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Alaina Abbott is a fresh-faced, idealistic journalist from the Cleveland Herald on her first foreign assignment: covering the Vietnamese war. Stationed near an American Air Force base in Saigon, Alaina immediately finds herself facing resistance from the local soldiers – no one wants to talk to a liberal-minded journalist eager to put yet another negative spin on an increasingly unpopular war.
Thanks to the Army’s Media Relations Office, Alaina manages to secure an interview with ace pilot Colonel Robert Blackhart, the swarthy champion of the Air Force. But Colonel Blackhart is certainly displeased by the news – he doesn’t want some “bleeding-heart liberal breathing down his neck,” and writing about sensitive war issues. And he certainly doesn’t want to have a woman walking around his base! Their first meeting is catastrophic, to say the least: Alaina barely has time to enter Blackhart’s office before they’re at loggerheads with each other. But the two are soon drawn together – and pushed apart – by circumstance, physical attraction, and Alaina’s investigation of the suspicious number of fallen planes flying out of the Army’s maintenance department…
Several sub-plots wend through the book, including Alaina’s relationship with her old college-pal Parker, the sad tale of a young half-American, half-Vietnamese boy who is allegedly Blackhart’s illegitimate son, and the slow and sombre unwinding of Blackhart’s complicated past. The erotica is fairly underplayed – I certainly wouldn’t read it for the sex scenes, which far and few between. However, as a warning, the book does includes attempted rape, some language, violence and vivid descriptions of a war-torn country and the horrifying effects on its people. The characters are brusque and brutal. It’s not for the faint hearted and not exactly the kind of romantic story I’d been expecting.
I took an unusually long time to read this book, simply because I found the two protagonists completely unlikeable. His troubled personal history and good looks notwithstanding, I still can’t understand why any woman would be attracted to a man like Blackhart, who is proud of sleeping with married women and prostitutes, calls Alaina demeaning names and even tells her they slept together when she was out-of-her-mind on drugs. While the book ultimately seeks to redeem him and present him as a good man (and certainly, compared to Alaina’s other options, he’s the best pick of a bad lot), many of Blackhart’s actions smarted with me. So be warned: the hero Blackhart is no dashing white knight but a product of his time and his environment, and his name is more than apt.
Reviewed by RJ Astruc
for The Road to Romance
September, 25, 2006
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