Welcome to Temptation
The novel explores the love story between Sophie Dempsey, a screenwriter making a movie in the small town of Temptation, and the mayor, Phinneas "Phin" Tucker.
Sophie's movie, which includes scenes taken from her courtship with Phin, provides an opportunity to explore the boundaries between private acts and public events.
She posited that women turn towards books in this genre to get an emotional release denied to them in their daily lives, where they must devote themselves to caregiving and have little time for themselves.
[2] Lamenting the lack of the “edgy, angry feminist love stories" that she most enjoyed reading, Crusie determined to fill that gap herself.
[6] The novel begins as Sophie Dempsey and her younger sister Amy approach the small Ohio town of Temptation.
Before the sisters reach the town, they are involved in a minor car accident with Stephen and Virginia Garvey, prominent citizens of Temptation who also consider themselves the moral pillars of society.
The hero of the book, Phinneas "Phin" Tucker, is another prominent citizen; he is the fourth generation of his family to serve as mayor of Temptation.
The second version, Cherished, is women's soft-core pornography, with Clea and Rob Lutz, the sone of her former lover, as the featured actors.
The hero is rich and of a high social stature, and his love will elevate a poor, yet honest lower-class heroine.
[1] By having the heroine frequently quote movie lines, Crusie initially implies that Sophie has difficulty distinguishing between reality and fantasy.
The initial movies that she quotes, Tootsie, Psycho, The Manchurian Candidate, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, all involve characters whose reality is twisted in some way.
While describing the first sexual encounter between the protagonists, Crusie alludes directly to Radway's conclusions in Reading the Romance.
[1] Radway wrote that women are attracted to romance novels "because the social role with which they identify themselves leaves little room for guiltless, self-interested pursuit of individual pleasure”.
When the more erotic version of the movie is stolen and shown on local television, the characters must confront the knowledge that their most private moments are now essentially public property.
Flashbacks reveal that Sophie experienced this societal backlash in high school; she was humiliated by a classmate ridiculed her for having sex.
In the early part of the book, Sophie agrees to a purely physical affair with Phin, who resembles the boy to whom she lost her virginity.
He seduces Sophie by offering to pleasure her with no expectation of reciprocity, inviting her to explore her sexuality without fear of societal punishment.
[3] In one scene near the end of the book, Crusie describes Sophie sitting on the hood of Phin's car, knees apart, leaning back on her hands.
In her previous essays, Crusie had argued that this was incorrect, that marriage in romance novels is instead a negotiation of the power dynamic between the protagonists.
Their reasons varied; the novel excused deception for the sake of love and family, while characters suffered consequences for lies based on self-defense, money, politics, and sex.
Although she intends to leave that life behind, the conflict between her sister's movie and the town's new porn ordinance makes it difficult for her to stop lying.
Very early in the novel, Sophie and Amy Dempsey describe the five steps to a successful con, and in the book's first eleven pages, Crusie displays all of them.
"[6] The reader is a willing participant, choosing to buy and enjoy the novel even though it is fairly unrealistic to think that extremely different people from dysfunctional families could find happily ever after in only three weeks.
Sophie is preoccupied with the fading wallpaper in her kitchen; in the beginning of the book, she sees them as cherries, which reminds her of the humiliation that followed her first sexual experience.
Baldus sees the cherry "as a wink from author to readers and back again, creating a sense of a community forged through shared knowledge and insights about the novel".
[2] Crusie herself references the sense of community between readers and authors, describing it as "one of the most powerful aspects of the romance novel".
[10] Both reviewers praised the "deliciously clever repartee" between the protagonists,[10] which Publishers Weekly noted "[kept] energy and sexual tension high".
[9] Romantic Times reviewer Jill M. Smith noted that "the humor and insight into human nature make [the book] downright irresistible.
