Published 1983 via Avon
★★★
Ellen Emerson White is one of my all-time favorite YA authors, and I don't turn down a chance to read one of her books—even if it's an old-school, out-of-print, out-of-date romance novel. It's sort of staggering to think that this was published so close to The President's Daughter, which kicked off a truly excellent series. That's not to criticize this book unduly—you can see in it some of the rhythms of conversation and humour that White has developed more fully in her later books, and her patterns of mother-daughter relationships, and it's overall engaging. (Also, it—and I think at least one of her other books?—was published while she was still in college, which boggles the mind.)
But yes—the language is dated, and the relationship is...I'm not sure what the right term is, but I'm leaning towards 'heavy-handed'. Trish is the prototypical good girl and Colin the prototypical 80s bad-boy hero, which is to say that if you scrape off the barest layer of spackle, he's not actually a bad boy at all. He's busy failing all his remedial classes, for example, but with a little bit of encouragement from the right people—voilà! Honors student. He actually reminds me a fair amount of Jack, the love interest in Long May She Reign, only in that book White had had quite a bit more writing and life experience to draw on, so Jack and Meg are able to be rather more complex characters than Colin and Trish.
This is forty years old, and unless you're already a fan of Ellen Emerson White's books and curious about what she was writing decades ago, I wouldn't bother...but it makes for a pretty fascinating comparison to her better-known books.
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