Blue Days at Sea by Anne Weale
Sarah is a plucky girl reporter!\xa0 Lyle is a hot war correspondent who's also a news anchor I guess?\xa0 (Maybe he's a far more uncool Morley Safer?) Anyway he isn't a print journalist but he's decided he's going to restart the weekly newspaper on Compostela, a Caribbean island that we might as well call Smasrshbuda.\xa0 She wants the job!\xa0 He's incredibly inappropriate and she takes it anyway!\xa0 It's 1981!\xa0 He has a terrible mustache and looks exactly like that guy from The Young and the Restless\xa0that Sara keeps calling Vincent!\xa0 (Courtney is screaming.)\xa0 It's\xa0Blue Days at Sea\xa0by Anne Weale, Harlequin #444! This is an interesting little book because - okay, remember back to\xa0our NINTH episode which was TWO YEARS AGO omg when we covered\xa0Adam and Eva\xa0by Sandra Kitt?\xa0 We were so young then. That was the first Harlequin by an African American author featuring a Black couple.\xa0 I read when we were working on that one that there was a stealth Black Harlequin earlier, that was written with no physical description of the couple's skin tonesl and that even the original cover is racially ambiguous.\xa0 And it turns out that that's true, and that it's this book, and y'all it is\xa0weird.\xa0 They're actually both British, and most of the people on the island are Afro-Caribbean.\xa0 But I'd assumed that to pull this off it would have to be a setting where the race of the two leads isn't necessarily so relevant that it feels odd that it's not mentioned.\xa0\xa0HA.\xa0 HA.\xa0 These people are constantly in situations where they're naturally talking about race and where their conversations would be different depending on their backgrounds, experiences with institutional racism, cultural upbringing - everything!\xa0 On the one hand it's pretty bold - it's always talking about the consequences of colonialism in the Caribbean, about racism, about interracial relationships - but then it's kind of tone deaf that Anne Weale, who's white, thought she had the cultural competence to write this.\xa0 So that's a major content warning.
BUT that's all!\xa0 For the low low price of this $5 used Harlequin paperback you also get: a sex pest on the mantel in Act 1 that goes off in Act 3! Labor law violations innumerable! A really awful 1981 guy! Fat shaming and diet culture that just kind of sneak up on you every so often! Sexual assault and really awful failures to support her afterwards! I am probably forgetting something!