The Perfect Hero

"If I can get 'naked' and 'virgin' into the first sentence, I'm happy," romance author Virginia Henley demurely quips. Comprising nearly 50% of mass-market paperback novels, the billion-dollar romance industry is--by any yardstick--big business. Barbara Doran's playful The Perfect Hero takes viewers on an engaging journey into the world of contemporary romance fiction, interviewing a Harlequin empire executive (Harlequin, which had its start in Winnipeg in 1949, releases 70 books a month, including the new Christian slang-termed "holy Harlequins"), catching the heated competition on a Carnival boat cruise for the coveted "Mr. Romance" title (think Fabio's successors), and offering comments from romance authors, including grande dame Barbara Cartland (97-years-old and still adding to her stunning oeuvre of 688 books!), Heather Graham, Charlotte Lamb, and Kayla Perrin. Viewers will also learn that (collection development alert!), romance novels are now being released in audiobook versions (with one new line--"My Romance"--read by daytime soap stars). While I personally think that a line like "she took all of his manhood" (from The Lorena Bobbit Story--just kidding) is probably better read silently than aloud, some portion of the current 50 million North American readers of romance fiction are likely to think otherwise. Although it only lightly touches on the issue of dark and occasionally violent sexual fantasies found in some of the racier books (and says nothing about the highly publicized, unsettling recent murders of romance authors Nancy Richard-Akers and Pamela Macaluso by their husbands), and playfully dismisses the question of literary quality ("well, it's not Dostoyevsky"), The Perfect Hero is a consistently engaging look at romance writers and readers that is sure to be quite popular. Recommended. Aud: P. (R. Pitman)