The Girl--Clare Meriden is your classic Harlequin doormat heroine: she'll endure a lot to be near her man of choice. She suffers in silence and waits...and waits...and hopes....and dreams....The Guy--Ross Brennan is a rugged guy who runs rubber plantations for some big-ass company in Africa just after the war when there was still that colonial stuff going on. He's snide, sarcastic, and tough, mainly because it's either have a thick skin or go bugnuts in the jungle.The Setup--During a break between plantation managing stints, Ross goes to England and meets Clare. She falls in love with him, but won't let him know that because he's a tough bastard. So she plays at being his wiseacre friend/little sister and contents herself with that. Then he proposes marriage to her so that he'll have a little civilizing influence in the jungle, but after this stint is over in 18 months, the marriage is off. No hanky panky or nothing, just platonic companionship. Clare accepts, hoping that in that 18 months she can get him to love her and have the marriage be for keeps. (Sounds pathetic, doesn't it?)The Good Stuff--No way in a million years would you get me living in the jungle. The author did a great job of describing a rough frontier that has no patience for wussies. Even though Ross is an abrupt and callous sumbitch most of the time, he's spent years in this environment and he'd adapted to survive, so he didn't seem unrealistically buttmunchy.Also, the long build-up of tension between Clare and Ross was helped along by the feelings of isolation (white people few and far between) and the even greater pressures put on white women in such a decidedly male environment and profession. Clare tries to go along gamely like a trooper and has mixed success through the various trials.My Gripes--I thought the author had already done a solid job making the rubber plantation and the whole region threatening and overwhelming to the naive heroine, but did we have to have the pet dog get eaten by a crocodile? (And this is after we heard about the hero destroying all but one of the litter because they wouldn't have survived. Then the lone survivor becomes croc food. Ugh! 1 star docked for that.)I'm not going to ding the author for having a patronizing attitude towards the natives since this book was written in 1948. Vintage contemporary stuff like that can have offensive stuff for today's readers, so just a warning here that if you don't like to have adult natives treated and referred to as children, boys, etc. by the "big boss-man" then you'll probably want to give this a pass. I found the author's description and the very slow-burn between Clare and Ross to be ample compensation for her colonist treatment of the natives in her story.
