And yes, I do have a good explanantion.
It was written by my mom’s friend and one of her friends, for no other reason than they were bored and thought it would be funny. It’s supposed to be hilarious. Well, the way she describes it is pretty funny anyway. “She rolled over. . . and there he was.” They ended up writing five or six of them, again, just for the hell of it. Although I’ve heard this one was their most successful, and they even went on a book-signing tour for it. This was in, I think, 1989.
Miranda North isn’t really her name either, it’s the pen name she and her friend used. I’ve heard a lot about this book, like how the publisher initially rejected it because there wasn’t enough sex in it, and said to them “Industry standard is, you have to throw the couple into bed every 70 pages.” They tried to go back and rewrite more sex scenes, but they ended up writing things like “And then they went to bed” to fulfill the requirement. The publisher didn’t even catch that the whole thing was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek funny.
Supposedly there’s a whole group of people who write subtle parodies of romance novels and then sell them AS romance novels. It’s like an inside joke only you and your friends are in on. (F’r example, she told us about a gothic romance novel written in the same way. There’s a scene in it where the heroine hears a deep-voiced man singing and playing piano in the drawing room downstairs, immediately falls in love with “Mr. Music,” but when she rushes downstairs to find him, there are only two people in the room - her Evil Half-Brother Raoul and a man “with a high, squeaky, effeminate voice” - and then she becomes convinced that Evil Half-Brother Raoul has hidden Mr. Music in the house somewhere! If I ever find out the title of that, I so need to read it. It sounds hilarious.)
The book’s out of print now, and I don’t think my mom’s friend has any copies lying around. On a whim, I checked on Amazon and found someone in Chicago selling a used copy for forty-eight cents. Haha, shipping and handling cost me three bucks fifty.
So I get my copy of Desert Slave sometime this week. The seller promised to ship it today. This is going to be fun. This week, I’ll be sitting at my kitchen counter cackling at a 10-year-old romance novel.