I really liked the premise of "Heartthrobs" but the analysis conducted by Ms Dyhouse just fell flat for me.

The book didn't really offer any new insights for me and I think that some of the points the authors makes about rape fantasies are somewhat problematic and I strongly disagree with her on more than one point.

I am a member of the American Library Association Notable Books Council. This title was suggested for the 2018 list. It was not nominated for the award.

A fascinating insight into the history of heart throbs and their appeal. Our tastes may have changed, but our screaming teenagers and fainting fan girls are still going strong!

Dyhouse takes a fascinating look at the position of the heartthrob in popular and literary culture, unpeeling the layers of what makes a heartthrob and looking historically at who has been a heartthrob, why, and what that means in a larger cultural context. Recommended for readers interested in popular culture through a feminist lens.

Heartthrobs is actually really good overview of all the different hero types in romance books over a time. There was a time when the readers hearts started to beat quicker when they read about gentle/dangerous poet type hero, or heroic solders or dangerous desert sons. Those where followed by doctors, celebrities and rich fellows. Modern day has brought vampires, damaged millionaires, whom young girls hope to save. All these preferences have been influenced by the things that have been happening in the world - the wars, cultural revolutions. It's interesting to read about the comparisons between the male models at he beginning of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21 century. And since there are a lot of references to different books and movies, to illustrate one or other point, my reading list got many additions :).

A good read, specially if you like romance novels.

This is sort of a hard book to place-- it definitely wasn't dry and it was very clear that Carol Dyhouse did a ton of research on it-- but I didn't have a problem setting it down for a few days & coming back to it either. I was a women's studies major & definitely felt in my element reading it. I'm not sure if it will fly off the shelves when my library purchases it, but I wouldn't have a problem recommending it to someone interested in a good non fiction book.

Something about this felt like I'd read it all before. Maybe it's my familiarity with the subject, but I wasn't drawn in by anything about it.

Carol Dyhouse knows her stuff. I've read and enjoyed her previous work with "Glamour" and "Heartthrobs" was just as insightful. A wonderful look at women and desire, the source of our desire. Why do we fantasize about singer on the stage and not the security guard at the door?

There's discussion of the 'male gaze'; not enough of a discussion of non-threatening boys. There were several well developed discussions and some discussions that were severely lacking. All in all, this is a great broad overview look at desire and it's evolution for women.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book.

An entertaining look at the history of women's desires in books and on the small and large screen. I do not read an awful lot of 'chick lit' or women's fiction but I really enjoyed this book.

This is an interesting sort of survey of historical heartthrobs and women's media over the last century and a half. It never really goes deeper than just sort of adding a little context to names and stories you're vaguely familiar with already. A decently fun read at first, but it becomes pretty repetitive. I'd definitely recommend as a book to just browse through a few times.

Heartthrobs is anecdotal rather than analytical, most of the time providing the curious reader with summaries of romance plots from past decades, giving an account of the more recent generations of female readers and writers in particular. The evolution of women's fantasies was entertaining to read about, but lacked an in-depth dissection of the psychology behind it; concepts like that of "non-threatening boys", for instance, are barely broached, if mentioned at all. The same applies to the more contemporary examples of fandom. The book's chapter layout wasn't especially coherent either and did in fact not help with the transitions at all, so that the writing felt repetitive at times.

Nevertheless, the few parts that ventured deeper into the matter were enjoyable, and I can say that I encountered some aspects I had never thought of before. I can't imagine the amount of time Dyhouse must have invested into the research! Besides, will I ever get over the mention of "Rhubarb Vaselino"? I don't think so.

Thanks to Oxford University Press and Netgalley for the advance copy.

This was an enjoyable book even if it was not exactly what I was expecting. I feel a more accurate description for this book would be a history of women and desire through popular or literary culture. This is the true focus of the book really, the way in which novels, films and musicians have shaped the desires of women throughout the twentieth century. Dyhouse mentions earlier periods only occasionally, the main focus of the book is from the 1920s onwards.
She certainly has amassed a wealth of source material and the amount of research she has conducted for this book is apparent. However, I do wish she had given more in-depth analysis as her conclusions were at times very surface level and did not make the most of the opportunity she has in this book to truly explore the subject matter. I became lost in the fascinating titbits of information she gave about each source but was left overall without any sense of her arguments. I feel like this is a good introductory book for the subject but that perhaps another author would have used the material in a different and more successful way.
On the whole it is an interesting book and is really good for anyone wanting to know more about novels and films of the twentieth century. As review of women's desire it fails to live up to its premise, perhaps ironically like many of the male representations in the book it has been made out to be something it is not.

A very quick and readable book but one which is all about the survey rather than detail, description and story-telling rather than analysis. There's undoubtedly a huge amount of material made available here but it's what I think of as an 'enabling' book: it would allow a more analytical scholar to do something more interesting with the material.

Dyhouse asks pertinent questions about female desire and the inversion of the male gaze: but her work is unframed (she doesn't mention Mulvey, for example, and instead quotes John Berger) and theoretically lax. The chapters skip around in a haphazard way and it would have been helpful to have clarified a) that this is about female *fantasies* of desire (books, films, music, TV), and b) that it's more or less focused on the twentieth century, albeit with some brief and rather predictable excursions back to Byron, Austen and the Brontes.

There's quite a lot of slippage between objects of female desire and cultural constructions of masculinity, not necessarily the same thing; and some interesting, though scanty, mentions of figures who appeal sexually to both men and women (James Dean, Valentino, possibly David Beckham).

Dyhouse appears to be a cultural historian rather than a literary scholar and so her readings of books are straightforward and descriptive of plot, ignoring scholarship on more complicated ways of making sense of archetypal 'hero' figures such as Darcy or Rochester.

So an entertaining read overall, perhaps more interesting to the general reader or undergraduate than anyone working in the fields of gender studies, women's writing etc. There's nothing surprising here (other than, perhaps, the idea of cardiganned, 47-year-old Perry Como as a 'heartthrob!) but Dyhouse has a wry and witty turn of phrase and covers a lot of ground.