Showing posts with label regency romances. Show all posts
Showing posts with label regency romances. Show all posts

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Title: Rakes and Radishes
Author: Susanna Ives
Genre: Regency
Grade: B (for Barns. and Byronic)
How Hot is it?: three hot chili peppers

Henrietta Watson, a generally kind-hearted mathematical genius who is prone to fantasies influenced by gothic novels, goes to London with her childhood friend, Lord Kesseley. Kesseley, a down-to-earth, agriculture-minded peer, is in love with Henrietta, but she is in love with her cousin, a poet who is himself in pursuit of a society beauty. Once in London, in a social milieu saturated with prostitution, gambling, loveless marriages, hypocrisy, and adultery, things start to unravel and hearts break. Henrietta doesn't understand her feelings and leads Kesseley on to the point where he loses it and decides to shed his bumpkin image and become the mad, bad, and dangerous to know kind of rake that Gothic novels portray and women apparently like. Meanwhile Henrietta, due to her relationship with Kesseley's mother (around whom a thematically linked subplot revolves), becomes involved in a coterie of older, wordly women who enjoy her card-playing skills, and eventually finds herself in the midst of a scandal.

There's a lot to like about this book. Ives turns the lovable/reformed rake trope on its head and looks at the process of a nice guy turning into a rake and nearly losing everything he loves. I adore books about people who have a savant-like skill at math and science, and this heroine is a mathematical genius who works with her astronomer father (and assists in an important scientific discovery). I even kind of like the idea that in this romance you're watching a relationship unravel and nearly be destroyed, rather than building it, for most of the book--probably because the idea of redemption really appeals to me. The theme that we don't have to be caught in a cycle of dysfunction because of our families, and that even if we do we can break out of it, is well-illustrated here.

I did have some problems with this book. It was poorly copyedited ("shined", "Gretna Greene", etc.), which unfortunately seems to be legion in e-books. (I don't blame the author for things like that. Things like that are Why We Need Good Copyeditors, says this former editor, plaintively). There were some loose ends left dangling--at several points Kesseley does something that causes someone else real harm and the reader never does find out if he went and made it right (an important aspect of redemption). Also, Henrietta and Kesseley's reconciliation and declaration of love is very near the end of the book and I would have liked to see more of their renewed relationship. But overall I found this a satisfying read from a promising new author.

This books is currently only available as an e-book.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

The Pitfalls of Poor Plotting and of Mere Marquess Heroes Named Gareth

Title: Faith
Author: Deneane Clark
Genre: Regency-set historical
Grade: D
How Hot is it?: 2 chili peppers

Title: Proof by Seduction
Author: Courtney Milan
Genre: early Victorian historical
Grade: A
How Hot is it?: 3 chili peppers

This is a little game of compare and contrast. Both of these stories are historical romances set in the early 1800s and have heroes named Gareth who are Marquesses. Marquesses are not quite Dukes, but they're high up enough that they have the aristocratic appeal. This is pretty much all these books have in common. Faith (the book title and also the heroine's name! It's like a twofer!) is the story of two poorly matched people who are socially forced into marriage after they kiss in a garden during a party. Misunderstandings ensue between them, which make them both miserable. A meddling sister-in-law doesn't help. Eventually the misunderstandings are unraveled. This is the basic "Big Misunderstanding" plot, variation "multiple misunderstandings.


Proof by Seduction
is about an unlikely love affair between a professional fortune-teller and the aristocratic uncle of one of her clients. In this book, the hero sets out to prove the heroine a fraud, and she sets out to not only prove herself but also improve his life--she's a benevolent fortune-teller, trying to improve her clients' lives through her insight and prognostications. The insights are real but the prognostications are not. The hero, Marquess Gareth, is a naturalist with a high regard for integrity but a very low ability to demonstrate any sort of affection to anyone (including his sister and cousin). This would be a match made in heaven if not for the obvious class differences.

One of the things that makes a romance satisfying, for me at least and I think for others, is that the hero and heroine not only complete each other but they challenge each other to be better people. This is one of the pitfalls of using the "Big Misunderstanding" plot--sure, it may lend itself to either Three's Company style humor or to tragic misery, but at the end, the author has given you two people who leap to conclusions and don't trust each other. The author has to unravel the whole thing while simultaneously displaying to the reader that these two people have learned their lesson. A lot of the time, I don't feel they've learned anything at all--particularly if the misunderstandings are multiple and lead to tragic misery. It often makes a hero, particularly a hero beset by sexual jealousy, look like an emotional abuser. During the course of the novel (I speak not only of Faith here but also of Rolls's His Lady Mistress, James's Potent Pleasures, and other books I've read not long ago) the hero goes through multiple cycles of jealousy/distrust, infliction of cruelty, and reconciliation with the heroine. At the end, the reader wonders if the characters truly do have a Happy Ever After, or are they just in the reconciliation phase of another cycle? To resolve the plot properly, the author has to convince us that the cycle is broken. Many authors just don't have the skill or experience to do this.

Of the last 2 authors I've read, Milan gets this basic thing about romance. Clark does not. In Proof by Seduction, Gareth and Jenny challenge each other to be better people--as a result of their relationship Jenny becomes more honest (at a heavy price) and Gareth becomes more able to show his affection to those he loves. They emerge from the novel better than they were before. In Faith, however, Gareth leaps to conclusions, always negative, about his new wife, putting her through useless misery; while she, confronted with his coldness and irrational jealousy, continually runs away from him. The misunderstandings unraveled, the story ends. There's no indication that the hero and heroine are no longer 2 people who jump to conclusions and run away from their problems--or even that they're self-aware enough to address the issue properly.

And that, my dear readers, is the difference between an A book and a C book. Faith has additional pacing and plot problems besides the basic problem at the core of the novel, which earns it a D.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

What Wicked? What Sin?

Title: Wicked as Sin
Author: Jillian Hunter
Genre: Regency-era historical
Grade: D, but edible.
How Hot Is It? 3 chili peppers


What does this title mean? The hero--so not wicked. But maybe "wicked" is a code word for heroes who live hard and have some sexual experience. By THAT measure the hero is wicked. Or maybe the wicked is for the villain, who does sound like a piece of work; but the true villain of the piece dies before the story actually begins, which is disappointing, because I would have liked to see him slain in a duel. And sin? It must be a code word for another 3-letter word that begins with "s" (and ends in "x") because the book does have that. The main characters here and the development of their relationship is fine, but other parts of the story are kind of jarringly awful, like huge infodumps of emotionally charged information at the beginning, flashbacks that are hard to tell from the present-time scenes, a horrible sense of the Regency milieu (especially for aristocrats), plot threads that appear out of nowhere near the end of the book (it is a book in a series which may explain, if not excuse, some of this; but I've seen tie-ins done much more smoothly), and characters believing and acting on things that just don't make sense. Like at one point, the hero is given a Big Misunderstanding due to eavesdropping that the heroine may have been a prostitute at some time in the past, and because he loves her, talks himself into thinking he can forgive her if she needed to do it to survive. But she's the sister of a rich earl who has wanted for nothing in her life and he already knows this because he's known her since childhood. So, I can't actually recommend this one. Hunter gets a D and not an F because for some reason I liked the hero and heroine despite the clunky storytelling. I gather from other reviews that she has done better, but this book didn't leave me wanting more from the same author.

One of the questions I want to explore a little more is why a lot of these titles (and the content of far fewer) of these books attempt to describe the hero as "Wicked" or "Dangerous" when in fact someone really wicked or dangerous would be the villain of the piece, someone the heroine should and would run screaming away from. It seems to be some kind of code-word for a person who is not accepted by the really high sticklers of society because of a tendency to drink or gamble too much, get into brawls, or womanize. It's "wicked' in the sense that (to quote a commercial), "the concert was wicked hardcore" or "girl you are wicked awesome." Someone a little edgy, but not really a stalker/rapist/blackmailer/extortionist. You know, not really wicked wicked.

Welcome to Dukes of Earl

I'm starting this blog because I like to read romances. I read a lot of romances. I read a lot of other kinds of books as well, but it's really easy to read too many romances because it's a genre where a good (or even middling) book will go fast, riding you to the climax as it were.

Last year I started keeping track of the books I read. This year I started reviewing them. And this blog is to share these reviews with the world at large, or, at least, the portion of it on the Internet that finds out about this blog.

There is a particular kind of romance I like to read. Just like some romance readers enjoy reading about Greek tycoons or vampires or Navy SEALs, I like reading romances set in 18th and early 19th century England. This encompasses the Regency and Georgian sub-genres. And in these books, there are a lot of dukes. And earls. Viscounts, barons, baronets, and marquesses, as well. There are, I say (fabricating wildy), more titled men and women in Romanceland than there ever were in real life! I don't, actually, have a particular fetish for dukes--I'm happy to read about a baronet or even just a plain mister! But Dukes of Earl seemed like a good title for a blog about this genre.

Along the way I will be exploring romance tropes (how did I get to read 2 books in a row about redheaded amnesiacs kept by the men who found them for fondling purposes? or 2 books in a row about the long-lost heir to a dukedom?), book titles that have nothing to do with the content of the book, back-of-the-book blurbs that get it wrong, the good and bad points of each book consumed and the tragic demise of Signet Regencies, as well as other topics as they occur to me.

I'll be trickling out some reviews from earlier this year and then catching up with more recent reads. Because I get many of my romances from the library (I buy a fair amount too, but the library provides me with a trial run for many authors), a recent read may not be a recent release.

I hope you enjoy this blog and I welcome you to comment about the book (if you've read it) or anything else in the post.