Lori, Runaway Wife

Reviewed by Carol Hoyer for Reader Views (11/08) "Lori, Runaway Wife" is a book that you can't put down. Through Dmitriev's excellent description of the characters and the scenes surrounding them, you can almost feel you are there. Lori Becker is a battered wife. She never knows from one minute to the next when the attacks will occur or for what. But she does know what she needs to do to stop it. As an intern in a hospital Lori is working at night when several ambulances roll up to the ER door. One patient is a pregnant, unmarried female who is with none other than the famous author Ian Damion. Francine, his companion, delivers a baby boy that night, but it will be a long time before she can see or bond with him. Ian is desperate, in shock, when Lori comes to his aid. The last thing he needs is an overly adoring fan drooling over him. Ian frequently argues with his inner-child as he has been abandoned in the past, but something about Lori attracts him. She is secretly in love with his books and him. As Lori rushes home to her husband Boyd, she knows she is in big trouble for being late. By stroke of luck, Mr. Damion asks her to leave with him and be his son's nanny. What a perfect time as Lori needs to get as far away from Boyd as she can and this is her chance. Follow Lori's journey to a new and exciting world where abuse isn't a part of her life. Be with her when she and Ian fall deeply in love and she has to confess something. "Lori, Runaway Wife" is a book I would recommend to my Psychology students as it addresses domestic violence, and what an individual will do at all costs to escape it.

This is one of the few romance novels that I have read, I don't know the exact number but am certain that they could be counted on the fingers of one hand. I avoid the genre because I believe that they are too formulaic where the plot and result are predictable. In my opinion, only superb writing could make such a book interesting. While I would not classify the writing here as superb, it is close enough so that I did enjoy reading it. Lori is a young woman in a brutal marriage to Boyd, whose idea of sex is rape within marriage. She is a quality nurse and Boyd learned his craft at the hands of his mother, a brutal woman with a grudge against the world and the only one she can strike at is Boyd. When he finally kicks Lori so hard her ribs are broken, she has had enough and leaves with no real plan as to what to do. In his hate, Boyd makes it clear that he will kill Lori if he can find her. In a stroke of incredible good fortune for Lori, Ian is at the hospital where she works with the woman carrying his unborn child. The conception was unplanned and neither one of them has any desire to get married, and the expectant mother values her career more than motherhood. Since the mother was seriously injured in an auto accident, the boy Danny is delivered and Ian assumes responsibility. In a quick decision, Ian offers Lori the position of nanny to Danny, which will take her far away from her current location. The three of them fly away to Ian's house, where he works as a writer of romance novels. Ian generally retreats into his office to write, surfacing only to eat and take care of other necessities. This begins a story with a lot of tension between them as the two struggle to keep their growing love for each other in check. Several other major plotlines intrude on this, they are: *) The fear Lori has for Boyd and his desire to find her. *) The relationship between Boyd and his mother *) The fact that Ian was an orphan living in an orphanage until his English teacher adopted him. The teacher still lives nearby and this relationship and his circumstances are explained in detail. *) Ian is struggling to complete his latest novel until he begins using Lori as a foil to act out some of the scenes in the book. *) Lori's relatives are bitter due to past events and she has a significant inheritance coming. *) Ian harbors a great deal of bitterness towards his birth mother for what he perceives as her abandonment of him. In a stroke of major coincidence, she surfaces in the story. While all these plot twists are handled well, this is just too much for a novel of 229 pages. It would have been a better story if there had been more emphasis on Lori and Ian and how they interacted in their minds. There should have been more details about how Ian thinks about Lori and Lori about him as they are going their separate ways within the same house.