Big Hair, Shoulder Pads... and Dating Your Secretary?

Whenever I go on a trip, I bring along a few old series books that I can toss when I reach my destination. (Even thrift stores don't seem to want 80's series titles any more, so I don't feel bad about tossing them.) Sometimes I find a gem, sometimes a dud, and sometimes something in between.

Tomorrow's Love Song by Georgia Bockoven (HT 261)
(1987, Contemporary Series) 7/18/07
Grade: 3

Amy discovers that her father was cheated of his share of a now-prosperous pharmaceutical company. She disguises herself as a dowd and gets hired as a secretary for the CEO, the playboy son of the man who cheated her father. But she finds that the son is nothing like his father, and she can’t help her attraction to him.

Although this book was well written and easy to read, it was noticeably dated, and the characters were somewhat stereotypical. It was very hard to read this “secretary falls for the boss” story without thinking of sexual harrassment, which doesn’t seem to cross any of the characters' minds. But I was more bothered by the mental lusting - the heroine meets the hero and suddenly she can’t keep her eyes off of him, thinks of every woman as a catty rival, and seems to lose her brains altogether. The hero is depicted as unrealistically perfect - he’s a playboy, but he’s really just misunderstood. Despite all of this, I finished the book - there were some good things here, and the author writes well, I was just disappointed that she never got past the 80’s romance stereotypes.

I'm not sure why books from 10-20 years ago are harder to read than books from 50 years ago - maybe because they have enough similarity to the present that the incongruities stand out. There are still lots of "boss and secretary" romances on the shelves today - mostly Harlequin Presents, which I don't read - and I wonder how they get past current-day attitudes about sex in the workplace. I read one workplace romance last year, Legally Tender, and I thought the author did a good job in that one in addressing the question without squelching the romance.