The Romance Quest!: 'Tempest' by Beverly Jenkins

Colton Lee has been looking for someone to help look after his daughter after his first wife died. Regan Carmichael is looking for an excuse to go on an adventure and go live in one of the new territories. Obviously, the solution for both of them is to get married, after an exchange of lonely hearts ads and letters.

Tempest is tricky to talk about. It's not actually that different from Forbidden in quality, but I don't like it as much as the latter. I think the main reasons I like it less is that it doesn't have some of my favourite tropes, and some patterns and quirks in Jenkins' writing went from amusing to annoying or side-eye inducing.

Turns out I really like romances with the big conflict being "We can't be together Because Reasons." Which makes arranged marriage stories like this one just not be as fun. The only thing stopping them from being more intimate is Colton's intimacy issues. Which is a conflict, I guess, but not necessarily one I find fun,

Also, Colton seems to be replaced by the Sexy Halloween Costume version of himself in the sex scenes. Which there are a lot of. Which is not a bad thing-- but I tend to read in public, and I was reading a large print copy-- so the sex scenes were scenes that I had to hurriedly skim through.

But I like a lot of the side characters. Honestly, I kinda ship Regan with Spring (Colton's sister.) Mostly because in the beginning of the book, Spring and Regan get along a lot more than Colton and Regan.

And I appreciate the way Jenkin's does HEAs. A lot of romance author's kind of crash into them, like a train running through it's barriers. They keep the last conflict going on for as long as they can, and then the characters run into each other arms and there is a paragraph or two of 'hooray, the conflict is resolved! Now they can live happily ever after.' And that resolution, because of it's brevity, is not always... convincing. But Jenkins tends to write a few pages of HEA, where we get to see the characters' new happy normal, and be like 'yeah, they are going to live happily ever after.'

And honestly, I can live with the characters' tendencies to know way too much about supreme court decisions, and tendency to make references to modern things ("Black people, voting for democrats? That'll never happen!") for those HEAs.

Now, this next section is not Tempest specific, it also applies to Forbidden. But it's a pattern that becomes more noticeable when you look at both books, and it's not a... great pattern.

( anti chinese racism cw? )

Content warnings for the book: child abuse, racist massacres, people shooting each other with guns, rape in backstory.