REMEMBRANCE

Romance pro Deveraux (Sweet Liar, 1992. etc.) knows how to stick the beginnings and the ends, but bogs down in the center like a slice of England's banoffee pie. Successful romance writer Hayden Lane, approaching the big ``four-oh,'' seems to have everything going for her: a career, firm thighs, and her own Iron John. Then why is she obsessed with her fictional hero Jamie? Because, says her psychic Nora, she can't succeed at a relationship in this life until she fixes the screwed- up love affairs of her past lives. Cosmically speaking, a woman's biological clock is as nothing when compared to her eternal one. Deveraux cleverly pairs up time travel with past-life regression as she hypnotizes Hayden back to both Edwardian and Elizabethan England to correct her karma. Hayden, it seems, formerly Callie, and then Catherine, was half of a pair of star-crossed lovers, born on the same day and dead on the same day when they jumped off a parapet locked in a kiss. Unable to consummate their love, they cursed each other never to find anybody else until the end of time. Hayden, in the body of Catherine, finally succeeds in outwitting the curse and setting her happiness back on track. Who couldn't love a heroine and a seasoned romance writer who puts an experienced 20th-century woman in the body of an Edwardian virgin to seduce her extraordinarily virile husband—who sadly cannot get an erection because of a spell—by disguising herself as a Southern harlot and then explaining to him (and to her panting readers) that the willow-bark tea she is feeding him (because he has fallen off his magnificent black stallion) is a precursor to aspirin? What a heroine! What a researcher! Would that it were all that good. At the risk of courting more of the heroine's hatred of romance reviewers, it must be reported that, despite some great romance, there's too much time spent here with children gamboling through their 16th-century Eden. (Doubleday Book Club main selection)