Customer Reviews

Yankee Lover (Harlequin Desire)

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Ms Barton barely has a base hit with this story. Her heroine Laurel Drew is an uptight, snobbish southerner who is steeped in her dixie pride. She is a history teacher writing a biography of her great-great grandfather Johnny Drew who was a wounded Union soldier but became a deserter to assist the south after he fell in love and married her great-great grandmother Clarice.

John Mason is from Ohio and he is in Alabama to investigate whether his great-great grandfather J. T. Andrews was buried in Alabama after the civil war. John has a suspicion that JT and Johnny are the same man which would make this southern war hero a bigamist since his grandmother insists that JT was married to her grandmother.

Laurel is attracted to John whom she meets at a local fair but he is just a crude ex-navy man and a Yankee to boot while she is a true southerner with a mile long pedigree. She is almost obsessed with Johnny and Clarice's rebel love story so when she hears that her idolized hero might have been a bigamist she becomes furious and will hear nothing of it. After all he is revered in their home town and it would be such an embarrassment if it turns out he was less than perfect. John Mason wonders how Laurel can live so much in the past, so do I.

This novel is really about Laurel getting over her prejudice and in many ways giving up her girlish dreams of her ancestors. It was odd because she never knew them and worse she referred to John Mason as Johnny any time they were in a romantic moment which makes John and the reader wonder if she imagines she is with Union soldier Johnny Drew. I could understand her desire to write her biography about a war hero but to act as if her whole world will be shattered because one of her ancestors had a checkered past is stretching it a bit too far.