cimorene

The sideplot contained in Alexander McCall Smith's Friends, Lovers, Chocolate and The Right Attitude to Rain, vols 3&4 (I think) of his Isabel Dalhousie books, constitute the most engaging and moving het romance I've been exposed to in quite some time.

And although I find something a little fussy about the protagonist and the narrative style, I really liked these books, finding them both intelligent and extremely simple and easily-digested: one-day books, both of them, perfect for an airplane except that I've not been on an airplane trip short enough for just one of them in a long, long time.

Another nice thing about them is that, although they belong to the mystery genre, they're not murder mysteries, nor remotely hard-boiled; on the contrary, they're sort of philosophical ponderances of manners, bordering on comedies, with a lot of basic sociology, psychology, and philosophy simmering away with the other concerns of the intelligent, independent middle-aged heroine. It's interesting that, written as they are by a man, this series' underlying thematic unity is a layered and faceted contemplation on the position of women in today's society - or perhaps that's just the lens through which I view it. I read this incredibly brilliant post in between the two books, and it considerably enriched my experience of the second:

aqueri's An Abstract of an Essay, which is a Racefail post also touching on feminism:

And every time there is recognition of something's greatness, there's also the attempt to recapture that greatness, and genres are created and become mainstream and the genres rarely succeed the way the original does - because I do not think a Mills&Boon romance can ever capture the true desperation of Jane Austen contemplating the fate of women in her time and imagining how she might escape that - within the strictures of her society, because that's what she was capable of imagining. Now we can imagine women escaping so much further, romance novels reinforce the structure JA was trying to break free of in a way she doesn't, and never will, herself.

You need only look around a single daycare, the little girls' clothes and overwhemling princess obsessions (because Disney princesses are the old rags-to-riches folkmyths stripped of their connotations of escape, transformed into a contemporary cultural myth for the leisured upper class of the world which encompasses the middle class of the wealthy lands of mommy's and daddy's treasured princess, where the new narrative constructed is that impossibly perfect beauty/femininity as manifested in little girls becomes the source of their 'deserving' the privileges they are born with), to know that there's a fate of women to be escaped in our time too, a circumscribed world even for the wealthy and successful woman.

I suspect that narrative will continue in the following books in the series; I don't think it unlikely that I'll be disappointed by the rest of them in some way, but I plan to read them anyway.