Reon Laudat

It's a Love Thang

First published in paperback by St Martin's Press, 2002 September 16, ISBN 0-312-98302-6.

Oh, the things I do for this Website.

Romantic fiction is a huge business. Actually, it's not. It's a stupendously enormous business. I'd had hardly any contact with it since giving up reading my mother's women's magazines decades ago, until I began heavy-duty research for Yarns Without Threads. Not having read an out-and-out romance for ages, I've got through six in little more than a year. Four have been dealt with in the "Unfulfilled Promise and Unfulfilled Expectations" area, one had neither plot, title, blurb nor cover implying naturist content, but Reon Laudat's It's a Love Thang has to go in this main section.

The basic plot appears to be a staple of romantic fiction. Two good-looking and intelligent people meet but, for sundry reasons, take an instant dislike to one another (more accurately, each is determined that the other does not represent an ideal mate). The plot requires either that the pair are kept together by external events, or keep encountering one another. By the end of the story, true love has blossomed, and everyone is destined to live and love happily ever after. Generally, a few accidental and deliberate misunderstandings occur along the way to keep the pot simmering.

One minor respect in which Reon Laudat's work differs from the majority of the genre is that she and her lead characters, are black. So when I read the book's blurb, which tells of scenes in a "nudist colony", I was intrigued. With only a few exceptions, fictional naturists are white. Sadly, although Laudat sets three full chapters of It's a Love Thang in a nudist colony, there is absolutely no social nudity in the book. There is sexual nudity in other chapters - sex seems to be common in modern romantic fiction - but not naturist nudity.

Although I am well aware of the dangers of imputing characters' views to the author, it does seem that Laudat's heroine, Ebony MacKenzie, is voicing Laudat's own distaste for nudism in the book. Have a read of the extract and see what you think, taking into account one of the author's acknowledgements of "heartfelt appreciation" is to "Cincinnati Enquirer columnist, Jim Knippenberg, who is not a nudist, but happens to have the best nudism research file that he was more than happy to share". To me this implies that a non-involved approach to nudism is the right attitude in Laudat's eyes.

The lack of social nudity in the book explains the first two ratings below, but the third is more than a little subjective. Many tens of millions of readers get great enjoyment from romantic fiction. I am not one of them, assuming my sample of six novels is vaguely representative. I find the working out of the "potential soulmates who dislike each other" plot to be tedious. Characterisation tends to be shallow, even the less-well-off characters seem to have plenty of resources while the wealthier ones are boringly over-endowed with money, property and position. I just can't get interested and involved - I can't care about these people. So, read It's a Love Thang only if you are a Mills and Boon fan, in my opinion. Even there, I advise against it if you want to avoid an unremittingly textile take on naturism.

Ratings:

Nudity	Naturist nudity	A good read?

Last updated 2005 October 8.
 
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