The Promise of Happiness, by Betty Neels

In an honest effort to blog at least briefly about every book I read in June, I'm honorably backfilling to cover a book I read before I accepted the rachelmanija challenge.

Betty Neels wrote roughly a quadrillion Harlequin novels from roughly 1970-2000, all of which appear to exist in a kind of 1930-1950 haze that make it impossible for you to read them in as actually taking place in the year they were published, so don't even try. Occasionally Harlequin reissues ones and upgrades record players to CD players and this is nonsense.

Anyway, Neels's books are a cozy kind of comfort reading for me. She wrote novels where young women--either snappy and sensible or shy Cinderella types--fall in love with (almost always) rich Dutch doctors while also wearing clothes and eating meals that Neels describes in some detail. (The wonderful site The Uncrushable Jersey Dress reviews the novels and includes at the end of each a non-comprehensive listing of food and costuming descriptions. They get me.) Generally speaking, everything is cozy and domestic. There is a stereotypical Other Woman that the hero does not love but nevertheless spends a lot of time with, presumably just to disconcert the heroine; the Other Woman wears slinky clothes and may range from "pettily rude" to "actively endangering children for sport." Class is super-important. Women are allowed to care passionately about and be very good at their jobs as long as those jobs are within the feminine scope, like nursing; obviously being doctors themselves is off-limits. There's plenty people might legitimately bounce off of here, but in this context, I'm rarely bothered. They're just quiet, undramatic books with lots of food and clothes descriptions and the satisfying children's literature arc of a character gradually getting to be appreciated, and they're smoothly written.

They hardly ever work for me as romances, mostly because the hero is contractually obligated to be inscrutable to the heroine (though not to us) for the majority of the book, so he's always behaving in ways no human being would actually choose to, but The Promise of Happiness, which is very quintessentially Neelsian in that it sports basically all of the above tropes, actually has several excellent romantic lines, including this:

'I like you, too, Becky.' His voice was beguiling.

She said stonily: 'Yes, I know. I heard you telling your mother than in Trondheim--you liked me, but I wasn't your cup of tea.'

'And I was quite right--but I do believe you're my glass of champagne, Becky.'

Plot! Becky opens the novel by walking miles through the rain with a cat in a shopping bag and a dog on a piece of string, and it gradually emerges that she's escaping a particularly hellish situation with her stepmother and stepbrother, who emotionally blackmailed her out of her nursing job and have been keeping her in their home as an unpaid housekeeper ever since. Her only money is what she's been able to scrape out of the shopping budget without them noticing. Her life has been horrible, and even though she's still essentially broke and without options, she's finally broken away at four o'clock in the morning (trying to get to town to catch a bus before her family will wake up and catch her) because she overheard her stepbrother plotting to finally kill her dog and cat while she's doing the grocery shopping. Threatening to kill them is how he got her to come home in the first place, but now he apparently figures the lack of money will keep her there anyway. Heroically, Becky sets off.

And is offered a ride by a rich Dutch doctor in a Rolls Royce. This is Tiele, who is a little irritated at being unavoidably morally obligated to help this mousy girl. He steps up nonetheless, offering her a ride and a meal and, when Providence intervenes to basically drop the opportunity in his lap, a job caring for his mother, who has just impulsively fired the nurse who was supposed to escort her on the cruise back to Holland. Great, Becky will look after his mother until her broken leg heals, and then Tiele will help her find a job in Holland, where her family will never find her.

Of course, increasing encounters conspire to keep demonstrating Becky's spirit, kindness, competence, and ability to find joy in her life, and Tiele gradually and irritably falls in love with her, though in typical Neels fashion he fails to break up with his current fortune-hunting girlfriend first, all the better to delay Becky's realization that he's kissing her for an actual reason and not just... random high spirits. They get a number of nice moments, from him rapidly calculating that she isn't (and can't be) dressed for the fancy dinner he wanted to take her to and saving it by pretending he always wanted it to be a picnic to him taking note of how quickly she's learning Dutch.

Basically, this novel is Neels to the Max, done very well. It's full of domesticity and cats and dogs and food and clothes and Cinderella tropes and great literary tours of Holland and Norway.

Food porn examples found just by searching the novel for the word "soup":

"...Becky, willy-nilly, had lived on a slimming diet as well, with little chance of adding to her meagre meals because she had to account for the contents of the larder and fridge each morning. Now she ate her way through mushrooms in sauce re-moulade, iced celery soup, cold chicken with tangerines and apple salad, and topped those with peach royale before pouring coffee for them both."

"The food was mouthwatering; Becky settled for crabmeat cocktail, chilled strawberry soup, Virginia ham with rum and raisin sauce with a sald on the side because the Baron assured her that that was essential to her good health, and by way of afters blueberry pie with whipped cream."

"Presumably the Baron had booked a table, for there was delay for them, they had their drinks and were served at once; iced soup followed by lobster and a salad because the Baron had recommended them and washed down by a dry white wine. And Becky was persuaded to sample a waffle smothered in whipped cream for dessert..."

I don't know what caused Neels's sudden fascination with iced/chilled soup, but it at least made it easy to find these particular passages.