Review: "A Kiss Under the Northern Lights" by Susan Carlisle

A Kiss Under the Northern lights by Susan Carlisle
Published January 2025 via Harlequin Medical Romances
★★

In which a woman heads off to Iceland to find her past, and maybe her future...

She dipped an unpolished big toe of a slim, delicate foot into the water with a sigh. (14)

Read this in something of a whirlwind month during which I had very little time to spare, even less time to read, and even fewer brain cells available. So this was exactly what I was looking for, and I'm glad of it, but it was...pretty dodgy.

She voiced next to his ear, "I can get my suitcase later."

"I believe I can handle both of you at one time. Neither of you is very heavy." He threw the words over his shoulder without any exertion indicated in his voice. (19)

So we have a heroine who is a skinny Minnie (as are all Harlequin heroines who are not explicitly plus-sized) but unpretentious (we know that from her lack of toenail polish), and a hero who is a manly man who is a man (as demonstrated by his show of he-man strength). Heroine is, while she's in town, gung-ho on conducting some deeply unethical research:

"While I am here, it's the perfect opportunity to do research and write a paper. I would like to start by looking at files and then interviewing people." (35)

That is not how ethical research works! Honestly, this woman...whatever research she conducts throughout the course of the book would never be published by any journal worth the paper it's printed on, because it would never pass an ethics committee. While Trice explains the barest of bare bones of her research to her subjects, there's not so much as a discussion of informed consent, just a bunch of conversations that go "Hey, I heard you once had this illness, so can I have a blood sample?" And then, because she's a manic pixie dream doctor, she bats her eyelashes, the people fall in love with her, and she gets her blood and answers and goes on her merry way.

This is to say nothing of the rescuer in one of the book's two Big Drama moments who is fat-shamed and blamed for his injury ("On his way down, his large body caused a rockfall" (51)), or Trice's tragic backstory with unlikely connections in Iceland (skimmed over—there isn't time for a full resolution with everything else that goes on), or the insta-love between the hero and heroine. I'm not actually complaining about any of this (except the fat-shaming), because I was not looking for Pulitzer material here, but oh boy.

What's really weird, though: If we're going to run with the insta-love, and if they're in Iceland, and if there's a moment when they're about to boink under the Northern Lights...why on earth would you have them decide that it would be better to go home and go inside? (It's all fade-to-black sexytimes, for those who are concerned about that, but that's beside the point.) How many people can say they've boinked out under the Northern Lights? Well, probably higher than I'm imagining...but Trice and Drake aren't among them.