Swoon by Betsy Prioleau

What makes women swoon? What is the quality that captures our heart, sometimes only for an instant, but sometimes irrevocably? Perhaps it is something different for each one of us. I know that it is different for me today, than it was when I was in my 20’s.

I attended a party at the Delta Sigma Phi house my Junior year of college at the insistence of my roommate, Cynthia. I loathe parties in general, but I succumbed to her pleading, and when I could stand the noise and confusion no longer, I slipped into what could have been loosely called a library and began reading behind the closed door. When a handsome man came into the room an hour later, practically hitting me with the door he pushed open, I looked into the brown eyes of the man I knew I would marry.

It was just that fast.

Could I have determined the qualities he possessed, untangling one from the other? No. I couldn’t do it today. But, I knew that he struck my heart and that was that.

Betsy Prioleau has taken it upon herself to untangle what it is that makes us swoon and listed more qualities of what women look for in men than I could include in this post. Combined with these qualities, are descriptions of men which fit them such as the charisma of Bill Clinton, the adornment of Sir Walter Raleigh, the manly jaw of Johnny Depp, etc.

But, my favorite part of what she’s done in her book, Swoon, is to list novels under which we can find characters exhibiting the traits women find so alluring. The reader in me, perhaps more than the feminine side of me, thrills to these titles:

• The Player/Seducer can be found in Neil Strauss’ The Game
• Intensity/Passion can be found in Wuthering Heights, Balzac’s The Memoirs of Two Brides and Colette’s The Other One.
• Love of Women can be found in Chekhov’s The Lady With The Dog, Somerset Maugham’s Up at The Villa, Jennifer Cruise’s Bet Me
• Androgyny can be found in Maureen Child’s Turn My World Upside Down and Anne Lamott’s Blue Shoe
• The Quicksilver Man can be found in Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County, Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Isak Dineson’s Out of Africa
• Flawed Manhood can be found in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and A Month in The Country
• Morality/Virtue can be found in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
• Courage can be found in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises
• Spiritual Cultivation can be found in Patricia Gaffney’s To Love and To Cherish
• Knowledge/Intelligence can be found in the Kama Sutra and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
• Social I.Q./Empathy can be found in Milan Kunderas’ The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• Self Realization can be found in Alice Munro’s story Passion, or the infamously popular Fifty Shades of Grey.

Prioleau continues with her list far beyond the few I’ve listed here. The qualities that she finds are seemingly endless, and beg the question, “What do you find most alluring?” not to mention, “Are the men of today offering it?”

Personally, I’d love to run into the competence of John Galt in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged…

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for the opportunity to review Swoon.