by Debbie Macomber
Recommended Ages: 12+
In The Man You'll Marry, Jill's friend mails her the family heirloom wedding dress that she believes brought her and her newly-wed husband together. It arrives in Jill's hotel room in Hawaii, just after she's spent hours on an airplane next to a grumpy businessman. Suddenly, despite her doubts about the dress, something seems to be drawing the couple together. But the question remains, can they be happy together? The book explores that question further than consumers of cookie-cutter romances may expect.
In Bride on the Loose, a desperate teenager wants her mother to let her go to the ninth-grade dance with the boy she likes. So, she tries to bribe their landlord, Jason, to sweep her mother, Charlotte, off her feet. Jason turns down the bribe, but the encounter sparks a flame between the two adults anyway and pretty soon, the only thing standing in the way of their shared happiness is the buried trauma from Charlotte's first marriage. This leads them on a surprising odyssey in the realm of mental health.
This list of Debbie Macomber's romance novels from 1983 to present, including standalone books as well as numerous series of various sizes, may give you an idea of how many books she has written and some of the ways they've been organized; I'm not going to try counting them now, but I'd say "hundreds" would be a fair estimate. I believe some of them have inspired made-for-the-Hallmark Channel movies. Even if that isn't the case, the "magic wedding dress" concept isn't far off a recent Hallmark series of "magic wedding veil" films, and the general tone of untrashy romance – with couples who don't fall into bed together until after they're married and, even then, the details are tastefully concealed – would work perfectly in that format. Except.
Except that they go further and deeper than "the hero couple overcome that one last obstacle to getting together and live happily ever after" formula so often seen in the TV movies, depicting a final threat to their shared happiness after the wedding bells fade. I only have these two novels to judge by, so I'm not sure whether that's generally the case with her work, but if it is, Macomber's romances have more to recommend them than mere chastity: they take care to test love's strength against the harsh reality of when the honeymoon is over. And in my opinion, that puts her in the company of such great novelists as Georgette Heyer.
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