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Christy Cameron of Pana, in addition to raising two
boys adopted from Russia and a recently born daughter, managing a farm
household, sometimes driving a grain truck, and frequently teaching
community-college English classes, has also published two books. Who’s Watching the Kids is a lighthearted romp in the romance genre. The heroine,
applying for a position as a nanny to finance art school, is sussing out
the house of her prospective employer when she manages to get her head
stuck in a wrought-iron fence. Discovered there by her future charges, she
tells them that she was looking for her cat. The children decide to aid her
release by greasing her neck with butter, but when the butter proves too
hard they substitute peanut butter. At this point the children’s
uncle happens on the bizarre scene and effects the rescue while the kids
make posters and fan out over the neighborhood to find the fictional
feline. Remarkably, they find him — and Sara is now sunk so deep in
lies that she dares not confess. If love is to blossom between the guardian
of these kids and this nanny, it is off to one godawful start. You can see
that Cameron is a princess of plots. Over Yesterday,
published last December, crested at 600-plus pages, which Cameron, with
excellent self-criticism, cut in half. Stephanie and Jason, high-school
sweethearts in a Taylorville-like town, suffer a searing breakup. Fifteen
years later they are thrown together when Stephanie returns home after her
grandmother has survived a fall that leaves her comatose. The reader knows
from page one the fall was a botched murder attempt, but it’s a long
time before Stephanie, now a city attorney, and Jason, a local law officer,
realize this. After an attempt on Stephanie’s life, Jason is assigned
to guard her, and the former lovers are understandably wary about this new
circumstance. The remarkable achievement of this book is in the
telling. Cameron starts with a chapter of high school, followed by one of
present day, picks up the high-school story again, then the present, and
continues in this vein through the book — two separate stories linked
in a grand right-and-left, each chapter propelling both stories forward.
The present-day telling startles the reader by always coming in at a higher
decibel level. Pulling this off successfully, as Cameron does, shows
considerable skill. The protagonists, as teens and again as young
thirtysomethings, are three-dimensional, and the supporting characters are
also real.
Romances come in gradations: Who’s Watching the Kids? has
no overt sex or violence; Over Yesterday has sex, rape, blackmail, and murder. It spills over into
the mystery genre or transcends genre completely. There are also romance
types to fit every taste: Regency, Westerns, sci-fi. Cameron is now working
on a time-travel romance — and how does one get lovers together when
their eras don’t mesh? Actually, that’s easy — it’s
the keeping them together if a “they lived happily ever after”
ending, a staple of the genre, is desired. We’ll keep you posted on
how she handles this one.
Jacqueline Jackson, books and poetry editor of Illinois Times, is a professor emerita of English at the University
of Illinois at Springfield.
This article appears in Apr 3-9, 2008.
