Surrender My Love: I got fake-married for this?

Another desert romance from the 1970s. This one is, surprising, not a Harlequin. It’s published by Signet: Surrender My Love, by Glenna Finley, 1974 (not to be confused with Johanna Lindsey’s historical romance of the same name).

Like Court of the Veils, this romance is more of a desert romance than a sheik romance. It’s set in Morocco, but none of the main characters are sheiks. The back blurb also says it’s a “tale of love and danger” but I haven’t reached the danger part yet…So, be prepared for excitement!

Surrender my Love has the most terribly motivated fake marriage that I have ever read. Krista Blake and Ryan Talbot both work for an American zoo.  Their boss and his wife were invited to a zoo tour and government junket in Morocco (and Europe, although the book is set in the Moroccan part of the tour). At the last minute, they are unable to go and Krista and Ryan take their place. For reasons that are not clear to me, Ryan and Krista get married before they go on the trip because they think that will cause less workplace gossip? But they’re planning on getting an annulment afterwards, which will, I assume, cause an enormous amount of gossip.

THIS MAKES NO SENSE. Obviously, Ryan is secretly in love with Krista, and that’s his motivation, but even then, it makes no sense that they’ve gotten married. This is 1974! They’re on a trip for work! A zoo trip! Other fake-marriage or fake-engagement romances are often also fairly implausible, but at least they make sense. A tycoon thinks that a business owner will only sell him the business if he believes the tycoon is a stable family-man? That makes sense. It's a silly reason to get married, but it makes sense. There is no indication in this novel, however, that anyone else cares whether they are married or not. Sigh…

Anyway, the novel begins with their ferry trip from Spain to Morocco. Krista and Ryan are not getting along well. They snipe at each other and Ryan offers Krista unsolicited advice about the possibilities of sunstroke. They exposition the reason for their fake-marriage. Krista is skeptical about the necessity of it (yes!), but Ryan suggests that one reason for it is that zoo curators “don’t operate in the ‘beautiful people’ league. No affairs—no swinging swap sessions—we’re the conservative, dull, reliable sort who just pay taxes” (9). Okay, then.

When they arrive in to the dock at Tangier, Krista is surprise to find that it doesn’t look “very different from the rest of the world” (17). While Ryan had earlier referenced the romantic trope of sheik abduction, with a waiter in place of a sheik (“you’ll probably fall madly in love with a Moroccan waiter. Over here, they snatch you up and carry you off to the edge of the Sahara” (16)), he dismisses Krista’s expectations that Morocco will look like “a Charles Boyer movie”, as he describes it (17).  References to other media set in the Orient are popular in sheik romances, even if the references disclaim the connections. In fact, this reminds me of when I went on a bus tour for research in Morocco – we watched Casablanca on the bus on our way back to Casablanca!

In some ways, this book is like a tour of Morocco: we’re presented with a lot of interesting facts and trivia about the country and customs. For example, Krista and Ryan discuss whether the men they see in the port are wearing djellabahs or caftans; Ryan tells Krista “for your information, they're djellabahs.  Caftans are the same thing but a more deluxe model. They come in all colors” (18). We also learn that the reason some of the signs are in French is that “the French and Spanish left their mark when they occupied this part of the world” (19).

Krista and Ryan’s fellow travelers are: 

Hamid, the tour guide, who is in his early twenties; Herb Freeman, who’s in hospital administration; Jeff Snow, who’s in PR for the State Department; Mr. Weston, who’s in Public Health in the States, and his wife; and Eve Lenz (the Other Woman), who’s a pediatric psychologist, originally from Vienna and now living in the States.  Mysteriously, Eve was apparently a consultant to the Vienna zoo before she moved to the States. 

A very mixed bag. And they’re all piled into the bus and taken on a journey through Morocco. 

Next up… Is Ryan attracted to the glamorous Eve Lenz? And why are there so many roadblocks?