I have to tell you all something, while reading this, I had a kind of enlightenment. An epiphany if you will . . . well, I won’t get that deep, but I did have a realization that I hadn’t had while reading all these old favorites again. 

Over the summer I pulled down the Long, Tall Texans and gave those a re-read and was a bit snarky about the attitudes and sensibilities of the characters. I would even say out loud, “Come on! No woman is going to put up with that!” or, “What man says this? What man does this?” Marveling all the while how on earth I’d ever lived and breathed these books as a younger person.

Diana Palmer is the reason I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be Diana Palmer. I bought every single book I could get my hands on, and my mother will openly tell you that when I moved out, I took her entire collection with me. Yes, I stole from my own mother.

Gentle reader, I forgot one important crucial thing. I grew up, the books didn’t. The books are a time capsule of how things were then. It wasn’t the author’s fault that the book didn’t evolve over time like I had.

I don’t read Austen or Dumas with that kind of arrogance, why in the world would I read a Diana Palmer novel that way?

The book is roughly 36 years old. It came out in 1986. I can’t expect a book that was written in the 80’s to be gelling with a brain that is living in 2022. This book is a period piece, our lead characters were born roughly in 1951 and 1964, and we didn’t live through the same stuff.

That being said, I came to this realization at page 96 of the book. 

And it changed my reading experience entirely. I stopped looking at the characters with a touch of snark. I stopped smirking at their beliefs and values. I simply began to enjoy the story for what it was. A product of its time.

In fact, I found myself reading pages over just to really absorb what I was reading. I studied the chapters, the story structure, the characters far more closely than I ever had before. Which made the entire book far more enjoyable. 

Now, I’m eager to go back through my collection of paperbacks and give some of them a fresh look with my new attitude. What great stories have I set aside just because it was too dated for my tastes?

I’m Cautiously Optimistic that I’ll discover something interesting.