Jewels of the Sun by Nora Roberts: A Sort of Review

For FCC (I believe those are the people) purposes: I do not know Nora Roberts aka La Nora. Though I’ve sat in on her Talks at RWA conference. And every time I see her at those conferences (every time) I have a fangirl moment that I’m more than happy she isn’t aware of. I bought this particular book in the Raleigh (NC) airport at 2nd Ed. Book Sellers. (The cashier at the time was beyond awesome. I perused the murder mystery for a while, but when I asked where’s the romance she stated, “You can never go wrong.”)

Now to the meat of this sort of review…

I’ve been racking my brain on why Jewels of the Sun changed my life. Why this particular book stays in my mind as the first real romance I read. I know it’s not. I read Sunset Embrace by Sandra Brown, Fallen Angel by Francis Ray, Fast Women by Jennifer Crusie, and probably several others before I cracked open the pages of Jewels of The Sun.

I’ve always known it had something to do with Jude Francis Murray, the heroine of this novel. There was something about her journey from America to Ireland that always pulled me into the book no matter how many times I’ve read it. Jude goes there and ends up finding/accepting her true self, love and magic. Not to mention the poetic way Robert’s describes the locale:

“Roll after roll of green hills shimmered under sunlight that glowed like the inside of seashells and spread back and back into the shows of dark mountains.”

Jude is self-deprecating about being a “neurotic tight-ass”, which made me root for her through-out the novel. The theme could easily be How can you live if you never let yourself? And Aidan, the hero, with his charm, Irish brogue and pride is the perfect flawed hero who you want the heroine to fall in love with because you’ve already fallen in love with him yourself.

But still, that’s not why this book resonates with me. Definitely not the reason why I shelled out five bucks for a book that I had at home. (Though it’s put together with tape and a prayer that it won’t fall apart if I breathed too hard on it.) It’s because on the first page Jude lived in in a way that choked the life right out of her.  I understood that type of life, even if it wasn’t on a conscious level. To be honest, before I could find out who I was as a person, I had to be an adult.  Adults are responsible . Fun is out, because the adults who have fun are the cautionary tales of what not to do.  Sacrifice is the name of the game. Hindsight being 20/20 I can read the words and see why this book took my breath away.

“Of course it can’t hurt me. It’s harmless and it makes me wonder. It’s been too long since I let myself wonder.”

So simple, but eight years later those few lines still speak to me. I lived in the extreme, flawed ideal of what it meant to be an adult.  And slowly, but surely if I stayed on my current road I would end up being a neurotic tight-ass or worse bitter and belligerent.

I still have those moments and when I do I always seem to pull out Jewels of the Sun. But the wonderful thing is instead of reading the book and wishing I could be like that I let myself wonder without caveats, or reasoning. I consider my missteps badges of honor. And hell, if I’m going to be someone’s cautionary tale, I might as well make it a damn good one.

Any books that changed your life?