a single mom, an only child, a schoolteacher, a woman of mounting debt and resigned loneliness. A chance encounter in a library bathroom lands her the opportunity to take over the helm of a successful run of romance novels. The idea may be artistically bereft, but could prove financially life-saving. Simultaneously, the cards predict the advent of a handsome stranger in her own life, and shortly Prudence meets Ray Chasing Hawk, a beautiful Comanche and a tireless, cool-hearted lover.
"Truly, Prudence marveled, the most remarkable events in one's life, the most astonishing people, arrived mysteriously, with little logic or planning — as if some larger, more complex fate overrode the small, decent destinies most people planned for themselves." Prudence writes the romance books in secret. Ray comes to stay at her house.
Only Ray is distant and moody, insatiable and inconsiderate, and yet so awfully good-looking. Prudence is beset by him, and trouble mounts steadily: between Prudence and Ray, Prudence and her daughter, her mother, her finances, her general sense of freedom. Late Bloomer mines a running racial subtext, native versus non-native peoples, and strong spiritual questions bubble to the surface, all of it bound up in this stupefying, punishing sex between Ray and Prudence. Their relationship is stormy, then satisfied, then stormy again. What develops is a kind of meta-romance, a romance outside the context of romance, a realistic fantasy — whatever. Pritchard does not draw these strings terribly tight, even if she does insist on her happy ending, authenticity be damned.
But reading a book like Late Bloomer becomes not only about authenticity, what pleases, what works, and what is good. It's also about balance: what doesn't work, what leaves questions, and why you love the book in spite of itself. Pritchard has a photographic eye for the inner circle, the secret ceremony or cultish sport. As the novel draws to its close, she seems to have notebooks she still wants to open, places she still wants to take us, even as the heart of her story is moving at a faster pace. Her mechanics become transparent, like when Prudence and her daughter, Fiona, compare the "performance" of suspension (where a person is hooked through the flesh of their backs and hung from high places) to the piercing rituals of the Lakota Sun Dance. But what amounts to a sin of enthusiasm seems minor in the light of what's come before.
--Ashley Warlick
The "Book Review" Forum, March 10, 2004
"Late Bloomer"
Melissa Pritchard
Doubleday, Apr 2004, $23.95, 365 pp.
ISBN: 0385503040
In Tempe the single mother of a teenage daughter, Prudence True Parker visits the public library seeking books that will help her draft the syllabus of the fifteen week course, Advanced Personal Journey that she will teach at the local community college. While in the women's room of the library, she meets cross-dresser Mildred Crawley nee Digby Deeds. As Mildred, he/she write highly successful romance novels, but now he is dying. He believes that their meeting over the toilet bowls is fate dubbing her his heir while she figures he is mad. Digby gives her the rights to complete his Savage Passion series.
At a Native American fund raiser in Oklahoma , Prudence meets and shares a night of love making with Comanche Ray Chasing Hawk. Prudence returns home followed by Ray who moves in with her and her seventeen year old. Living research with Ray, Prudence tries to replace Mildred whose next book centers on a white woman/Indian chief romance.
Late Bloomer is an engaging romantic satire that contrasts “real life” with fiction. The troubled relationship between Ray and Prudence compares unfavorably with that in the novel that she is authoring. This book within a book gifts the audience with a biting edge to an eccentric tale that ironically is softened with a romance novel's simple climatic solutions that seem more apropos for the "Savage Passion" novel. Still Melissa Pritchard furbishes a witty spoof that mocks all that is sacred in the wonderful wacky world of the romance relationship.
--Harriet Klausner
The Chicago Tribune, March 7, 2004
"A fun mix of romance and romance novels"
Late Bloomer
By Melissa Pritchard
Doubleday, 365 pages, $23.95
To Prudence True Parker--the too-pale, broomy-haired divorced woman at the center of Melissa Pritchard's often hilarious Late Bloomer--readers of romance novels are as easily typecast as the high-breasted, heaving-chested characters in the books they read:
"Sparrows, every one. Drab, rumpled dowdesses. Look, there goes one now: wan, endomorphic, with bowl-cut brown hair, and a grayish complexion, sporting polyester slacks in sludge brown, a white bow-tie blouse and rustic Birkenstocks."
It's a pity, how pitiable these vicarious romantics are. It's unseemly, how they let their hearts throb for made-up people, how they sacrifice real life to typescript and garish covers. Things might not be going too well for Prudence--Did we mention that white patches spill across her skin like milk? That she's deeply, dangerously in debt? That she's not just lonely for a companionable man but also missing the beloved teenage daughter who is growing up, too quickly, into an independent soul?--but at least she's no romance reader.
But romance writer? Could things ever get so flat-out bad and desperate that Prudence would become a romance writer? Could one bad coincidence after another place her fate in the hands of this cliche-ridden industry?
Absolutely, and of course.
This, and sometimes too much more, is the stuff of Late Bloomer--a novel whose heroine (by virtue of a chance meeting with a dying author at a local library) is given a shot at continuing the successful "Savage Passion" romance series and turns that shot down until--freakishly, almost inexplicably--she finds herself in the sudden throes of passion with a much younger and very beautiful Comanche man. If she studies the form of the romance genre and if she pays attention to her new life, Prudence might just be able to pull off a romance novel or two, cancel a couple of outstanding debts and get both awkward feet back on the ground. She's a community college teacher, after all. She penned a few stories way back when. It shouldn't be so hard to write these formulaic, stereotyping things, and then to sweep them right out of her life.
A Pushcart and Flannery O'Connor prize-winning short-story writer and the author of two previous novels--Phoenix and Selene of the Spirits--Pritchard is a rambunctious, witty writer, devilishly attuned to details and pop culture, gleefully and liberally spicing her text with countless unusual, but rarely precious, words. Skies are "brumous." Cars "womble." Birds have "vitellene" wings. One widow is "ermetic," many form a "sodality." Pritchard's descriptions are mostly electric and exciting. Her dialogue is funny and engaging, though at times so tangential to the multiple plots that it becomes exasperating. Her sentences celebrate the verb and take interesting shapes, though some are played out a beat too long and collapse under the weight of their own raucous, freely associating cleverness:
"Years before, Prudence became convinced that some conspiracy of higher education demanded a warlike ugliness of its classrooms, a rigamarole of dust, ashy fluorescence, filthy linoleum, begrimed windows with thin, dingy splints for blinds (and once, a dying pigeon, lavender and plump, fluttering and flopping against the window as she tried to elucidate the narrative conflict--eventually, given permission, the students just spun their desks around to watch the bird's final moments, a horrific, superior, upstaging commentary)."
And then there's the plot, which goes this way and that way, careering from Tempe, Ariz., where Prudence lives with her daughter, Fiona, to Waikaloa, Hawaii, where her newly widowed mother is trying to survive her father's passing, to some sort of American Indian convention in Anadarko, Okla., to the Comanche lover's home in Houston, to a reservation in northern Arizona for a sun dance festival--and back again.
Chapter by chapter the cast of characters swells, as the sexually ravenous, somewhat androgynous, never entirely trustworthy and cash-poor Comanche, Ray Chasing Hawk, moves in with Prudence and an unimpressed Fiona and then (to top things off) invites his also not-exactly-rolling-in-the-cash friends and their animals (a wolf!) to move in with him, Prudence, and an increasingly absent Fiona. Debt-ridden Prudence becomes debt-desperate Prudence. The white woman cooks a zillion breakfasts for the Comanche, who finds her (starchy hair, blotchy skin, and all) sexy. Debts pile up and accusations fly and Prudence's mother, lonesome Deleanor, cannot for the life of her understand what has gotten into her once-tame daughter. Time and again, Prudence vows to rid herself of her sudden and exhausting extended family. Time and again she tries to reconnect with some semblance of her own true self. And then Ray--that hunky, glorious Ray--will make her 49-year-old heart pound with desire.
Pritchard is having a field day with all of this--reveling in the complications, the exasperations, the stereotypical genre twists that Prudence both lives and begins to plow right back into the "Savage Passion" series. There's as much literary smarts and sass here as there is a high-definition-TV cartoon quality. It's feral and vivid and outrageous; it's also extremely sly. It walks the narrow line between story and spoof, plot and commentary, and it does so daringly.
But underpinning it all, I think, is Pritchard's genuine compassion for Prudence, who is doing her best at this difficult juncture in life to sort out the good from the bad, the necessary from the nonsense, the person circumstances force her to be and the person she actually is. Prudence may live an exaggerated life, but Pritchard skillfully makes us care about what happens to her and Fiona and the never-less-than-sexy Comanche, who is ultimately far more than he appears to be, who transcends, hero-like, his own fictional category.
Most of all, I suppose, Pritchard makes us root for a happy ending, and in the end, Late Bloomer satisfies.
--Beth Kephart
Beth Kephart's fourth book, Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World, is due out in June 2004.
Romantic Times, March, 2004
"Mainstream Fiction Reviews: Contemporary"
Late Bloomer
Melissa Pritchard
Doubleday
****
Not long for this earth, Digby Deeds, whose alter ego is romance novelist Mildred Crawley, wants to see his Savage Passion series continue after his death, so he calls on community college professor Prudence Parker. While Prudence considers this request beneath her literary ability, a mounting pile of bills forces her to reconsider.
In a modern-day twist on the art-imitates-life concept, Prudence meets Ray Chasing Hawk, a Comanche man whose sexual proclivity exceeds anything she could imagine. Raye becomes the prototype for the hero of Prudence's novel, but the relationship turns Prudence's simple Arizona life into an increasingly complex and humorous farce. He moves in with her and is soon followed by his friend Rita, who brings along her holy man boyfriend and a pack of wolf dogs. Meanwhile Prudence's teenage daughter, Fiona, moves in with her boyfriend, Kirby, and Prudence's very proper mother fears she is "turning Indian."
With her household turned upside-down, Prudence must cope with her jealousy of Ray's female friends and feelings of being an outcast in her own home.
Alternately introspective, funny and full of quirky insights, Pritchard's novel adds credibility to the romance genre, even as it explores one woman's search for self. (Mar., 320 pp., $23.95)
--Sheri Melnick
Vanity Fair, March 2004
"Hot Type: In Melissa Pritchard's ravishing Late Bloomer (Doubleday), a strapped divorcee with a teenage daughter stumbles into ghostwriting Native American romance novels, only to find life imitating art."
--Elissa Schappell
Publishers Weekly, February 23, 2004
"Late Bloomer"
Melissa Pritchard
Doubleday, $23.95 (320 p.) ISBN 0-385-50304-0
Pritchard's brilliant mix of romance and satire may have a heart made of cactus, but it goes down like hot Indian fry bread dipped in honey. "Shouldn't one live one's romance, not read about preposterous imaginary ones?" muses Prudence True Parker, college prof and single mom shortly before romance novelist Digby Deeds (aka Mildred Crawley) bequeaths her the last 40 plot lines from his bestselling Savage Passions series as a reward for passing him toilet paper in a lavatory. Parker, author of one award-winning book, hasn't written written anything in years, but has mounting bills and a 17-year-old daughter to support, so she accepts. Then Parker meets gorgeous Ray Chasing Hawk, Comanche artist (and former porno films soundtrack composer), a self-styled "Lord of the Southern Plains," 14 years her junior. Although Hawk likes to bite rather than kiss and says, "[Y]ou are so white you glow in the dark," he's soon sharing Parker's Arizona nest, painting, modeling and preparing to become a Sun Dancer. Meanwhile, a parade of vividly drawn characters, including Hawk's fellow Sun Dancers, invade Parker's white-bread life as Hawk teaches Parker that "savage" love bears little resemblance to the novels she's been secretly writing. Pritchard's quicksilver ability to blend her biting social/political commentary with a rueful analysis of relationships makes this lesson in true romance an absolutely sage-scented delight. Agent, Joy Harris (Mar.16)
Forecast: The author of three story collections (The Instinct for Bliss, etc.) and two novels (Phoenix and Selene of the Spirits), Pritchard has won two Pushcart prizes and the Flannery O'Connor Award. Readers of literary fiction who eschew romance will go for this one, while the jacket art, a close-up of an archetypal Romantic Times couple in a clutch, will draw romance fans.
--Melissa Hall
Booklist, February 1, 2004
"Late Bloomer"
Mar. 2004. 320p. Doubleday, $23.95 (0-385-50304-0).
Arizonan Prudence True Parker teaches surprisingly effective touchy-feely writing classes at a community college. Divorced, 48, in debt, and excruciatingly lonely, she's also smart, funny, generous, spiritually inclined, and open to new experiences, of which there are many in this clever roller-coaster ride of a novel. First an enormously successful romance writer who specializes in romances about white women and hunky Native American warriors anoints Prudence his heir to the series Savage Passion. Prudence has no intention of writing such trash until she meets Ray Chasing Hawk, a gorgeous, young, and virile Comanche artist and model, and finds herself enacting a romance of her own. Or is she? Angry, difficult, and manipulative, Ray turns Prudence's life upside-down. Now truly desperate for cash, she starts writing Native American romances in secret, torrid, and cliched tales that play in ironic counterpoint to her increasingly complicated life. Pritchard overloads her otherwise wily tale with trivia, but her shrewd humor, canny insights, colorful characters, and intriguing plot prevail. Is this a romance? Yes, although by critiquing the genre, it transcends it.
--Donna Seaman