Books › My dear innocent
My dear innocent
First published 1981 · 192 pages
A sun-baked, tension-filled vintage romance where resentment slowly melts into undeniable attraction amidst the dust of an Australian horse-training stable.
What it feels like
Immersing you in the sun-baked heat of rural Queensland, this vintage romance delivers a potent blend of workplace tension and simmering, unspoken attraction. The narrative moves at a brisk, engaging clip, characteristic of classic 1980s category romance, pulling the reader through a landscape of dusty stables and intense emotional crossfire. Its prose is earnest and heavily focused on internal turmoil, capturing the dizzying confusion of a heroine caught between resentment for her lost home and a magnetic pull toward its new owner. The atmosphere is thick with yearning and the inevitable friction of jealousy. Readers who delight in nostalgic, angst-heavy love stories featuring forced proximity, rugged settings, and old-school romantic melodrama will find this a perfectly satisfying escape.
- Mood
- sun-drenched
- tense
- yearning
- rustic
- Tone
- earnest
- angsty
- melodramatic
- romantic
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- workplace proximity · loss of home · unspoken attraction · jealousy and misunderstanding · loss of innocence
- The writing
- Straightforward and emotionally charged, leaning heavily into internal turmoil and atmospheric descriptions of the Australian landscape.
- The arc
- Moves from resentful displacement and guarded confusion to intense, undeniable passion and secure love.
- Who it's for
- Fans of vintage category romance who crave forced proximity, rural settings, and the classic angst of 1980s love stories.
Content notes
- vintage gender dynamics
- mild sexism
About the book
She just wished she could hate him
Camira had grudgingly come to accept her new circumstances--strangers living in her family's Queensland home and working the horse-training stables.
She could even accept Marc Riley as Camira Lodge's new owner. He was an excellent trainer, and she actually enjoyed working for him. But the man himself disturbed her.
She was just beginning to understand her feelings for him when David Thorpe and Lisa Mackenzie turned up to spoil everything.
Description from Open Library.
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