Jake, humiliated and angry, sets out to punish her. But when she gets to work the next day she finds that he’s the star TV presenter whose scripts she’s been typing. Natalie, ashamed, hopes never to see him again. And just as things are about to get really hot and heavy, she calls him Angus, and he leaves in a rage (and under the impression that her husband is still alive). There Natalie sees a man who looks just like Angus–well, the back of his head does.
A friend persuades her to come to a party in an attempt to cheer her up. Widow Natalie Buchan loses her wedding ring on what should have been her second anniversary (her husband, Angus, was killed in an accident just before their first). The opening chapter sucked me in because it sets up a highly dramatic conflict. I had a feeling of déja vu–or is it déja lu?–as I read the opening chapter, and remembered that Tumperkin (aka author Joanna Chambers) wrote a great (spoilery) review of Frustration, as well as a post on Lamb Sunita mentioned it admiringly in a reflection on the “allure of old skool HPs”. Some of the most thoughtful romance readers I know loved this book. While to some extent the book is exactly what I expected, and I think it would have seemed rather dated even in 1979, it does its thing so well that I enjoyed it even though it isn’t usually my thing. It’ll be a doormat heroine cruel, obsessed, domineering alpha hero yadda yadda, not my thing, I figured. I looked forward to broadening my romance education by reading this, but “broadening my education” is exactly how I thought of it–an exercise in literary historical curiousity. Janet W on Twitter), an adventurous romance-reader with access to some great used bookstores, generously sent me a package of books that included Charlotte Lamb’s Frustration, an “old skool” Harlequin Presents novel published in 1979.
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