Late Bloomer
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Prudence True Parker teaches a course called Advanced Personal Journey at a community college in Arizona, but her own personal journey is not really advancing. She’s divorced, debt-ridden, and starting to feel desperate, when she meets Digby Deeds (alias Mildred Crowley), the author of the wildly successful Savage Passion romance series, at her local library. When the dying Deeds offers Prudence the final forty plots of his popular series, her financial needs trump her literary aspirations, and she accepts. To her astonishment, her own life soon begins to outpace Passion’s fevered tales, and she finds herself in the midst of a plot involving psychics, a sexy young Comanche lover, Native American activists, medicine men, and even a few wolves. Quick-witted and laugh-out-loud funny, Late Bloomer follows Prue on her madcap journey, as she finds her real life surpassing the wildest flights of her imagination.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 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, "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 biting social/political commentary with a rueful analysis of relationships makes this lesson in true romance an absolutely sage-scented delight. , 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.
