Free-spirited, rebellious American coed Virginia Walters came to Europe looking for excitement and romance. She meets and marries Pierre, a member of the French aristocracy, and thinks her dreams of fairy-tale romance have finally been achieved. Virginia is in for a rude awakening, however, when day-to-day life in Morocco (where the family business is located) and the various idiosyncrasies of her husband and his family combine to make her life miserable. Although an initially interesting premise, this young-American-in-Europe yarn loses sharp focus in trying to tackle too many subjects. The reader must digest Virginia's dysfunctional, racist, and violent family; Pierre's lack of sexual prowess and Virginia's dissatisfaction with him; Pierre's mentally unstable mother and a whole host of bizarre family relations; Virginia's secret love affair with Pierre's cousin; a bloody coup in Morocco; and other surprises. Despite slow parts and digressions, however, this novel about a woman's self-discovery remains decently absorbing. Kathleen Hughes
From the Publisher
"Never Marry In Morocco" NOW IN ITS SECOND PRINTING Virginia Dale's fast-paced tale of domestic adventure on foreign soil
A free-wheeling young American woman finds that life, love, and marriage aren't all fun and games when international relations become involved, in Never Marry in Morocco, by Virginia Dale, a first novel based on the author's own adventures.
As the story opens, Ginny, recent college graduate, is taking classes in Madrid, Spain when she meets her future husband, Pierre, a wealthy student from Morocco. At first she is charmed by this suave Frenchman and the trappings of his family's wealth: the refined manners of Pierre's parents on their bucolic farm in southern Spain, so different from the crass urbanity of her California family; the exquisite Louis XIV furnishings of their several homes and their secluded Mediterranean beach house, so different from her family's dowdy barcaloungers; and, most of all, the heady freedom of Pierre and his fast-driving and open-minded friends. Never mind that Ginny's basically English-only and knows little of history, geography, or politics. For the first time in her life she is away from home, unrestrained by concerns of money and society, free to pursue her own dreams--and, it's fair to say, pretty well lost in those dreams.
But when Ginny finally marries Pierre, the shine quickly comes off those sunny days in southern Spain. Together they go to Rabat, Morocco, "for just a year," Pierre promises, to tend to his family's antique store. It quickly becomes clear that in aristocratic French society --and even more, in traditional Islamic society--a wife has her place, and it's a place far removed from that of a footloose girlfriend or fiance. As Pierre's "one year" stretches into three, that place becomes more and more confining. She doesn't have her own money, and now that she's married Pierre has quite a bit to say about how much she spends and what she spends it on. She hasn't her own time either, as most of the days formerly given over to marathon parties is now spent attending to her husband's business and to tedious social affairs. But worst of all, she no longer has the delirious freedom of that summer in Spain; she's now a wife, a rich man's wife, and after a few bad faux pas Pierre makes it clear that she'd better start acting like one.
This state of affairs is fast approaching intolerable when outside circumstances deliver the coup de grace. Ginny and Pierre are attending a birthday party for the King of Morocco at his summer palace where, without warning, a violent and bloody coup d'etat breaks out. Faced with mortal danger, Ginny must also face facts and admit how far she has strayed from home.
Virginia Dale survived to write the tale, of course, but in its aftermath she is hardly the innocent Ginny who went to study in Spain. She has faced the music and paid the piper, and finally learned what it really means to take responsibility for the control of her life. For the first time, she really has won her freedom.
A heady mix of adventure, sagacity, and worldly wit, Never Marry in Morocco combines romance, travel, danger, and a woman's search for values that really matter.
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