It was 2003 and I was at friends house for a rare night out with out my young family. We’d decided we wanted to watch the American Idol finale without our husbands giving us crap for loving Clay Aiken and his voice. During a commercial break my girlfriend Heather, a huge romance reader like me, asked if I’d read any J.D. Robb books. I said no, I’m only reading romance books now. (I wasn’t I was also reading LOTS of toddler books.)
She responded with “You read Nora?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“You know J.D. Robb and Nora Roberts are the same people right?”
“Excuse me what?”
Okay in my defense it was 2003. I had 3 boys under 3, (no we didn’t lose one. We were fostering a little boy while his adoptive parents finished their classes and paperwork) and was still recovering from major surgery the previous winter. Plus there were no smart phones, heck cell phones could only call back then. The internet was used for simple searches, checking your email, and downloading songs from Napster. Don’t know what Napster was Google it.
Heather got up from her couch, went over to her bookshelf and pulled all the J.D. Robb books she had on her shelf off and handed them to me and said enjoy.
She gave me the first ten books in the series that night. To say I was a bleary eyed, why the hell wasn’t I drinking coffee back then, walking zombie of a mom during this time is a MAJOR understatement.
I was officially hooked.
In two weeks I read all of those books, and then proceeded to haunt the library and used bookstores for the rest of the books in that series.
By the time Portrait in Death came out that fall I was more than ready for more Eve and Roarke.
I remember years later two of my favorite book bloogers/reviewers going back and forth on each others sites on why one of them had never read an In Death book and never met the awesomeness that is Eve and her gorgeous Irish reformed bad boy Roarke.
At the time I was given these books I was suffering with one of my worst bouts of depression. I felt like my marriage was coming apart at the seems, it was. In my bid to follow in the footsteps laid out for me by every single woman in my family before me, get married young, I held out till I was 24, and start popping out babies, which didn’t happen, I had lost who I was. This is something that took me years to rediscover. But reading about Eve and how her identity was completely swallowed up in being a cop, I KNEW her. My whole identity had become as Mike’s wife and the M’s mom. I saw a lot of myself in Eve.
For me this series was never about how Eve and Roarke fell in love. It was so much more.
When we first meet Eve she’s a homicide lieutenant in NYC. She has one friend and lives for the job. Nothing else matters.
Then came the case (Naked in Death) that put Roarke in her path. As they begin their relationship how he forces, I know that word seems harsh but as I’m listening to this book now, it’s honestly how it seems, her to see what she’s doing to herself. He saw her as only someone who was falling in love with her could.
Over the course of that book and the next we got to read how Eve slowly began to open herself up to new people. Not a lot, but some. Mostly because they were Roarke’s friends and she didn’t want to embarrass him.
But it isn’t until the 3rd book in the series Immortal in Death that we really get to see Eve start to leave her isolation, which is completely justified. If I’d had happen to me what happened to her I doubt I’d ever be as brave as she is. As Roarke tells her in one of the latter books she made her own family.
And we get to watch it.
We get to watch this amazing woman emerge from her cocoon. The one she’d put herself into to protect herself as a young girl.
By the end of the fifth book Ceremony in Death Eve’s family is made. She has gone from having no one beside her best friend Mavis, and Feeney her former partner to a family. One that wasn’t made of blood, but of choice.
Then there’s the fact even though there’s 50 books in this series, they take place over a 3 year time frame. So we get to watch as Eve and Roarke, two people who had no family, figure out how to be married and what all the Marriage Rules are. Sometimes they get it right and sometimes they don’t. Just like a normal marriage.
All of this is why after 26 years and 50 books J.D. Robb is still one of my favorite authors and one I come back to often. In fact this year I’m re-reading the entire series.
