1.0 out of 5 stars A hopeless muddle
This author was recommended to me by a romance editor for a big publishing house as an example of how to write a good romance. I will give you all the same reply I gave her as to why it is such a mediocre book.
The manuscipt is littered with errors right from the first page. There is no excuse for this with a spelling and grammar checker on most computers these days.
The first chapter is nothing more than pages and pages of exposition and background information dressed up as dialogue, with no sign of the main characters except as people to be gossiped about in the vaguest way.
Hero-male of species, Heroine-scandalous woman-but then they ALL are in this book so why do they care? They don’t. They flout convention, so there is nothing at stake.
When the hero and heroine meet, there is no heat, just a rather crude leering on the hero’s part. Then he decides to seduce secondary character Helene to play it safe, because she is married. Complete hypocrisy and lechery are not very worthy character traits in a hero.
We get reams of tedious info about Helene’s failed marriage, husband, husband’s mistress, her music, her husband’s career. In fact, we get the entire past sexual histories of all of the characters within the first 30 pages or so. Not subtle at all.
There is way too much internalization, especially for people who are not the main characters. The internal monologue is not delineated with italics, so we get long paragraphs that look hashed together. We are not really interested in what they are supposed to be thinking and feeing because we are trying to find out about the main protagonists and how they meet and supposedly fall in love. Someone should remind the author of this.
Even worse, Stephen suddenly wakes up at the age of 43 and decides to be married, wonders where the last ten years have gone, and decides he needs sex? Ludicrous. The author can’t write about men at all.
Why have such a panoply of characters and affairs? THREE! It only waters down the romance between the hero and heroine. We want heat and passion, not a costume drama which is about as memorable as one of Rees’ White Elephant Operas.
This is also an absurd way of the author setting herself up for the next book with Rees and Helene-we need to care about the characters enough to see them through to the end, and while they are trying very hard to be witty and charming, I see nothing of interest in any of them.
Helene deciding an affair is a great idea after years of chastity is also absurd. Once again, these characters have nothing at stake, they just do as they will. They are financially independent, can do as they like. This was not the norm for the period at all, and destroys any tension she might have created. Where is the heroine in all of this? Lady Bea is a mere cipher.
Stephen is one note-Reform. The Tories were not interested in reform, so if he is Castlereagh’s most trusted man, this is utterly ridiculous. The little research that has been done is literally on the pages-an historical novelist should never show her corsets! One should introduce the historical detail as seamlessly as possible.
Everything lurches, with jarringly discordant and jerky notes like Helene’s waltz. I won’t even go into the whole age of the waltz debate which readers love to argue about, except to say that it is not some newfangled thing as they all make it out to be. Stephen as someone with little social life and experience of dancing is absurd for this time, period, especially given his single state and title. He would have been expected to make a decent show of the social season, not act like a wallflower.
There is little setting woven into the book at all. I get the dressing room and the Rose Salon, the goat pasture, but no specifics, furniture, size of room, curtains upholstery, even a fireplace would be nice. Their dialogue is jarringly modern in places.
I hardly even get any details about what any of them are wearing, usually a bit interesting to at least take us out of endless plot and narrative. The setting is NOT integrated into the book in any meaningful way. The action, such as it is, could literally be taking place anywhere.
This pseudo-comedy of manners could take place at any period of time because the characters don’t give a fig about mores and they have no basis in society. They just live in their own little world apart from Stephen and his misplaced Radical sensibilities if he is a Tory.
The romance part of it: well, what can I say. When they finally do ‘it’ there is so much mention of the goat I thought I was going to get a bestial menage a trois. There was no heat or heart to the encounters between them, and there was no sequel to the scenes-they have sex, and then we get another domestic drama chapter.
He creeps into the room, douses her with water, and it just drones on to a very unexciting chapter end, with no follow up there either. I would have liked to see warmth, commitment, their affair advancing, their plans for the future. Them actually speaking to each other about something other than sex. They are like wind up toys jerking to their conclusion.
Instead of a real conversation, we get Bea proposing via Romeo and Juliet and the second ‘heroine’ via the Song of Solomon. Very unoriginal, it has all been done before, far better elsewhere, and the characters have so little to say for themselves they can’t even use their own words to woo each other?
Or the supposedly brazen hussy is suddenly coyly shy? We expect growth and development from really good characters, and consistency as well. They are consistently dull, but not much else.
The two epilogues are ridiculous as well. These people are not firmly fixed in their society or they would never so blithely court scandal.
None of them ever learn their lessons, they are just wilful, capricious and obey the dictates of their loins. I dread to think what will happen to Stephen and Bea when he starts to go impotent.
At best this is a mildly diverting book one can waste a few hours at the beach with, but in terms of capturing the Regency period, it is average to poor, and in terms of romance, it is poor.
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