Book Review
Cowboy romance penned by Hawai'i male writer

By Ann M. Sato

Michael Little signs copies of his first novel, "Queen of the Rodeo," at Bestsellers Books, Honolulu. Though fewer men than women write romance novels, Little says men often read romances to find out what the women in their lives are thinking. Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser "Queen of the Rodeo" is available at Bestsellers and Barnes & Noble, and is making its way into other stores. It also can be purchased directly through Triple Tree Publishing (tripletreepub.com). To read excerpts and learn more about the author, check out www.michael-little.com

But Honolulan Michael Little didn't feel the need to become "Michela Litelle" or some such in publishing "Queen of the Rodeo" (TripleTree Publishing, paper, $14.95). Nor does the president of the Aloha Chapter of the Romance Writers of America feel at all trapped in a given style of fiction.

"I didn't set out to write a romance or any particular genre," said Little, who has a doctorate in English literature from the University of Delaware and taught English in high schools before becoming a state employee in 1991. "I wanted to tell a good story."

And so he does in this frothy and amusing tale of a rodeo queen and her cowboy plagued by exes (who don't, as Little couldn't resist pointing out, all live in Texas).

Little acknowledges that relatively few men write romances (although the current president of the Romance Writers of America is a man, who writes cowboy romance under the pen name Leigh Greenwood — oops, outed). But he says men do read romances occasionally, sneaking a peek at their wives' or girlfriends' books to see what the fuss is about.

"My theory is that most of the time, men have no idea what women want, so when they pick up the romance novels, they're desperate for clues," said Little. Certainly Little's hero Tyler Griffin, a Texas steer wrestler with a weakness for a pretty face, is hilariously clueless about what he's gotten into when he hitches up with Miss Donna Cooper of Reno, Nev., queen of the rodeo wave and the big, big hair. He thinks he's found a little woman who'll learn to cook up his mama's chicken-fried steak and pecan pie and turn out a passel of children right quick.

But the rodeo queen has a mind of her own under all those blond curls. She can handle the recipes alright, but the woman goes out and gets a job of her own and then has the temerity to cheer for the San Francisco Forty-Niners right in the middle of the Griffin family's own Dallas Cowboy-worshipping living room!

As in all good romance novels, everything comes out OK in the end, but the two have some mental readjusting to do in learning to know and fully appreciate each other — not to mention getting themselves shut of Donna's chainsaw-wielding ex-fiancÚ and the trashy hairdresser who thought Tyler was her ticket to a ranch house.

"I love to tell stories and I love to laugh," said Little, who grew up in a small town in central Texas "with the horned toads and rattlesnakes," a place just like Lampasas, where Tyler's Bar G ranch is.

He says "Queen of the Rodeo" is a member of a family of stories that dates back to Shakespeare's romances and forward to Neil Simon, Woody Allen and Mel Brooks. Little weaves comedy throughout this book, not to mention songwriting (Donna's good friend Teri is the Cowgirl in the well-known band Four Cowboys and a Cowgirl) and even includes recipes (Tyler's mama's chicken-fried steak).

Though the dialogue occasionally seems a bit strained, Little does a fine job of creating characters who interest us and entice us to keep reading, the heart of character-driven fiction. (This is a strength of his editor and publisher, Elizabeth Engstrom, the Oregon-based writing teacher who is in Hawai'i every year for the Maui Writers Conference and often teaches O'ahu workshops as well.)

Little is adept at capturing a moment in just a few words: "You would see those hands of hers moving and punctuating every sentence she spoke and it was all exclamation points, not little commas."

And when he describes the wink that launches Donna and Tyler's romance, when he first catches sight of her riding by in full Queen of the Reno Rodeo regalia and exclaims reverently, "God bless America."

"If Donna had stopped her horse, leaned toward the steer wrestler and given him a kiss and her phone number, it would have been overkill. The wink was just as effective," writes Little, who traveled to Reno and talked to real rodeo queens in order to get this right.

There'll be more big hair, country songs and recipes (cowboy creme brulee, which requires a branding iron) in "Chasing Cowboys," the prequel, on which Little is working now.