Book Analysis: ROMAN HOLIDAY novella

Author: Lois Richer
Anthology Title: From Italy with Love
Other Authors: Gail Gaymer Martin, DiAnn Mills, Melanie Panagiotopoulos
Publisher: Barbour & Co. (February 2004, 350 pages, paperback)
ISBN: 1593100817
Genre: contemporary romance

Roman Holiday shows the power of setting even in shorter fiction like a novella. Setting is, after all, a story element that proves the motto "Less is more." It requires a ton of research, distilled into a few drops blended on the page.

In romances, love is not a character's goal. It's more of a conflict. The heroine's goal in Roman Holiday is to tour Rome's religious sites in a quest to understand forgiveness. In a lesser story, this could become an excuse for long boring passages of exposition, grinding the story to a halt and satisfying no one but an author intent on using a ton of meaningless research. Another risk to a static setting is that there's no action originating from the setting itself, like exploding volcanoes or street riots. The plot line in Roman Holiday skillfully navigates around these story failures by motivating the heroine to tag along on the hero's student tours, and creating reasons for readers to care about ancient ruins and old statues. Because the hero is a history professor, it also provides logic and a sense of naturalness to the historical information delivered through dialogue.

As the heroine views the Colosseum of Rome where Christians were killed and Michelangelo's Pieta depicting Mary cradling Jesus' crucified body, these images create inner conflict. She struggles between their example of forgiveness and her own bitterness over her ex-fiance's rejection. Richer activates the setting by allowing specific characteristics of the setting to stimulate specific internal responses in the heroine. This makes the setting indispensable to the story; it couldn't be the same story if it happened anywhere else.

Richer works the same magic with the hero, who travels a different internal journey to reach the happy ending. Whereas the setting created internal conflict for the heroine by challenging her flaw, it creates conflict for the hero in an entirely opposite manner. Famous and not-so-famous Roman sites are imbued with tragic personal memories, reinforcing his flaw every time he visits. Whenever his developing relationship with the heroine challenges him to grow and change, specific setting elements call to him to embrace the status quo even tighter.

By utilizing the setting in this way, Richer accomplishes several writer's goals at once. She creates reader interest in the setting, because the setting matters to the characters and the romantic resolution. The setting becomes indispensable to the story, and therefore a memorable character in its own right. The writing becomes tighter and shorter because description of the setting also serves as internal conflict and character development. The setting contributes to characterizing the hero and heroine as three-dimensional people.

Roman Holiday is quick-paced and well written. The hero was deliberately unlikable at first. However, Richer performed a quick save in the next scene by entering his point of view to reveal both his motivation and regret for his behavior.

This story provides novel-size reader satisfaction in a compact novella length. It's a fun study in activating a historically rich setting and making it come alive for characters and readers alike.