In the wake of ubiquitous popularity for The Book That Shall Not Be Named, the reality that women do experience – and even enjoy! – sexual fantasy has collided with far more than 50 shades of judgment about who, what, where, when, why, how, and whether that’s okay. Last week, Leigh at AAR wrote a blog post detailing her concerns about the real life relationship messages conveyed in Romance novels’ treatment of sexual force scenarios. Sandy Coleman went even further, invoking the “slippery slope,” Stockholm Syndrome, and insisting that “It’s dangerous for readers to be comfortable with forced seduction. Or date rape.”  As debate ensued over whether such sentiments blame women for rape and shame them for their sexual fantasies, Ridley summarized her opposition to Leigh’s and Sandy’s concerns by arguing that “Women still can’t be overtly sexual beings without being judged for it. Rape themes in romance continue to be a way to work with and around this.”

After the haze of red cleared from my vision, I started thinking about how frustrating these discussions often are for me, in large part because I don’t find the framing all that helpful or illuminating. Some version of the following arguments appears in almost all of these discussions (and I have certainly been guilty digging these holes, myself):

• Adult readers can tell the difference between fantasy and reality;
• Books both reflect and instruct, and because they instruct, we need to be conscious about the messages they send and we imbibe;
• Because women are writing these books, and women are primarily victims of violent sexual crimes and domestic violence, we have a higher level of responsibility for conveying the “right” messages, especially to impressionable girls & young women

So for the sake of argument, I want to start by accepting a version of each of these arguments to be true:

• In the overwhelming majority of cases, adults know the difference between fantasy and reality;
• Words are powerful, stories are powerful; therefore, books are powerful. They affect us in our real lives. As cultural artifacts, they are identifiable within the cultural paradigm shared by authors and reader, which means that they can both perpetuate and challenge dominant ideologies’
• As women raised in primarily patriarchal societies, we absolutely help to socialize each other to survive and thrive within the patriarchal paradigm. We are almost always operating from inside the paradigm, and because paradigm shifts of this magnitude take a long time to occur, at some point we’re all complicit in sustaining the dominant paradigm.

So with all that on the table, let me propose we re-frame the discussion for a moment. Let’s start from the idea that books can powerfully affect readers and that real life rape and battering are horrific experiences that no psychologically sound person desires.

From there, let’s take a quick look at the concept of the submission fantasy, of which the rape fantasy is part. Although I’m not the biggest fan of Psychology Today, this brief article by Michael Castleman points out that in 35 years of research, only 9 major studies had been conducted. To those, I would add the work of Nancy Friday, who, though not a social scientist herself, has written numerous books and amassed an impressive archive of erotic fantasy archives, of which submission fantasies remain the most numerous. As she notes in her most recent book, Beyond My Control, when she first wrote My Secret Garden back in 1973, there was widespread backlash to the idea that women even had sexual fantasies. And yet, as Friday has shown in her almost 40 years of research on the subject, there is something primal about sexual fantasy, something that is so real that it seems to exist coherently only on an experiential level.

Clinical research seems to back this up. As the 2009 study, “The nature of women’s rape fantasies: an analysis of prevalence, frequency, and content,” concludes, we know far less about the purpose and meaning of these fantasies than their ubiquity (researchers have measured between 31% and 57% of women, with speculation that the number could be higher, with some women reluctant to disclose) and their diversity (recorded on an “erotic-aversive continuum”). We know that women who have been raped experience submission fantasies, and while some research (namely Bivona and Crinelli’s study) indicates that women who experienced rape might be more inclined toward aversive fantasies (i.e. fantasies that are less arousing or involve more pain), others continue to experience the fantasy as erotic and enjoyable.

In Beyond My Control, Friday relates the story of one woman for whom erotic submission fantasy has been “therapeutic.” The woman, identified in the book as “Melly,” goes so far as to say, “I suggest fantasy for any women who has been raped.” Consequently, the persistent belief that women who enjoy rape fantasy are not the same women who are raped is just not sustained by either the qualitative or quantitative research. Which, again, supports the absolute lack of understanding we have about the source of these fantasies or any systematic conclusions about the work they do – psychologically, physically, culturally, etc. Friday has long argued that the sexually “forbidden” is always most arousing, and that submission fantasies are about “[r]elinquishing power in a world that offers so much.” She stresses that while the fantasies themselves may be beyond the woman’s conscious control, at some very fundamental level, the fantasizer exercises absolute control over the terms of the experience.

That paradox is evident in numerous textual expressions of the fantasy, as well, especially in Romance where the author is literally exercising absolute control over the construction and execution of the “fantasy” scene. In this sense, the fantasy is deliberately created, so it differs from the primal erotic fantasies chronicled by Friday and others. However, textual representations can trigger a fantasy response in the reader, which is where much of the controversy surrounding forced sex in the genre hovers. Even if submission fantasies are spontaneous and, at the very least, value neutral in their seeming naturalness (that is, as natural as anything can be within our cultural paradigm), textual representations are deliberative and artificial. In other words, fantasies themselves may be uncontrolled responses, but the writing process is not.

This is the point at which I think a huge leap is often made, namely, that if texts are deliberately constructed, and they are also socially and culturally coded, that the reader is similarly being encoded during the process of reading. For example, books that reward a heroine for staying with a hero who rapes her could be telling the reader that they should tolerate male violence. And the more we read these kinds of scenarios, the more desensitized we become to the idea of violence against women, and the more likely we are to let violence against women go unaddressed. The problem is that this conclusion assumes facts not in evidence.

Extending the pseudo-legal analogy for a second, think about legal and cultural attitudes toward real life rape and domestic violence over the past 30 or so years. Rape laws have become stronger and less dependent on the physical resistance of women for conviction. Sexual harassment laws have become much more inclusive and far-reaching. And in the field of domestic violence, research has finally shifted from the victims – about whom virtually no consistent pattern or list of common characteristics could be discerned – to the perpetrators. For those of us who were raised with the idea that you could make yourself look or act like a victim, these shifts are substantial, if not complete, and they do not suggest a “softer” attitude toward violence against women. And in regard to The Book That Shall Not Be Named, we are seeing women talk publicly and in mainstream media about their fantasies in unprecedented ways, declaring that they refuse to be shamed for something they find pleasurable.

This is not to say that we should not question portrayals of violence against women, that we should not be individually and collectively be discussing, debating, disagreeing, and generally digging deep into the complex dynamics of the stories we tell ourselves. However, prescribing uniform readings and interpretations is another matter. Consider the US Supreme Court justices, who represent, ideally speaking, the pinnacle of understanding in regard to legal history, jurisprudence, and case law. Even among these few highly educated and trained lawyers, there is extreme disagreement in regard to the intention, meaning, and purposeful implementation of the Constitution. How could it be any different when we’re talking about reading fiction?

For all of those who went through college sometime during the past 30 years, reader response theories have informed our literary education. Simply speaking, reader response is a categorical term for theories of reading that focus on the interaction between reader and text. There are many theories that can be classified under this umbrella, and they cross multiple disciplines. Researchers at the University of Alberta have been conducting empirical research on reader response theories, and they have posted numerous online resources on their work and results to date. But one of their premises is particularly applicable to this discussion, namely,

We think literary reading may involve some distinctive psychological processes not found in other kinds of reading. If we contrast reading a newspaper article or a textbook with the reading of a novel, we believe that readers’ feelings are not only more important in the context of a novel, but that feelings play a critical role in the constructive processes that enable a reader to sustain her reading and make it meaningful as a whole. Our theory of reading is thus based on trying to understand feeling rather than cognitive processes. Although cognitive components such as imagery or memory are clearly essential, these are controlled and shaped by the reader’s feelings. Feelings are important because they engage the reader’s sense of self. Reading a literary text involves exploring and perhaps questioning the self, although readers may generally be unaware of this underlying process while reading.

Their focus on emotions and on “the reader’s sense of self” is important, I think, because it brings the focus back to the individual process of reading and interpretation of meaning and significance. In Romance fiction, particularly, the emotional aspect of the experience is forefronted in the structure of the stories themselves, personalizing the experience even more. There is a degree to which we share experiences, perceptions, and constructions of meaning; however, there is a level of experience in reading that exceeds our ability to explain or even articulate the way any of us responds to a particular book. So taking the leap from the personal experience of a book to a universal truth is always problematic, because it assumes a universal way of reading and an undifferentiated sense of self among readers.

This is not to say that textual representations are not – to any of us at a given time – problematic. Nor does it mean we should refuse to problematize them and subject them to the scrutiny of analysis. Shared analysis can be even more illuminating, because individual readers not only measure their own responses to a text, but those of other readers who may have extracted meaning in an entirely different way. For example, women writing, reading, and discussing Romance fiction within a patriarchal cultural context can affect our conscious thought processes. How does it affect our unconscious processes? Can a book force a seduction on its reader? If anything is “dangerous,” perhaps it might be making universally shaming prescriptions (and proscriptions) about how fictional narratives speak to any of us.

Why dangerous? Because it conflates reading as a shared activity and reading as a personal activity. Because it folds reality into the experience of the book in a way that might not be accurate, certainly not for the totality of readers. For example, I did not read Anna Campbell’s book Claiming the Courtesan in the context of Stockholm Syndrome. For one thing, I think the term is overused and often misused. It is a very specific phenomenon, and one of its characteristics is the lack of awareness and/or understanding the captive has about his/her feelings toward the captor. And yet Verity wonders extensively about her feelings for Justin, as do many Romance heroines who are engaged with heroes who make them suffer in one way or another. My “reality” of that text is much different. The text is necessarily an incomplete map of objective reality, because it cannot anticipate every interaction between itself and its readers. Moreover, the reader not only has the ultimate power to consent (or not) for the heroine, but she also has the ability to analyze and respond to the textual representation, creating yet another layer of symbolic distance from “real life.”  And in the case of sexual fantasy, what the reader experiences at that level is not necessarily a literal translation of what occurs in the text, as readers of The Book That Shall Not Be Named have demonstrated in conversations about the differences between the (faux) BDSM in the book and their own submission fantasies.

Even the context in which we read makes a difference. As a student of 19^th C sentimental and sensational fiction, I have read numerous books in which the “virtuous” heroine who is attracted to the rake suffers sexual degradation, social ostracism, disease, and often ignominious death. By contrast, the Romance heroine who falls in love with the rake gains happiness, often wealth, social acceptance, and, often, a loyal and faithful romantic partner. Two different faces of patriarchy, but are they equivalent? Could the Romance version be viewed – under particular circumstances – as more sex, love, and power positive for the heroine?

So yes, I believe that texts have power, that they convey and reflect socially and culturally conditioned messages. So does everything with which we engage emotionally and intellectually. I do not personally know one woman, for example, who has been untouched by male violence, even indirectly. We learn that men are capable of danger and violence, and, as women, we know we can be vulnerable to that in a way that makes it difficult to distinguish violence and sex. So is it any surprise that in a world made unsafe for women by men that women might find ways to rewrite that story? Is the textual recreation of that story problematic? Perhaps, but I would argue that it’s a problem that will never have only one solver, nor one solution. Which, like the submission fantasy itself, is what makes it so potent with possibilities, and so fundamentally and stubbornly resistant to literalization.

Related posts:

1. Read Enough Romances and Rape Is No Longer Rape
2. Of Rape and Rape Fantasies
3. You Are What You Read

Before I get too far into this review, I want to say right up front that I found Blame it on Bath quite likeable. I do so because the series that includes this book – The Truth about the Duke – is based on a legal issue that, even to my limited knowledge, seems kind of squirrely. That did not ruin my enjoyment of the book, but for those who require scrupulous historical realism, this series might be a challenge.

Captain Gerard De Lacey, the youngest of the Duke of Durham’s three sons, has always respected his father and the care with which he raised his sons after his wife’s death left him with three small boys and a guilty conscience. The source of the guilt was not revealed until the duke lingered near death, at which point he confesses that he was married as a very young man – before he took his title – and separated from this woman without divorcing before he married the duchess. And while this secret has remained unearthed for more than 60 years, in the months before the duke died he was receiving letters from a supposed blackmailer, who, strangely, demanded money to keep quiet but never actually tried to collect it.

Thanks to middle son Edward’s insistence that they confide in his then-fiancée, who promptly broke off the engagement and feed the gossip papers her story, the “Durham Dilemma” has imperiled the inheritance and the passing of the title to the eldest son, Charles (apparently there is a vile distant cousin who would inherit should the sons be declared illegitimate). And since Gerard does not have the patience to wait on the work of the solicitors (I’m not even going to explain this bit, but my understanding after asking a gazillion questions of people much more educated about the historical context of the novel is that there are numerous problems with this whole set up), he decides to pursue the alleged blackmailer himself in the hopes of disproving whatever claim this person might have. He also decides to find a rich woman to marry, in the event that he has to survive on a thousand pounds a year for the foreseeable future.

Katherine Howe has spent nearly a year in mourning for her husband, although it’s less out of love and more out of a desperate attempt to postpone what seems an inevitable marriage to his younger, handsomer, but humorlessly devout nephew, Lucien Howe. A relatively plain woman of thirty, Katherine does have one substantial asset: an inheritance of more than a hundred thousand pounds that her father left to her outright. Katherine’s late husband borrowed a large portion of money from her father, with the Howe estate as collateral, and because he died before Katherine’s father, which means that Lucien, who has inherited the estate, must repay the loan soon or lose the estate. His own lack of financial plentitude means that marriage to Katherine would bring him the greatest profit.

Katherine is no romantic when it comes to marriage, but the thought of marrying the dour and dominating Lucien is more than she can stand. Her mother, a great beauty who is thrilled at the idea of marrying her daughter off to such a handsome young man, is pushing hard for the marriage, as well. But neither knows of the youthful crush Katherine has carried for a young army captain who once showed her a relatively small kindness that represented a level of solicitous concern Katherine had never really known in her life. And years later, when she finds out that the very same captain is now in danger of losing everything he has been raised to expect and work toward, she sees her only chance of escaping the life her family is planning for her.

Gerard has no memory of Katherine, but when she covertly approaches him in the middle of the night at an inn outside of London, he is both surprised and intrigued by her proposition: a marriage of convenience that would, Katherine insists, solve both of their dilemmas. Gerard does not mind that Katherine is not a great beauty, hoping that perhaps she will be a good wife in other ways, and the same chivalrous concern that made him do that kindness for her all those years ago impels him toward seriously considering her proposal, not just for his own sake, but for hers, as well.

So here’s the thing: even as I’m typing that I can see how crazy it sounds. Why would a handsome young man (two years younger than his bride!) who has not yet lost anything marry a relatively plain woman he doesn’t even know? And the book does not, at least for me, manage to make his choice particularly rational, although I was glad to see that Gerard investigates Katherine’s family history to make sure she’s not trying to bamboozle him. I had to take a relatively big leap of faith here, especially since Gerard’s notion of marriage is that it’s for life and that fidelity is a reasonable expectation for both of them unless they truly don’t suit. So why was I willing to take this leap, especially on the heels of the squirrely legitimacy scandal? I think it’s because – in addition to marriage of convenience being one of my favorite devices — I sensed that both characters were honorable and likeable, and I was curious to see how their relationship would play out.

And, as I said at the very beginning of the review, I liked this part of the book quite a bit. First of all, both Gerard and Katherine are responsible adults who believe in personal accountability and understand consequences. Katherine, whose mother is incredibly shallow and vain and whose husband was an irresponsible, inattentive spendthrift, is quiet and serious, and uncertain of Gerard, who reacts to Katherine’s restraint with the fervent hope that still waters run deep, so to speak. When he surprises her with a kiss to seal their bargain, he senses that she’s not very sexually experienced and yet she seems open to the experience. Whatever Katherine’s expectations may be (and she fools herself a little on this point), Gerard is basically hoping for a woman who will be a good mother to his children and an enthusiastic companion in bed. However, Gerard also has his investigative mission to attend to, and as soon as he and Katherine are married, he needs to break the news to her family and get both of them out of London and on their way to Bath.

You would think, given the dramatic context of the marriage and the Durham Dilemma, that Katherine and Gerard’s relationship would be fueled by a relatively high level of drama. That it’s not is probably one of the reasons I liked it so much. What plagues these two is primarily a function of their lack of acquaintance. Katherine, despite the fact that she has been married before, has not had the chance to be sexually expressive — or expressive in any way, really, and therefore she is unsure of what Gerard expects of her. Gerard, who is not used to women being wary of him, sees Katherine as afraid, which makes him hang back a little, as he tries to puzzle her out.

He twisted in his chair to regard her with mild surprise. That rumpled wave of hair fell over his brow again. “We shall have to get to know each other, Kate. You’re always so nervous when I look at you.”

“I’m sorry.” Unconsciously she straightened, smoothing her expression.

He sighed. “There’s no need for that. Don’t shy away from me.”

Katherine didn’t know what to do. “I’m not afraid of you,” she insisted. “Do you think I would have proposed what I did if I feared you? No, I told you I esteem you very highly—”

“There’s a vast gulf between esteem and affection.”

Then, when she sees him arm-in-arm in town with the sister of a friend and fellow army officer, she naturally assumes he has a mistress, as her first husband did. And when Gerard doesn’t automatically open up to her about his investigative mission in Bath, Katherine gets frustrated, which in turn baffles and frustrates Gerard:

Katherine glanced at him. He looked tired but on edge. “Perhaps I can help,” she offered.

“Oh?” One corner of his mouth still curled. “I’m sure you can. Come here, m’lady.”

“No, truly.” She stayed in her chair even when he put out one hand to her. “If you tell me what you’re trying to do, I might be able to help in some small way.”

He dropped his hand. “I don’t think you can.”

She bit her lower lip in frustration. He was growing annoyed, when she was only trying to understand and help. “I don’t want to pry. Different people see things different ways. I feel unable to offer even sympathy and support since I don’t know what you’re trying to do.” “Does it matter?” He cocked his head. “Does one need to know all before offering sympathy and support?”

“It would be nice if you talked to me!” she exclaimed. “You have my sympathy, you have my support, and I have nothing from you!”

His eyebrows shot up at this outburst. Katherine felt her face flush deep, burning red as she realized how much she’d lost her temper. “Nothing?” he asked in a dangerous voice.

She looked at his expression, and the flush spread across the rest of her body. “Well, not—not nothing,” she stammered. “But . . . we don’t talk of anything.

. . .

He scrubbed his hands over his face. “Kate, I haven’t the patience for puzzles now. What do you want?”

I want you to take an interest in me, she thought.

How could one ask for that? “I want to be a good wife,” she said softly.

“Excellent. Come upstairs and show me.”

What a grand joke on her. She had hoped he would warm to her physically once they were acquainted and familiar with each other. Instead he took her to bed and made sweet, wicked love to her without appearing to care to be acquainted at all. She didn’t know how to respond to that. On one level she was deliriously happy with her marriage, but on another, she felt more and more distressed.

For me there was a real sense of relief in reading about two people who wanted to do right by each other but did not completely know how. Katherine soon understands that what she really wants from Gerard is something she might never get, while Gerard is so happy to get what he does from Katherine that he does not think more deeply about his own feelings, or hers, for that matter. She needs to learn how to communicate her emotions more directly, while Gerard needs to get more in touch with his, and that interdependent process creates some friction between them, not all of which kindles desire. The more deeply Katherine falls for Gerard the more embarrassed she becomes by her feelings, while Gerard, who has always enjoyed a kind of popularity and social ease that Katherine has not, becomes more comfortable with Katherine than she does with herself. It’s an interesting dynamic, and one that — while not incredibly deep — has a nice resonance in a relationship that has to grow from the ground up. That Kate does not get a magic makeover and Gerard is a good man but not a perfect husband make the romantic progression of their relationship believable, and it made me want to root for their happiness as equals. It also allowed me to appreciate and enjoy the relationship as a separate entity from the whole Durham Dilemma stuff.

Which brings me back to the historicity of the novel. While I suspected a Regency setting, there was no date that I could find in the book, nor anything substantial locating the novel within a specific year. Linden does have a page online that allows the reader to discern the year in which the novel is set (1810), but this is not a book that I’d describe as historically rich. Still, because the romance itself (outside of the whacky circumstances under which the couple meet and wed) was kind of timeless in its focus on the very real and yet mundanely realistic issues that likely exist in every time period, for the most part Blame it on Bath worked pretty well for me. B

AmazonBNSonyKobo

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: One Night in London by Caroline Linden
2. REVIEW: What a Gentleman Wants by Caroline Linden
3. REVIEW: What a Gentleman Wants by Caroline Linden

This is the first of your books I’ve read, and it’s the first in quite a while that I’ve considered applying the mistorical tag to. Given the muddled nature of Regency history in Romance, as well as my insecurity regarding how much I really know that’s true about the period, I decided against tagging the book that way. However, the internal debate is indicative of my overall response to A Rogue By Any Other Name, specifically my inability to feel immersed in the lives of its characters or their world. Despite some likeably competent writing and some truly entertaining scenes, I pretty much stayed at arm’s length from the book and felt unconvinced by the progression of the romance.

At 21, only six years after his parents’ tragic death, Michael, the young Marquess of Bourne lost all of his unentailed property in one hand of vingt-et-un. In a cruel irony, the man who took Bourne’s fortune was the man who helped him build it back over the past six years. So for nearly the past decade, Michael has been planning his revenge against the Viscount Langford, while building the wealth to re-aquire a stretch of land that, for Bourne, seemed to represent his future. As a partner of a notorious London gaming hell, The Fallen Angel, Bourne has the money to buy out most of his fellow aristocrats, but the deed to Falconwell remains elusive. Until, that is, Michael happens into a little bit of luck in Surrey.

At 28, Lady Penelope has had five proposals of marriage, none of which have resulted in a wedding. Her latest, from childhood friend Thomas Alles, was probably the easiest to reject, in part because after being spurned by a duke who went on to marry for love, Penelope would rather be a spinster than unhappily married. And now that her father, the Marquess of Needham and Dolby, has placed Falconwell in Penelope’s dowry, that chance has drastically increased. As much as Penelope would like to marry for the sake of her younger sisters’ matrimonial chances, she cannot imagine how that could ever happen. The one man she wished for has been gone from Surry for almost a decade, and for years her letters to him have gone unanswered (and lately unsent). So when, in the middle of the night, she decides to walk the neighboring land, Falconwell, in fact, she is absolutely stunned to come across Michael, who is equally surprised to see her.

Michael knows that if he lets Penelope go safely back to her home and bed, he will never again have a chance at Falconwell, so instead he basically abducts her to the long-abandoned Bourne estate, ensuring her “ruin” by ripping her dress practically in half and introducing her to the hot pre-marital sexxoring. Penelope, who had long been a young woman of propriety and respect for her parents and the many rules of society, is both incensed and tempted by Michael’s actions. Part of her has always wanted him to love her, and yet, as he makes clear that first night,

“I do not fool myself into thinking that the goal of marriage is happiness for one or both of the parties involved. My plan is to restore Falconwell’s lands to its manor and, unfortunately for you, it requires our marriage. I shan’t be a good husband, but I also haven’t the slightest interest in keeping you under my thumb.”

Still, it is difficult for Penelope to accept that her childhood friend Michael is now this seeming hard, uncaring man bent myopically on revenge, which establishes a difficult dynamic in their relationship early on: she consistently hopes for more, and Michael consistently shows her less. Until he doesn’t. But more on that later.

Some of my favorite books in the genre feature heroes who – through a mixture of traumatic loss and a diminished sense of self-worth – struggle with unaccustomed feelings of emotional dependence on the heroine and, in the process, end up hurting and disappointing her. One of the reasons those books are among my favorites is that the process of successfully redeeming such a man is both torturously painstaking and cathartically rewarding in direct proportion to the degree of alphahole behavior. And for almost the first half of A Rogue By Any Other Name, Michael is one serious alphahole, telling Penelope over and over again how incidental she is to his twin goals of Falconwell’s restoration and revenge against Langford, leaving her for days at a time, seducing and abandoning her without a word, etc. Standard alphahole behavior, in other words.

For her part, Penelope is tired of living in response to the whims of men, and if she cannot have the kind of happiness in marriage she once imagined, she can use the position her new marriage affords her to secure good matches for her sisters. She bargained that deal with Michael the first night he took her to his abandoned estate and convinces him that it will go much easier if they convince everyone they have a real love match. And unfortunately for Penelope, Michael is an incredibly good actor, which adds to Penelope’s confused feelings, her stubborn hopefulness, and the disappointment she feels when Michael reminds her, for the umpteenth time, how uncommitted he is emotionally to their marriage. It’s not until Penelope decides to take the freedom Michael’s disinterest offers her more seriously – making a late might trip to The Fallen Angel to explore Michael’s world – that her own marital fortunes change.

The character trajectories of Penelope and Michael are clear: as she becomes more independent of will, he becomes more connected emotionally, and thus they ultimately grow together. Because this is a Romance, we know they will end up happily and in love, so the main mystery in the story is how Michael will resolve his revenge plans, which implicate not only Langford, but also his son, Tommy, the mutual childhood friend of Michael and Penelope. Penelope, of course, does not want Tommy to suffer for Langford’s betrayal and Michael’s righteous anger, which creates a good deal of emotional tension between her and Michael, who is alternately jealous of his wife’s desire to protect Tommy and resigned to seeing himself as unworthy of Penelope.

Unfortunately for me, that tension around Michael’s revenge and his feelings for Penelope were just not enough to emotionally invest me in the story. Part of the issue was the way the two protags evolved. Penelope, for example, is initially introduced as this reasonable, proper young woman who has always put her responsibilities first and who even failed to stand up for herself when her thoughtless younger sister, Olivia, makes snide comments about her marriage prospects. And then suddenly she’s walking around outside – alone! – in the middle of the night, pursuing the strange light that turned out to be Michael’s lamp, demanding he take her home and then letting him have his wicked way with her. It wasn’t that I disliked her; it was more that I felt a fundamental lack of consistency in her character that made it difficult for me to trust her. I found myself annoyed at her constant waffling between dreaming of Michael falling in love with her and being let down by his alphaholery. And yet, despite the lack of consistency, she possessed a predictability that further distanced me. There was one point where Michael offered her an adventure, and I think I actually yelled out loud at the book, “Don’t say you want to go to the gaming hell!!!!!,” right before she did, indeed, say she wanted to go to the gaming hell.

Still, my bigger issues are with Michael, who spends at least 200 pages in alphahole mode, only to flip like the coin he gives Penelope as a marker when he promises to help her sisters. What facilitates the flip? Among other things, a late night therapy session at The Fallen Angel with his business partners, who tease and goad him, challenge and, when all else fails, brawl with him in service of getting him to see what he’s missing by spending all his nights at the hell. Now don’t get me wrong: this was one of the funniest, not to mention, truly unexpected, scenes in the book – all these tough guys gossiping like women and trying to get Michael in touch with his suppressed emotions. But the whole thing seemed kind of crazy to me, as well, both in its character and effectiveness. Like Penelope, I was taken aback at Michael’s change of heart, although unlike her, I was more unconvinced by the way it happened than by the fact that it did. After all, I expected that. Unfortunately, the process was unexpected in a way that made it feel more cartoonish than authentic to me. Even Michael’s backstory left me with questions: what happened to his entailed property while he disappeared from society? Didn’t he had many people who were counting on him to be responsible and take care of them? Did the Bourne manor house sit on Falconwell, and if so, why was it not part of the entailed property? And with so much property lost to Langford, why was it just Falconwell Michael wanted so badly? Part of me was never able to see Michael as the good guy, because I had no sense he felt there was anything wrong with taking off  for a decade after he had lost what he perceived to be “his future.”

I think, in the end, it was this combination of clichéd predictability and eccentric inconsistency that kept me from loving the book. Where I wanted more unpredictability – in how the characters developed and reacted and evolved – I felt it was too superficial, and where I wanted consistency, I felt like I got artificial shifts that propelled the plot forward. Instead of the plot serving the characters, it felt to me as if the characters served the plot, and I think they really suffered for it. I felt this even extended to some of the historical details. For example, I’m certainly no Regency expert, but I understand that gambling and cards were quite popular among men and women. And yet one character in the book boisterously insists he won’t deign to play cards with a woman, and vingt-et-un is basically described as a man’s game, in order, I think, to ramp up the dramatic tension of the scene. And while I understand that the book is set in 1831, it still feels very much a Regency Romance to me.

I cannot say, though, that I would not read another MacLean historical, as the writing was likeable, and at some points, really quite nice, especially some of the descriptions of The Fallen Angel:

Penelope had never seen anything so stunning as this place, this marvelous, lush, place, filled with candlelight and color, teeming with people who called out obscene bets and rolled with laughter, who kissed their dice and cursed their bad luck.

Perhaps my reaction would have been different had I read the book containing Penelope’s backstory. I will soon find out, as I will likely read Pippa’s book, as her match is quite an interesting choice. For A Rogue By Any Other Name, though, a C.

~ Janet

AmazonAmazonBNSonyKobo ARE

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: The Season by Sarah Maclean
2. REVIEW: Eleven Scandals to Start to Win a Duke’s Heart by Sarah MacLean
3. REVIEW: The Curious Rogue by Joan Vincent

One of the reasons I was excited to read The Whip is that I lived for quite a while in Santa Cruz County, where some of the novel is set. I was also intrigued by the idea of a fact-based story about Charley Parkhurst, a woman who not only lived for most of her life as a man, but who was one of the most respected “whips,” aka stagecoach drivers, for Wells Fargo. While not a great deal is known about Parkhurst’s life, especially her early life, what is known provides a lot of rich material for any novelist, and certainly there is a great deal of drama in this fictionalized account of Parkhurst’s life. I found some of that drama moving, and there were significant stretches of the story I felt immersed in as a reader, but I ended up feeling ambivalent about both the kind of drama created around Parkhurst and the amount, which for me too often crossed the line into melodrama.

In 1812, Charlotte Parkhurst was left as an infant on the doorstep of the Boston Society for Destitute Children. Her first days at the orphanage were hardly auspicious, as the overworked, uncaring caretaker sees fit to lock the crying infant in a laundry closet at night so she will not keep the other children awake. Were it not for the immediate interest and devoted protection of a four-year old boy named Lee Colton, who rescued Charlotte from the closet and then kept her under his protection for the first four years of her life, Charlotte may not have made it through that first night alone in the closet. The relationship between Lee and Charlotte is somewhat like brother and sister, but the appearance of a new headmistress and the imposition of new rules, including the separation of male and female orphans, jeopardizes Lee’s authoritative protection of Charlotte, and his open defiance of the rules results in the kind of discipline that brings out the bad in Lee, a darkness that never leaves the bond he shares with her.

As Lee and Charlotte grow, their relationship becomes fraught, both with Lee’s conflicted feelings toward his “sister,” and the perceptions of others about the nature of their closeness. Charlotte is much more innocent than Lee, and while she escapes most of the brutality that Lee suffers under the orphanage’s “improvements,” her persistent efforts to spend time playing games with the boys instead of learning the domestic arts eventually results in her banishment to the stables, where the headmistress is certain she will learn humility and a desire to be a “good” girl. Instead, Charlotte discovers her love of horses, and under the wise tutelage of the stable master, Jonas, she gains both skill and the protections of a father-figure, both of which become necessary once Lee’s mixed feelings become dangerous to her and she needs to fashion a life without social, financial, or family connections.

Charlotte lives as a woman for the first four decades of her life or so. During that time, Lee moves in and out of her life, becoming more and more unstable and belligerent, and Charlotte moves from job to job, each more drab than the last, and the sum total causing her to “disappear” from her own life. Until, quite unexpectedly, she meets the local farrier and blacksmith in Providence, Rhode Island, where she is working and living in a women’s boarding house. Byron Williams, who was born into slavery and sent North through the Underground Railroad at 12 by his mother, who also taught him to read and write so he could support himself as a free man, introduces Charlotte to Emerson, and their mutual passion for the Transcendentalist’s ideals is matched by their physical passion for one another and their eventual love. Although their relationship is shunned in Providence, they eventually find happiness and stability on a farm, and the birth of their daughter brings them fulfillment neither ever thought possible.

So when tragedy comes to the farm donning white sheets and masks, and fueled by racism and a personal anger that is definitely not brotherly, Charlotte heads out West to California, where she hopes she will find the master of her misery and exact well-deserved and long-overdue revenge. Instead what Charlotte finds is a new life as Charley Parkhurst, stagecoach driver and Sacramento resident. Although small and slim, Charley manages to pass as a man, although the parts of the narrative told from Charley’s point of view continue to use female pronouns, suggesting that Charley never thought of herself as male. Whether this was the case in real life is not clear, but for the purpose of the book, Charley’s dual identity is necessary because of the various relationships she has during the second half of her life, one of which is as a woman with a local gambler she periodically trysts with in San Francisco, and another as a man with an actress and her daughter who live with Charley as caretakers of a sort. I will not describe this section of the book in much more detail, because it is difficult not to venture into serious spoiler territory, but I will say that this was the most problematic part of the book for me.

Fictionalized biographies are interesting creations, because the choices the author makes for her “characters” are as significant as the real life history on which she draws. In Parkhurst’s case, there are so many gaps in the story that Kondazian invents the majority of the biographical details, incorporating those that are speculated or known alongside the fictional aspects. For example, it is known that Parkhurst was abandoned and raised at an orphanage, but the content of those years is not known. The invention of Lee Colton is interesting and provocative, because it is Lee’s idea to initially disguise Charlotte as a boy so she can stay with him once the orphanage is divided along gender lines once the new headmistress arrives. He is the one who dubs her Charley, and even though her real gender is discovered almost immediately, the ruse sets the stage for the second half of the book and problematizes the relationship with Lee in a way that creates a lot of dramatic attention throughout the novel. Lee is characterized as possessing “anger” that is often seen “showing off its sexual side.” He feels possessive and protective of Charlotte/Charley, but is also attracted to her, and it baffles and angers him that she does not easily submit to those desires.

Lee’s dark ambivalence is later mirrored in Charley’s dualistic experience of herself as both male and female. She is most at home on the stagecoach driving her beloved horses, but experiences some of her happiest moments dressed as a woman and making love with a man who knows her secret:

Charley could sense Edmunds not only made love to Charlotte, but to Charley as well. The vision of Charley on the driver’s box, sweaty, dirty, whipping the six-team, powerful and brave as any man. She imagined it excited him to feel Charley beneath him or on top. As it excited her . . . the freedom to be a man and a woman in the same body – at the same time.

But that dualism can also be extremely difficult, as when Anna, the woman who lives with Charley, wants to make their relationship sexual and Charley can neither satisfy Anna’s desires nor tell her the truth.

And, indeed, this ambivalence, which can be so interesting when it’s explored in terms of the fluidity of gender identity and issues of power, also becomes problematic and ironically constraining when it comes to the novel’s dramatic structure. For example, why is it that Charley can trust her male lover with the truth of who she is but not the woman who claims to love her? And why is it that Charley necessarily thinks of herself as female when she not simply passes as male but seems so embedded in male culture and so infused with male habits and behavior as to be considered male and to be characterized as relishing the freedom of being male? Is there really a gender duality or is it more about conforming to the varying demands of the fictionalized drama? Also, why is it that some people conveniently see through her disguise but not others? Why does no one who could be dangerous to her see through it? And if, as she is told by her doctor at one point, that she is not the only woman living the way she is, that there is “nothing unusual” about her choice, why doesn’t she run into any of these other women? It feels that her secret is alternately urgently well-hidden or not so necessarily hidden depending on the circumstance, and the differences feel more contrived for plot than realistic consistency.

Realism is not necessary for the success of a fictionalized biography such as this one, but believability is, and there are so many coincidences in the book, especially in the second half, that for me that crucial believability became strained to the point of frustration at several crucial points in the story. In some ways it was fun to see all the artifacts and details packed into the book – the historical speculation that Charley was the only woman to vote in the US during her lifetime; myriad locations from Rhode Island to Sacramento to San Francisco to Soquel to Watsonville; Transcendetalism; saloons and chewing tobacco and sound horse knowledge and relevant social issues and events; even the preserved head of Joaquin Murrieta! But in other ways the novel had a kitchen sink feel, and more importantly, a sense that the book could not decide whether it wanted to be a serious, even heartbreaking, examination of prejudice and social identity or an indulgently pulpy historical melodrama. Even the prose shifted from banal to lyrical to purple:

Byrne had heard that old Charley Parkhurst was one of Wells Fargo’s most adept drivers…that he could get his coach along twisting roads in the dead of night as a dog can follow a trail by his nose.

. . .

It was March of 1812, the month when wagon-ruts were filled with cold, dark puddles – the month of mud and suicide in New England.

. . .

She tried to take all this in. That the woman in her had died in anguish and a vengeful man had been born in her place apparently brooked no notice of the universe. Nor had the universe even blinked in the absorption into itself of her tragedy.

And speaking of tragedy, there is a lot of it in this book. During the first half of the book, I felt that the darkness was effective at engaging my emotions and empathy. But the second half, where the tension between Charley’s tragic past and the almost ebullient indulgence of her masculine identity creates some over-the-top melodrama, I felt like The Whip was drawing on a number of stereotypes of life in 19^th C America more than constructing a believable tale about a complex and provocatively fascinating character. Consequently, my experience of the book was mixed and while I’m glad I read it, I cannot recommend it without reservations. C+

~ Janet

Goodreads | Amazon | BN | Sony | Kobo

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Take Me If You Can by Karen Kendall
2. REVIEW: Sea Change by Darlene Marshall
3. REVIEW: Desert Guardian by Karen Duvall

Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a lot of bluster in the YA community over what reviews “should be” and how they should be written and defined and what they should and should not contain. It’s a conversation that was very common in the online Romance community not so many years ago, and the topic still breaks the not-so-still waters periodically.

I won’t rehash the arguments made over the past few weeks, but I will provide a link round-up for anyone trying to catch up on the crazy:

A nice summary of the Goodreads flameouts

YA author Hannah Moskowitz’s “open letter” to Goodreads reviewers

Veronica Roth’s thoughtful response to some of her fellow YA authors’ meltdowns

Maggie Stiefvater’s insistence that reviews should be like academic papers, with a thesis and supporting sentences

Crime writer Jim Thompson’s rules for reviewing

Common themes have emerged from authors and reviewers. On the authorial side we’ve seen the assertion that there is a certain type of review that deserves to be called a “review,” and there are certain “professional standards” said “review” must meet, else it becomes something else, something decidedly lesser. And on the reviewer side we have the persistent refrain, “reviews are not for authors, so authors should not be trying to define them.” Of course there are authors on the so-called reviewer side and vice versa, but this conversation has occurred so often over the past decade or so that I’ve been online, that many of the issues are now well-rehearsed.

There also tends to be this polarization of micro and macro perspectives. On the one hand, you get rants on specific reviews that generate numerous generalizations and misunderstandings. We saw that here on Dear Author just yesterday. Then you get these macro-level generalizations about, say, less than stellar Amazon or Goodreads reviews, as if these reviews are mass-produced in some anti-author factory somewhere. In fact, one of the interesting things Veronica Roth notes is that “98% of the time, the reviewer is expressing opinions about a book, and if an author expresses his or her opinions about a review, they are always saying something about the reviewer.” We’ve also seen that here at Dear Author, too.

And let’s face it; it’s not difficult to see why that happens. A book review can feel like an incredibly personal thing, even though it’s directed at the book and not the author. Responding publicly in a way that doesn’t sound like a personal opinion about the reviewer is not as easy as it may seem, in part because a review is a personal opinion, with the reviewer and the review more closely combined in the review itself.

Which is, I think, one of the best things about reviews and one of the chief reasons we (that is, the broad community of readers, authors, editors, and publishers, regardless of favored genre) should be encouraging as broad a diversity of reviewing voices as possible, with the fewest set “rules” about what constitutes a proper or legitimate review.

I suspect a lot of the rule-setting is about legitimacy. I mean, what author wouldn’t want a glowing review in the NYTBR? And regardless of all the dismissive “I’m laughing all the way to the bank” comments about gaining critical exposure in certain venues, there is still a lingering sense that certain critical attention equals cultural or literary legitimacy. I think some of the current muddle in YA is connected to a desire for the perception of greater legitimacy for the genre. And I don’t think that desire is, in itself, illegitimate. What I think is unproductive and short-sighted, though, is the attempt to proscribe reviewing, especially when those doing the proscribing are not, in fact, doing the bulk of the reviewing.

For example, how many people consult Yelp or Trip Advisor when checking out a hotel or restaurant? How would you feel if the restaurant or hotel industry came out publicly against certain kinds of online reviews? Wouldn’t that seem to represent an overstepping of bounds? But book reviewing is different! Books are art! Writing is hard! Yes, writing is difficult. Writing reviews can be difficult, too. Not everyone articulates their opinion easily or in the same way. Not everyone is versed in the language of literary theory or writing craft. Not everyone has the same writing style or feels the same way about a book. In fact, it’s the very personal experience of reading – much like the experience of writing – that makes it special and makes the articulation of its lasting effects on the reader so critical. Not that every review is a gem of brilliant insight or linguistic beauty, but as a whole, reviews are tangible evidence of the importance and legitimacy of reading and of books.

At its best, reading creates an alchemical reaction between book and reader, an elevation of both through the synergy created in the radiance of the experience. Although difficult to express, every reader knows what I’m talking about here, because we’ve all had that experience, thus our ongoing dedication to reading. It’s a very personal experience that, in and of itself, cannot be expressed. However, what can be articulated are the thoughts and reactions we have to books in a review – literally a re-viewing of the text through words. And in that re-viewing, we can share a part of that reading experience with others, making something that is unique and personal into something collective and connected.

If legitimacy is really the issue here, then let’s think about the long-term legitimacy of reading and book buying in general. How many nail-biting admonishments do we hear about the future of books, which are in hot competition with myriad other forms of entertainment. Reading, a largely solitary experience, becomes shared and communal through conversation, some of which may begin with reviews. Conversation both reflects and fosters personal investment, which in turn promotes more reading and conversation. The book is critical, but so are the forums in which the book becomes alive again through discussion and debate. This second-life doesn’t always take on the form most pleasing to the author, but it’s life, nonetheless, and that vivification is productive. It keeps interest in reading and books alive and growing, in the form of overlapping communities, forums, and venues, and in the inclusion of more and more voices. Why would anyone want to limit the number or type or style of voices in reading communities when there is so much worry about the long-term viability of books and reading?

But perhaps even more importantly, why would we want to stifle the precise thing that makes reading so powerful to so many of us – the enduring promise of that alchemical magic – for the sake of formalities? If books are special, if they are to be regarded as “art,” and if genre fiction in general is legitimate, then it will survive bad grammar, bad language, and even bad reviews.

Related posts:

1. In Praise of the Man Titty
2. REVIEW: Personal Demons by James Buchanan
3. REVIEW: The Personal Touch by Lori Borrill

In a way I wish I had read Trouble at the Wedding before the first two books in the Abandoned at the Altar series. The Edwardian setting, pairing of the bourgeois heroine from the American South and the titled but impoverished English duke, and mixed cocktail of the marriage for money and the reformed rake plots add up to an ambitious vision. But I’m not sure whether my expectations were set higher after the first two books, or if what struck me as fresh earlier now seems a bit worn, but whatever the reason, I found this third installment to be a bit of a kitchen sink of tropes and clichés, more interesting and successful in the concept than the execution.

Annabel Wheaton may have catapulted from near poverty to great wealth, and from Gooseneck Bend, Mississippi to New York City, following the death of her father, but she still feels like the “poor white trash” she’s been called most of her life. A smart, independent, business-minded young woman who has already been burned by what she thought was true love, Annabel is determined to marry into the British aristocracy, trading her money for a respected title and a sedate and secure life overseeing her husband’s English estate and raising their children. The man she has chosen, Bernard Alistair, Earl of Rumsford, is not particularly exciting, but then that’s the point. Annabel has had her fill of exciting men, and she frankly doesn’t trust them. Instead, she’s looking forward to a life of security, which she is certain will more than compensate for a lack of passionate romantic love.

Not everyone is on board with Annabel and Bernard’s upcoming wedding, however, which is set for six short days away on the ocean liner Atlantic, a compromise solution to the problem of whether to hold the ceremony in New York or London. One of the dissenters is one of Annabel’s trustees, her uncle Arthur, who believes that Annabel deserves a better match and is determined to get Annabel to see how ill-advised her choice of husband is. Which brings Christian Du Quesne, the handsome, rakish, and nearly broke Duke of Scarborough into the mix, hired by Arthur to talk Annabel out of the wedding in exchange for a half a million American dollars, a sum that will substantially rehabilitate the family estate, which fell into deep debt under the control of his older brother Andrew, whose death has brought the ignominious and unenthusiastic second son into the title.

Christian does not have to stretch the truth in articulating his disdainful view of life in England, especially for the dissolute aristocracy, and once he makes the acquaintance of the lushly beautiful Annabel, his attraction to her, combined with his dislike of Rumsford, generates an urgent personal interest for Christian in convincing Annabel that she doesn’t want what she thinks she wants. Annabel, who is well aware of her tendency to fall for the bad boy, doesn’t want to believe the things Christian is telling her about the unsuitability of life as an English countess, and especially as the Countess of Rumsford, but because Christian promises her he will tell her all the unwritten rules of the life she is choosing, she cannot stay away from him long enough to remain immune to either his charms or his admonitions.

As is the case in many Romances featuring two outsiders, Christian and Annabel have a rapport that is evident to both of them, despite their mutual insistence that they would never suit as a couple. Still, that rapport creates a kind of fast friendship, which tolerates a great deal of mutual honesty and fosters a powerful mutual attraction. Christian tells Annabel of his own past, married to a young heiress who killed herself after miscarrying their baby, while Christian was traveling and partying with friends. Annabel tells Christian of her own humiliation at the hands of the town rich boy, who took Annabel’s virginity and then unceremoniously dumped her.  Which makes Annabel even more determined to go through with the wedding and take the life she wants, and even as Christian admits defeat and drinks himself into a stupor, he inexplicably finds himself standing up at the wedding and calling it a “farce and a lie,” humiliating Annabel a second, devastating time and necessitating, in Christian’s mind, a proposal to save Annabel’s reputation.

But Annabel isn’t going to meekly accept Christian’s loveless sacrifice, and instead she engineers a strategy by which Christian will retroactively become one of Annabel’s trustees, thus making his wedding protest one of avuncular protection rather than scandalous insinuation. And in the meantime, Christian’s sister Sylvia volunteers to bring Annabel more fully into London society, where she can make an appropriate match and ultimately resuscitate her original ambition.

In many Romances, all of this set-up would have occurred in the first quarter or third of the novel, with the remainder of the story dedicated to unraveling Annabel and Christian’s true feelings for each other. Actually, many novels would likely turn the plot into one of marriage of convenience between the protagonists. That this particular plot occurs at the halfway point of the novel is indicative of its ambition, as does Annabel’s incredibly independent focus and resolve:

“First of all, let me say I owe you my most sincere apologies. My conduct was reprehensible”

“Which part?” she asked in a tart voice. “The part where you agreed to take money for talking me out of marrying Bernard? Or –“

“You know about that?”

“Uncle Arthur told me. Needless to say, he’s not feeling inclined to pay you that money now, so is that what you’re apologizing for? Hoping he’ll give it to you anyway? Or maybe it’s breaking up my wedding that you’re sorry about? Or maybe it’s because you called it a farce and a lie, and hurt my reputation? Or maybe it was the fact that you hauled off and kissed me last night? Which of those reprehensible things is the one you’re apologizing for?”

. . .

“We should become engaged.”

. . .

“Thank you for your gallant effort to save the day,” and the sweet drawling sarcasm in her voice told him his hope of an easy solution was rather out the window. “I appreciate it so very much, Your Grace. But I think I’ll pass.”

“You’re saying no?” He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. No doubt she felt a bit let down by the idea, for he knew he hadn’t made any effort to put a romantic gloss on it. Nonetheless, she couldn’t really refuse. “But we have to become engaged. It’s the only way to avert a scandal.”

“It’s not the only way. It’s the simplest way, and the easiest way for you because it doesn’t affect your life at all.”

I really liked this Annabel. I was even willing to overlook the sitcom sorghum character of her Southern accent and idioms, as well as the cliché-ridden prose and conversation. I liked the fact that the book took a somewhat unexpected turn at this point and that Annabel seemed to be the engineer of her own rescue.

Then it all fell apart for me. Annabel and Christian find themselves in that push-pull of attraction and resistance, with Annabel literally begging Christian to stay away and then feeling disappointed when he complies. Christian is torn between doing “the right thing” and pursuing his own desires, even as he knows he doesn’t want another marriage to a woman who supposedly deserves better than a rake like him. Rinse and repeat.

I have recently been thinking about certain Romance character pairings where you have an almost unresolveable conflict. For example, a heroine who deserves to be loved for who she is and a hero who is destined to let any woman who loves him down. As often as we see these kinds of conflicts, I’m not sure they’re usually resolved by means that don’t seem almost supernatural, often in the form of a crisis that clues the hero in to how much he loves the heroine and wants to be the man she deserves. I have, of late, been pining for more realistic resolutions to these complex conflicts, and one of the things that frustrated me about Trouble at the Wedding was the way in which the dramatic tension in the second half of the novel is generated in part by Annabel’s increasing desolation over the depth of her feelings for Christian and his inability to love her in return.

Not only does this dynamic weaken Annabel’s character and undermine her independent resolve, it accomplishes this by manipulating the reader into desperately hoping that Christian will come to his senses and accept his own feelings are more than simple lust. It became a problematic dynamic for me in this novel because I kept feeling like I was put in a position where I had to depend on Christian for Annabel’s happy ending, which contravened so much of what appealed to me about her character. While that is typical Romance form, it was constructed at the expensive of a character who, for me, at least, was appealing to Christian for that precise independence that the romantic trajectory of the novel undermined.

Part of the issue may have been the relatively short time and page frame in which the second half of the novel proceeds. But I also think there was a difficult pairing of plot and character ambition and genre mimesis that went too far out of balance in the second half of the book. I also felt that there was more infodump in this novel than in the previous two, with passages that sounded almost like they were powered by cinematic adaptations of Edith Wharton novels or Wikipedia:

The door banged again and the young woman below looked back over her shoulder. “There you are at last!” she exclaimed as a girl about ten years old came into view, her age evidenced not only by her more diminutive stature, but also by the shorter length of her skirt, the sailor motif of her dress, and the fact that her dark hair was not put up.

As much as I appreciated the details provided, their integration didn’t feel as easy as in previous novels set during this same time, and that added to the kitchen sink feel of the novel for me. Still, had Annabel’s happiness not depended so very much on Christian’s change, I think I would have overlooked so much else in the novel. But that substantial disappointment made other elements seem more pronounced, undermining my appreciation and enjoyment of the more unexpected and ambitious elements of the novel. C

~ Janet

Goodreads | Amazon | BN | Sony | Kobo

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Wedding of The Season by Laura Lee Guhrke
2. REVIEW: Secret Desires of A Gentleman by Laura Lee Guhrke
3. REVIEW: Scandal of the Year by Laura Lee Guhrke

I may be in the minority of readers in this, but I really prefer your contemporary books to your historicals. I find your contemporary voice more confident, fluent, and engaging, and, more specifically, I find Travis series books reliable comfort reads. Since we already had reviews of Sugar Daddy and Smooth Talking Stranger posted, Jane asked me if I wanted to write a view of Blue-Eyed Devil. I readily agreed, not only because it rounds out our coverage of the Travis series, but also because I think the novel’s treatment of domestic violence is an ever-timely and important discussion subject.

When Haven Travis defies her father’s wishes by marrying college boyfriend Nick Tanner, she is determined that she and Nick will be blissfully happy and she will never need her father – or his money. Which is a good thing, since Churchill Travis informs his daughter he will disinherit her if she goes through with the marriage. Churchill is a proud and arrogant man, but perhaps he also knows something about Nick that the young and naïve Haven does not yet see: the insecurities that express themselves through physical and emotional abuse of Haven. Still, it takes quite a while for Haven – who has inherited no small portion of her father’s pride – to break free of Nick’s control, and when she finally makes the phone call home, after Nick beat her and literally threw her out of the house, she calls her big brother Gage, who wastes no time in getting Haven back to Houston and, if he has his way, rapidly out of her violent marriage.

Because that’s the thing about the Travis men: they are charming as hell but too used to wielding their own power unchecked. Protective rather than abusive toward their women, the control is nonetheless the last thing Haven can stomach, having been controlled in almost every way by Nick. Still, it’s a long road back for Haven emotionally, and even as she makes substantial strides in her life – working for her brother Jack’s leasing company; divorcing Nick; undertaking psychotherapy – she still has a great deal of fear around men. So it’s no surprise that when she runs into Hardy Cates – her sister-in-law’s trailer park teenage crush and now a wealthy Houston oil man – she can literally feel the long-healed aches in her body from her final beating from Nick. And yet she is drawn to Hardy, too, just as she was in her family’s dark wine cellar when she accidentally kissed Hardy at Gage and Liberty’s wedding. Well the first kiss was accidental, at least, until she realized it wasn’t Nick who was wreaking such havoc on her sexual nerves. That long-ago kiss sealed the attraction between Haven and Hardy, though, and when they see each other again, Hardy is intent on taking things to the next level.

Hardy, of course, has no idea about Haven’s experience with Nick. In fact, he still sees in her a bit of a spoiled college girl whose apparent liberalism was more intellectual snobbery than authentic sentiment. So when Haven tends to act a bit standoffish in response to his assertive, even aggressive pursuit, Hardy isn’t sure she’s merely skittish or a tease, and he tries even harder to win her over, purchasing a condo in the Travis building where Haven works, buying her a gift that brings back memories of Haven’s childhood, and inviting her to a dance with him in front of her family, who see him as a no good, lying jerk who will take advantage of Haven if given half a chance (this aspect of the relationship was developed in Sugar Daddy, where Hardy tries to take Liberty away from Gage and interferes with an important Travis business deal).

Haven is not sure how to feel about Hardy’s pursuit. Part of her refuses to trust his motives, but another part is strongly drawn to the man her best friend Todd describes as “’[c]ool, tough retro-manly. The kind who only cries if someone just ran over his dog. The big-chested guy we can indulge our pathetic daddy complexes with.’” Although Todd also discerns that Hardy is more than he seems, a “’bending-the-rules, foxy, conniving twisted’” kind of guy who uses his “’aw-shucks-I’m-just-a-redneck routine’” to “’set people up” before he “goes in for the kill.’” In fact, Todd notes how much like Haven’t own father Hardy is in his “calculated underplaying,” which makes Haven even more wary of Hardy’s charm and intelligence. Indeed, Hardy uses a deft mixture of gentleness, charm, and forthright pressure with Haven that keeps her off balance but also keeps her coming back for more.

One of the things that drives me bonkers in Romance novels is a heroine supposedly recovering from abuse who somehow unconsciously recognizes that the hero is “safe” for her and has little compunction about jumping into a relationship – and into bed – with him. But one of my favorite aspects of Blue-Eyed Devil is that Haven and Hardy’s relationship does not follow that easy path. Like Haven, the reader wants to feel that Hardy is safe, but we still remember what he pulled in Sugar Daddy, making him a bit dangerous (or a bit contradictory in character, something I’ll address later). And Haven, who had almost no relationship or sexual experience before Nick, is doubly disadvantaged around a guy like Hardy, who is widely known for his bedroom looks and skills and ignorant of Haven’s history. A born seducer, Hardy pushes her sexually, and when she pushes back, he gets angry:

“Like hell I was pushing you. You wanted it.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Hardy.”

He looked flushed and dangerously aroused and annoyed as hell. Slowly he began to restore his own clothing. When he spoke again, his voice was low and controlled. “There’s a word, Haven, for a woman who does what you’re doing.”

“I’m sure you know a lot of interesting words,” I said. “Maybe you should go tell them to someone else.”

As much as I hated Hardy in this scene, I loved that Hardy makes this misstep, because it shows him to be a mere mortal, vulnerable in his own way. Because Hardy has a history, too – he got himself out of a trailer park and into the Houston social scene all by himself, and his own family history is even darker and more violent than what Haven experienced. Which makes his attraction to Haven very believable, even logical, in the same way that Haven’t attraction to a man who reminds her of her approval-withholding father is. For many readers, this kind of psychological layering makes Blue-Eyed Devil an “issue book,” but for me it’s really a book about people who have issues that make them good for each other but in really complicated and not-instantly negotiated ways.

Still, the story is romance at heart, and there is a certain amount of tension between the way the book tries to show Haven’s emotional journey in an authentic way and the almost fairy tale happiness we know Haven and Hardy will ultimately enjoy. For example, when Nick shows up to harass Haven before one of her dates with Hardy, it triggers an extreme emotional reaction in Haven that brings her relationship with Hardy to a crisis:

“. . . I’m broken.” I blotted my eyes with a shirtsleeve. “I wish I’d slept with someone before I married Nick, because at least then I’d have some good experience with sex. As it is, though. . .”

Hardy watched me intently. “That night of the theater opening. . . you had a flashback when I was kissing you, didn’t you? That’s why you took off like a scalded cat.”

I nodded. “Something in my mind clicked, and it was like I was with Nick, and all I knew was that I had to get away or I would be hurt.” . . .

“I guess it’s over now,” I said bravely. “Right?”

“Is that what you want?”

My throat clenched. I shook me head.

“What do you want, Haven?”

“I want you,” I burst out, and the tears spilled over again. “But I can’t have you.”

Hardy moved closer, gripping my head in his hands, forcing me to look at him. “Haven, sweetheart . . . you’ve already got me.”

I looked at him through a hot blur. His eyes were filled with anguished concern and fury. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “And you’re not broken. You’re scared, like any woman would be, after what that son of a bitch did.” A pause, a curse, a deep breath. An intent stare. “Will you let me hold you now?”

On the one hand, I was moved by Hardy’s reaction when he finally learns about Haven’s past and starts putting all the mixed signals into logical order, but I also saw the way the scene was set up to push Hardy and Haven into physical intimacy so the romance arc can progress. So as many ways as we can see Haven struggling to move forward –taking back her personal agency, trying to deal alone with a sociopathically abusive boss, freak outs with Hardy, ongoing therapy, etc. – we know where things are going with Hardy, and while there’s a lot of comfort in that, there is also the necessity of getting Haven recovered enough to have a healthy relationship in a timeframe that suits the romantic arc (i.e. condensed).

Additionally there is the problem of Hardy. In Sugar Daddy he showed himself to be ruthless and selfish, willing to betray a hard-won trust to get what he wanted. But by Blue-Eyed Devil we’re supposed to be willing to put our own trust in Hardy as an appropriate partner for the somewhat fragile Haven, which means we have to know he’s fundamentally a good guy. If readers are not familiar with the first book in the series, this might not seem like such a problem; however, if they are reading the series in order, Hardy feels a little artificially rehabilitated for the second book.

Still, Hardy is not a perfect man in Blue-Eyed Devil, even though we know from the beginning that he is The One for Haven. His missteps give his own character depth and let us know that he is a man who understands destructive family dynamics and has his own self-destructive streak to manage. Moreover, we see what Haven gives to Hardy rather than merely seeing Hardy as someone who will “save” Haven and bring her happiness. Hardy’s own background and his own unraveling during the course of the novel reveal the extent to which Hardy needs saving, too, and the extent to which both Hardy and Haven need a compassionate, protective, trustworthy partner.

At heart, though, I read Blue-Eyed Devil as Haven’s story. In fact, I find the whole series to be very heroine-centric, which may be one reason I like them so much. It’s not that the romance is peripheral or unimportant, or the men forgettable (in fact, they’re all very imposing, dynamic, handsome men); it’s that I find the heroine’s journey about more than one in which she finds love with the hero. Haven has to find the road back to being able to trust and accept herself and be confident in who she is. And Hardy is, indeed, a delicious counterpart, his love for Haven as big and powerful as he is. As I said, this book (and the series as a whole) is a comfort read for me – engaging, emotionally fulfilling, and psychologically satisfying despite its flaws and inconsistencies. B

~ Janet

Goodreads | Amazon | BN | Sony | Kobo

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Devil in Winter by Lisa Kleypas
2. REVIEW: Sugar Daddy by Lisa Kleypas
3. REVIEW: Smooth Talking Stranger by Lisa Kleypas

Although I’m not exactly a devoted reader of John Scalzi’s Whatever blog, a Twitter retweet last week drew my attention to a recent post, in which he announces that readers protesting ebook prices on his “Big Idea” posts will have their comment deleted:

Why? Primarily because here at the tail end of 2011, I find the subject boring and I find the people who get huffy about an electronic book not being [insert price you believe for whatever reason an eBook should be] are exhibiting a particularly tiresome sort of entitlement, to wit, that owning an electronic book reader means that you are possibly obliged to announce your opinion on book pricing at every turn. See, the thing is: You’re not. You don’t have to. At this point, I wish you wouldn’t.

But it doesn’t stop there. Scalzi goes on to insist that such complaints are “kind of mean to the author,” and that

. . . going into a comment thread of a Big Idea and making a big show of why you’re not going to buy the book because of a price point that the author very frequently has absolutely no control over kind of makes you a dick. Authors are already neurotic and twitchy about how the book is going to be received; you going in and announcing “I will not buy your book for reasons entirely unrelated to your writing and about which you were given no say” is really cluelessly rude. If you want to complain about the pricing, please do — to someone who actually has the wherewithal to do something about it, namely, the publisher. They are not hard to find and e-mail.

Without a doubt, Scalzi has the right to delete comments on his blog, and at least he’s giving people fair warning that he will do so in certain circumstances. That’s not what irked me about the post. What irked me is this belief that readers who protest book prices to the author are “entitled,” a word that in the context of his post suggests that we are somehow overstepping and over-reaching beyond what is our right. That, combined with Scalzi’s belief that readers have easy access to publishers and that not utilizing it is “mean to the author,” struck me as just plain wrong. Numerous supportive comments to his post honestly surprised me, as did a point Scalzi brought up to me in a long Twitter exchange, namely his belief that the big 6 publishers regard readers as their customers – which stands in contradiction to what even the publishers themselves say. And while I certainly understand why authors would get frustrated and even resentful over reader complaints about pricing, I think Scalzi’s argument is, at best, myopic and mistaken in regard to readers, authors, and publishers.

The Nature of the Book

There is an ongoing tension around whether books are the same or different from other consumer goods. Is the book a sacred cultural artifact or a commercial product akin to a vacuum cleaner or a kitchen appliance? The rise of digital books suggests that even within the realm of books there is a hierarchy of cultural value. Eloquent eulogies to the paper book abound, elevating its status and calling into question whether something that’s not printed and bound can even be called a book. Publishers currently treat digital books differently from print books, both in royalty structure and pricing (i.e. no so-called agency pricing model for print books). Scalzi argues that “eBooks are not special snowflakes; they’re just books in electronic form. As someone who prefers to read in eBook form, you are not substantially different from someone who prefers hardcovers, or trade paperbacks, or mass market paperbacks,” but what about books in general?

The Nature of the Reader’s Relationship with the Book

My own view is that books are both a commercial good and a cultural artifact, which means that behavior toward them will be a hybrid of consumption and critical engagement. And one of the biggest aspects of the commercial nature of books is the price. Under the current so-called agency pricing (Charles Petit does a great job explaining why it’s not really an agency model), big 6 publishers set the price of books, but consumers still primarily acquire books via retailers, which have long been considered the customers of publishers. As cultural artifacts, books are creative products, and readers are conditioned to identify them primarily with the author’s name on the cover. In the broad universe of books and readers, what is the likelihood that a reader will identify a book with its publisher?  I know for myself that even now I’m much more likely to know a non-agency book’s publisher than I am one from the big 6. Some of those non-agency books I purchase direct from the publisher (e.g. Harlequin), but most I still buy from a retailer.

The Nature of the Reader’s Relationship with the Author, the Retailer, and the Publisher

When I learned that publishers don’t view readers as their customers, so much made sense to me. My inability – until very recently – for example, to find a contact link on the Penguin publishing site; Macmillan CEO John Sargent’s failure to include readers in his letter on the agency stand-off with Amazon; the seeming hostility to digital demonstrated by big 6 leaders like Simon and Schuster’s Carolyn Reidy, who unselfconsciously explained the practice of “windowing” digital releases, admitting that,

“The right place for the e-book is after the hardcover but before the paperback. We believe some people will be disappointed. But with new [electronic] readers coming and sales booming, we need to do this now, before the installed base of e-book reading devices gets to a size where doing it would be impossible.”

Hachette CEO David Young added, “We’re doing this to preserve our industry. I can’t sit back and watch years of building authors sold off at bargain-basement prices. It’s about the future of the business.” And the big 6 business model is built around the hardcover, something I do not believe reflects the priorities of the reading public as a whole.

I know it’s not personal; I understand that publishers, like all commercial businesses, are profit-driven; I don’t doubt that publishers know consumers are end-users of their products. However, their business model has not included readers as customers. Digital growth is beginning to challenge this tradition, but as the publishers themselves admit, it’s a challenge. Part of the problem is that big 6 publishers have decidedly not made themselves accessible or even recognizable to readers. Frankly, I’d love to know when it became easy to contact publishers directly, because that certainly has not been my experience.

Consumers sometimes vent their complaints about a product directly to the manufacturer; however, as gazillions of Amazon reviews demonstrate, the retailer is the likely first stop for the consumer, because they have a direct customer relationship with the retailer. And as readers, especially readers online, we identify books with their authors, more and more of whom have websites, blogs, Twitter and Facebook accounts. In their own way, authors have become like direct marketers of their literary products, not necessarily selling books directly, although more and more authors are, in fact, publishing their own books and selling them via retailers.

Which brings me (FINALLY!) to my central question: why is it inappropriately entitled behavior for a reader to complain about ebook prices to or in the presence of the author?

If ebooks are not “special snowflakes,” then why wouldn’t we expect readers to act any differently from other types of consumers? Consumers complain to the store; book consumers also complain to the authors. But, Scalzi says, authors can’t control their book prices, so it’s “mean” to complain to them. I’m not going to debate the question of whether authors can or cannot control prices, because for me that’s not the point (although clearly self-publishing indicates that author can create an environment in which they can control the price of their books). Rather, I’ll focus on this: among retailers, authors, and readers, the only party not in contractual privity with the publisher is the party Scalzi insists has the burden of dealing with directly. This just strikes me as fundamentally illogical.

Even if I accept Scalzi’s assertion that big 6 authors can’t control price, as contractual partners with publishers, does that invalidate the reader’s right to protest? Authors make choices in what publisher they contract with, and maybe some authors want to know the deterrents readers face in buying their books (this goes for geographical restrictions, too, for example). As Dan Gillmor, director of ASU’s Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, pointed out in his recent Guardian blog post,

Sure, I can afford the higher prices. But the greed of the publishers has inspired me to make different plans. Now I reserve bestsellers at my local library – run by people who love books: imagine that! – and read them whenever they are available. What were impulse purchases of books that sent revenue to publishers are now impulse reservations that do not. If I have to wait a few weeks, no big deal. I should have remembered that all along.

How many readers are now forgoing purchase of big 6 books because of so-called agency pricing, even if they can afford the higher prices? Is this something authors want to know? As authors continue to reach out directly to readers to market their books, I don’t think it’s reasonable to view readers who complain to the author about prices as misbehaving. Because as popular as it is to say that the reader rules, if that were truly the case, I’m not sure the big 6 would even exist, let alone have been able to establish so-called agency pricing.

And do I even need to address the question of whether it’s “mean” to complain about prices to the author? The person who has commercially sold his book in the hopes of making money from it? The person whose name is figured most prominently on the book itself?

Why Shouldn’t the Reader Complain to the Author?

I’ll give Scalzi this: he’s right that I don’t “have to” complain about the price of digital books. What I think he’s dead wrong about, though, is that complaining about the price of digital books is a form of illegitimate entitlement.

When I purchase a digital book from big 6 publishers, which I do infrequently if the price is not reduced, I am denied the right of first sale, which is one of the most fundamental copyright principles. More and more, I am also being denied the kind of editorial and formatting quality I associate with a higher book price (even print books have declined in size, paper quality, and editing, which creates another pricing issue, but I’ll leave that aside for now). But to abdicate my own rights under copyright law in purchasing a digital book means that I am ultimately buying a lesser or at least more limited product. And just as I don’t think it’s anywhere near reasonable to pay $15 or $20 to rent a movie, I don’t think it’s reasonable to pay print prices for DRM’d digital books.

So what about publisher costs? The current print model demonstrates clearly that price is not determined purely by the cost of producing an item, so I don’t find that a helpful argument in determining the cost of digital books as compared to print. With the big 6 business model built around the hardcover, the growth of digital books is not a good thing, which means that publishers do not have much incentive to promote their growth unless the model is changed. With debates over whether so-called agency pricing has helped or hurt authors, it’s unlikely that authors will stand united for or against the practice.

All of which makes it more likely than not that if readers protest digital pricing, they will do so to authors. Even if authors feel that is unfair. Which, in some cases it might be. And perhaps it’s not the most effective venue of protest, although I don’t think it requires subtle interpretive tools to read Scalzi as dismissive of readers who protest digital prices period. But how does lodging the protest with the author’s online book marketing presence make the protesting reader a “dick”? How is the reader’s frustration about an ebook price any different from an author’s frustration over, for example, a royalties structure? I know there are authors who forward reader comments to their publisher. Not every author does this, nor should readers expect it. I think we all have to accept that for the most part people act in what they perceive to be their best interest. The question here, I think, is whether pricing is in the interest of the author, as well.

Without a doubt, the primary perceived interests of readers, authors, and publishers are not always in alignment. But when we have direct evidence that digital book pricing is aimed at slowing digital growth, which in turn potentially slows digital sales for authors and deters readers from buying their books, I think price is a shared concern between authors and readers, one which we are all reasonably entitled — and perhaps should be encouraged — to discuss. Except, of course, at Scalzi’s blog.

Related posts:

1. Adobe Labs Cooks Up Worst Ebook Reader in Ebook Reader History
2. Whither the Reader
3. The Author/Reader Disconnect or Why Can’t We Just All Get Along?

It’s always exciting to read a debut book by a fellow blogger, although it can be a bit daunting, too. What if I don’t like it? Will that affect the way I read your blog? Fortunately, I enjoyed The Lady’s Secret, a book that mixes old and new genre conventions in interesting ways. In one sense it reads like a love letter to many older trad Regencies, but with a progressive streak that updates and adds new dimension to vintage tropes like the cross-dressing heroine and her brother who is trying to prove his legitimate claim to an earldom.

While her brother Harry travels the English countryside, looking for written evidence of their parents’ marriage, Georgiana Knight works at the Camelot Theatre in London, where she makes sets and costumes, her promising acting career cut short by crippling stage fright. Georgy and Harry inherited their actress mother’s share in the theatre, but Georgy still works hard, in part because Harry is using a good portion of their savings trying to confirm their parents’ marriage and, ultimately, his claim as the legitimate Earl of Dunsmore. Their parents married in secret after their father was told he’d be disinherited if he married an actress. After his death, their mother was paid off to keep quiet about the marriage, and her suspicious death has left Harry and Georgy financially stable but technically illegitimate. And while Harry is optimistic that he can find evidence of the marriage, Georgy has another plan: get into the current (i.e. illegitimate) Earl of Dunsmore’s house and search for evidence there.

Finding a way inside one of Dunsmore’s homes is easier said than done. However, a position becomes available in the Earl of Harland’s household, which would give Georgy the opportunity to visit Dunsmore’s house with Harland’s other servants for Dunsmore’s holiday house party. The problem is that it’s a position as valet to the earl himself, which would require Georgy to function in a state of daily intimacy with the man she is trying to fool into believing she is both a male and an experienced valet. Still, the temptation of being able to search Dunsmore’s house for evidence is immensely appealing.

It is a foregone conclusion that George Fellowes will get the job; the real challenge is in putting her considerable acting skills and somewhat androgynous appearance to use in close quarters with other servants and a “beautiful” man who makes her “ache.” Where Georgy is slight and almost boyish in appearance, Nathan has “lushly, extravagantly lashed” eyes and a mouth that “might have been thought almost feminine in its beauty, were it not for the firm, purely masculine line of the jaw beneath.” Where Georgy is spare in speech and manners, Nathan is elaborate and highly decorated, and elegant dandy who nonetheless thrives under Georgy’s unassuming but highly attentive maintenance.

For me, the first half of the book is the most interesting, because there seems to be no rush to reveal Georgy’s secret and let the sexxoring begin. Instead, Georgy spends the first part of the book watching and learning about Nathan and his household – how he prefers to be shaved and dressed; how his cravat should be tied, how his body looks and moved as he casually displays himself in Georgy’s presence. She is attracted and intrigued, but not tempted to reveal herself. And Nathan suspects nothing amiss, even after a facial massage Georgy gives him to relieve a headache physically arouses him:

Bloody hell. He had been aroused by Fellowes! No, he amended the thought quickly. He had not been aroused by Fellowes. Just by Fellowes’ hands on him. An anonymous pair of hands had brought him pleasure—that was all. Any pair of hands would have done the same.

These rationalisations did nothing to relieve his horror though. He felt embarrassed and awkward. And exploitative. Especially when he remembered what had brought Fellowes to his door—a master who had tried to take advantage of Fellowes’ youth and inexperience.

But still there is no unveiling, or even suspicion on Nathan’s part, that George is other than he seems. I appreciated this, because as difficult as it often is for me to suspend my disbelief that these young women make convincing young men, it is particularly frustrating to me when the cross-dressing device is used primarily as foreplay. In The Lady’s Secret, however, Nathan and Georgy move on from the massage incident, and it is not until some time later that Georgy’s secret is revealed. And even then the relationship between them does not change. I won’t spoil the secret of how Nathan finds out, because it’s quite a delicious scene, but I will say that his discovery is probably my favorite part of the book, because instead of calling Georgy out, he decides instead to observe her:

She was like that secret drawer in Lady Dunsmore’s tea chest. Now that he knew the secret, he wanted to know how it worked too. He wanted to see her with other people and watch how she did it.

Nathan, who has a scientific bent of mind, studies her like she initially studied him, although for different purposes. And what is wonderful about this part of the book is the way their relationship beyond master and servant, but not yet friends or lovers, begins to develop, with Nathan testing and teasing Georgy, trying to understand what she’s about and enjoying his secret knowledge of her:

He levered himself off the bed and stretched his long body with languid grace while Georgy, who was trying not to look, brought a straight backed chair forward for him to sit on while she shaved him. As soon as he sat down she began to dab lather over his face, noticing that his eyes were on her own face as she did so. It was disconcerting. Usually he was inattentive, his gaze elsewhere, but today he followed all her movements, and when she finally leaned over him, brandishing a razor, he tilted his chin to stare up at her. The silence between them seemed to take on weight and charge—it became a physical thing with uncomfortable edges.

It’s not just a sexual thing, although mutual attraction is part of it. There is a real intimacy in the relationship between a man and his valet, and the way Chambers plays with the budding sexual attraction in the context of this other intimacy is very well-done – you feel the tightness of desire between the two, the uncertainty, the slipping of the masks and yet at the same time the remoteness between two individuals of such apparently different social status. The writing throughout is also quite nice, not florid but not completely spare, either.  There is some over-description and explanation of things I wish had been trimmed a bit, but overall there is a real deftness to the construction of this part of the book.

Where things break down for me is when Georgy discovers that Nathan knows her secret, and the two begin what feels like a much more conventional relationship. The snapping tension loosens and for some reason the growing emotional intimacy did not feel as powerfully wrought. Georgy’s agenda – which she does not immediately share with Nathan – keeps some distance and tension in the relationship (can she trust him?; can he trust her?), as does the social inequity between the two and Georgy’s own resistance to leading the conventional life of an earl’s mistress. That Georgy does not give up on her quest to find evidence of her parents’ marriage at Dunsmore’s home adds a good deal of plot suspense, as well, and much of the second part of the novel is taken up with the complications that arise from Georgy’s determination and Nathan’s curiosity about what she is up to. In fact, I really love a curious and scientifically minded hero, although I even felt that part of Nathan’s character weakened over the course of the book, giving way to the equally clichéd and definitely not my favorite insensitively boorish aristocrat type.

There is also a secondary relationship between two male aristocrats that intersects in interesting ways with Georgy and Nathan’s relationship. I liked that the relationship was not included for titillation or novelty; Chambers constructs several clever scenes that make a substantial contribution to the central plot and romantic relationship, and for the most part she handles the relationship with a cognizance of its necessary secrecy. However, there is a point later on in the novel where a very unlikely (and dangerous) public scene seems to contravene the previous discretion shown (and while homosexual feelings themselves were not a capital offense, in 1810, arrest for sodomy was still very much a frightening possibility). This shift wasn’t a deal breaker for me, but it did seem a bit inconsistent, given the previous handling of this relationship.  I also think it is a difficulty inherent in wanting to give two men a happy romantic outcome during a period in history when their relationship was a crime.

Ultimately, it was the gradual slipping of Nathan and Georgy’s relationship into the conventional romantic mode, combined with the rather dramatic and somewhat clichéd resolution to the unfairly-denied noble inheritance subplot, that kept The Lady’s Secret from being a perfect read for me. Not that I did not enjoy the book as a whole – and I especially appreciated its generous length – but the promise of the first half or so was just so high, I wanted that wonderful engagement I had with the characters to last longer. Still, I would recommend The Lady’s Secret as a book that makes nice use of many genre conventions, making it both a familiar and a novel read and a substantially promising debut. B-

~Janet

Goodreads | Amazon | BN | nook | Sony | Kobo

Related posts:

1. Joanna Trollope Gives Chick Lit Some Props
2. REVIEW: The Courtesan’s Secret by Claudia Dain
3. MANGA REVIEW: Ooku: The Inner Chambers volume 3

And then came Jennifer Weiner. You remember Weiner and Jodi Picoult’s criticism of the NYTBR and other book venues for privileging white male authors and all but ignoring female-authored books. So when Kit Steinkellner blogged a piece for The Book Riot entitled “Why Aren’t Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult Pissed at Jeffrey Eugenides?,” because The Marriage Plot has garnered so much press, including a Times Square billboard, Weiner discerned that Bethanne Patrick was Book Riot’s executive editor and opined to her readers, via Twitter, that perhaps “her readers” should stay away from FridayReads. While she deleted her original tweet, she explains her point to Jane:

From there Weiner began to question FridayReads for its promotional aspect, which caught the attention of the Washington Post and extended to Weiner’s own blog, in which she says,

 Nobody’s running a literary blog or magazine to get rich. Most writers who maintain blogs end up losing money, not making it. Should a blogger decide to try to turn their hobby into a paying endeavor, nobody rolls their eyes or clutches their pearls. We’re all used to seeing ads alongside a blog post, or a request for sponsorship on a literary website, or a virtual tip cup at the bottom of a post or a review with a note saying, “Hey, if you like what I’m doing, consider supporting it.” I don’t think anyone begrudges the Fridayread folks the ability to make money from their endeavors, if they’ve found a way to do it honestly.

But honesty matters – to readers, to writers, to bloggers and Twitter users, to those who’ve chosen to monetize their content in a clear and public way, and those who continue to do what they do for community and good karma instead of cash. . . .

I don’t know Bethanne Patrick or her colleagues, except on the Internet…but I believe that you know people through their actions. If they’re honest, if they’re ethical, you can see it in the choices they make. If they aren’t, no amount of indignant insistence otherwise will change your mind.

Patrick responded on her own blog, pointing out that she has tried to keep FridayReads transparent via its FAQ page, which Weiner was, in fact, linking to in her tweets pointing out the promotional elements of the event.

I have what would politely be called a multi-layered response to this fracas. On the most visceral level, while I have read, enjoyed, and recommended several of Weiner’s books, I have long found her a problematic spokesperson for mainstream media’s neglect of women’s fiction. I should probably be grateful that in her call for transparency she was herself pretty clear in connecting her criticism of FridayReads to the personal affront she took at the Book Riot post, which was admittedly snarky and belittling of Wenier and Picoult’s Franzenfreude campaign, part of which included a very clever call for alternate book recommendations, a bit like FridayReads, in fact:

Instead I feel frustration that a woman who has become a de facto spokesperson for the plight of female-written commercial fiction so profoundly personalized her very public Twitter campaign against FridayReads, because that personalization threatens to legitimate the persistent marginalization of female authors as unserious and incapable of taking grown-up criticism (i.e. they weren’t nice to me so I’m not going to be nice to them!). Also, despite Weiner’s insistence that she doesn’t begrudge the FridayReads folks of monetizing the hashtag, her somewhat righteous invocation of the FTC regs and the lecture on honesty and transparency undermine her alleged approval. The irony that she has monetized her own writing and utilizes her own Twitter muddies things a bit, too and undermines the seriousness of even her most valid criticisms.

And then there is the whole “my readers” should stay away from FridayReads because they won’t be welcome, thing, even when it was reconsidered as a recommendation to participate with Weiner’s books, because “[I]magine their nose-hairs curling in rage every time they see mah name!” Weiner’s perception that FridayReads is some kind of ‘place’ where readers are welcome or unwelcome depending on whether the organizers like the authors whose books are being named suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of FridayReads, making Weiner seem more lucky than anything else that she was able to get so much traction on the transparency issue.

Moreover, it’s a problematic construction for readers who don’t just read a single author’s books (i.e. the overwhelming majority of readers). On the one hand Weiner seems to be saying that readers shouldn’t be commercialized by publishers and accusing FridayReads of participating in that process. And yet, how is her own advice and direction to “her readers” any different? In whose interest is it for readers to either fearfully avoid FridayReads or enrage its organizers’ nosehairs by shoving Weiner’s name in their faces? The presumptions alone at work in that choice are immensely problematic for readers to presume to take on as their own.

Which brings me to the “transparency” and “honesty” issue. The fact that Weiner has become so well-known for her off-page commentaries is a testament to the power of social media and the breaking down of certain barriers between authors, publishers, and readers. The viral power of tweets and hashtags have created new opportunities to be notable, noted, and even notorious. Which makes the desire to establish boundaries, guidelines, and transparencies even more understandable and difficult.

As Weiner’s own tweets, with links to Patrick’s FAQ page demonstrate, Patrick wasn’t exactly hiding the promotional aspects of FridayReads. In fact, I was surprised to learn that up until several months ago, Patrick was giving away books from her own collection; I always assumed that the books were donated by publishers, and in fact assumed some kind of publisher support long before the program had any.  I am personally less suspect of ventures that rely on the support of multiple publishers, because I am less likely to feel there is a bias, although that does not solve the problem of transparency, per se. I also think that Weiner’s implication that FridayReads (and more specifically Bethanne Patrick) is pimping for publishers weakens her credibility by hyperbolizing the relationship between publishers and FridayReads. She refers to Patrick “selling” books and likens publisher sponsorship to “slipp[ing] … some cash” or “expect[ing] a favor later,” in return for a book recommendation.  I don’t see the same intent to deceive that Weiner does, and I do think there’s a substantive difference between trying to bury a connection and failing to disclose obviously enough to meet the expectations of strangers who aren’t necessarily privy to things you may believe are more widely and obviously known. There is a sense of insularity online that can distort in various directions one’s sense of being known and understood, which I think is often in play when these issues arise.

In general, though, I’m not sure how much of a problem there has been with FridayReads’ transparency; that is, if none of the publisher sponsorship was known beyond the FAQ page, would it fundamentally change or diminish the value for readers participating in book recommendations (and potentially winning a randomly awarded free book)? I don’t think so, because I don’t see FridayReads as much different from any other forum in which readers recommend books and have the potential for winning a publisher-donated book. It’s no secret that publishers utilize blogs, messageboards, and social media venues to cull information on reader likes and dislikes and promote their own books, which is presumably their interest in FridayReads, as well. And the disclosure solution turned out to be straightforwardly simple: the #promo hashtag for promotional tweets. But even in absence of that new hashtag, I have to ask: were readers really being duped by potentially false recommendations and publisher payola, or is Weiner the one underestimating readers to serve her very personal interest in FridayReads?

If Weiner has been paying attention to the broader online communities centered on female-authored fiction, she must know that these issues have been under discussion for several years now. I’m not sure how much Weiner actually contributes to the discussion, especially given the emphatically personalized nature of her critique. Which is not to say that this is an unimportant discussion or that we should not all be having it openly and – ideally – civilly, precisely because the online landscape is shifting so dramatically. In academic and literary circles, authors serving as reviewers has been a long-standing tradition. In genre fiction communities, readers, bloggers, and authors are themselves contributing to multiple venues, sometimes for payment: RT Magazine, Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, USA Today, Macmillan sponsored Tor.com and Heroes and Heartbreakers, New York Journal of Books, Borders, Barnes and Noble, etc. Not every individual is taking special pains to disclose these ventures, and I haven’t seen a lot of accusations of nefarious intent from the general community.

In many ways I think these new opportunities provide genre books with wider recognition and respect, and they provide readers with more venues for discussion. In other ways these relationships provide challenges, because we are all, in fact, reading and talking about commercial fiction, which means that publishers and authors are always looking for ways to capitalize on the independent activities of readers.

Although Weiner has  bristled at the suggestion that some of her soapboxing has a mercenary intention, I don’t find the charge particularly objectionable. After all, I assume that authors move through their careers with self-interest their primary driver. Ditto publishers. And,  ideally, readers, too, should be looking out for their own self-interest, which may not be the same for every reader, even if it is identifiable across readers generally. And along with the concerns regarding disclosure and transparency in this new reading and writing environment, I think we also need to be talking about ways to protect the self-interest of readers, just as we take that for granted with authors and publishers. And in many ways, having readers participate more broadly and more formally in book discussions – through blogging, reviewing, and other ventures – opens up more spaces into which readers can identify and pursue their own interests as readers. The concern that bloggers, reviewers, and readers are somehow becoming the pawns of publishers, for example, is not insignificant or irrational, but I think we need to look at the flipside, as well – in the ways that readers can remain just as self-interested as we believe authors can be, even if they’re receiving free arcs, advertising money, or even pay for reviews and/or blog posts.

Currently there is a good deal of justifiable suspicion and confusion regarding the short and long-term effects of all this boundary destruction. Rules, such as they are, have been applied haphazardly, and lines of “acceptable” behavior continue to shift, both for individuals and across communities. Still, if readers are going to maintain their own independent interests, which is more likely to make that happen: refusing to participate in FridayReads or reviewing books for the USA Today Romance blog? Or perhaps that’s an unfair way to pose the question. Let me ask it this way, instead: can readers commercialize their own self-interest as a way to preserve their independence?

Related posts:

1. Amazon Censors Its Rankings & Search Results to Protect Us Against GLBT Books
2. Links of Interest
3. Can the locale of a book affect your interest in reading it?

When I first started the Lucky Harbor series, I wasn’t sure I would like it. I have a visceral aversion to books with cute titles set in cutely named small towns, with covers colored in pastels and adorned with cute dogs or food. But my strong appreciation for your Sierra Nevada-set series pushed me past my initial resistance, and once I started the trilogy of Phoebe Traeger’s estranged daughters, I was just a little bit hooked. There is a basic affability to your books I cannot precisely articulate, and it often sweeps me along past issues I see more clearly in retrospect. Head Over Heels, the third book in the series, is probably my favorite, affably flawed as it is.

Chloe Traeger has always been the wild child of the sisters, more like her mother in her unwillingness to settle in one place and follow what she perceives to be society’s conventions regarding marriage and family.  She was working with her two sisters, Maddie and Tara, to restore and run the B&B their mother had left them, but only as long as she could light out periodically on her own. These days, she was traveling to demonstrate and distribute her own line of natural spa products, which was already a small nod to stability, but the travel still nourished Chloe’s somewhat restless soul, especially when the alternative was getting into trouble with local law enforcement for helping her friend Lance “rescue” some abused dogs.

Of course, local law enforcement represented more than legal trouble for Chloe; if she let him, Sawyer Thompson could put her into far more danger than Lance’s latest scheme — danger to her body, mind, and heart. Reformed bad boy turned sheriff, Sawyer has watched his two best friends, Jax and Ford, fall under the spell of Chloe’s sisters, and he knows he is a very short step away from the same fate with Chloe. The hell she could raise around town with Lance was nothing compared to the havoc she wreaked with his internal sense of order and control, and the worst thing was that Sawyer couldn’t make himself stay away from her:

[Chloe] wore a soft, black hoodie sweater that clung to her breasts and dark, hip-hugging jeans tucked into high-heeled boots that gave off a don’t-fuck-with-me air but made him ache to do just that.  There was a wildness to her tonight, hell every night, and an inner darkness that he was drawn to in spite of himself.

It called to his true inner nature, the matching wildness and darkness within him, which he’d tried to bury a long time ago.

As reluctant as Sawyer is to revisit that darkness, Chloe has an even more basic concern about getting involved with Sawyer. She has acute asthma, which makes all types of physical exertion, especially the good kind (and would there be any other kind with a guy like Sawyer?), uncomfortable at best and life-imperiling at worst. So powerful as their attraction and friction-producing flirting is, it’s not until Sawyer’s undercover work for the DEA brings him into conflict with one of the town’s real bad boys – who happens to have a growing interest in Chloe – that things really heat up between them.

Anyone who has read the first two books in this series has seen the smart-aleck flirtation between Chloe and Sawyer intensify over the year or so those books cover, and one of the things I appreciated about Head Over Heels was the way it continued to build on that dynamic rather than radically alter it for dramatic effect. And Chloe’s asthma is a very interesting issue in the relationship, because it forces both Chloe and Sawyer past the somewhat clichéd internal obstacles they have to cope with, as well. Sawyer, for example, has unresolved issues with his father, a man who cannot seem to see Sawyer as anything but the troublemaking teen he used to be, and Chloe pushes him to that fine psychological line dividing past from present. And Chloe struggles with her need to feel unimpeded by a “traditional life”:

She understood that, from the outside looking in, it might seem like she had a secret death wish, but she didn’t.  It was just that when she was in the midst of an asthma attack, she often felt so close to death that she, well, dared it.  But she just wanted to run or dance or laugh hard, or have sex without needing an inhaler and possibly an ambulance.

Not exactly a common problem, but one that often left her straddling a fine line between socially acceptable behavior and the wild yearnings her mother had always encouraged.  Her sisters wanted her to stop pushing those boundaries and settle down a little.  And it was that which bothered Chloe more than anything.  The message was simple: if she wanted to be accepted, even loved, by those she’d come to care about, she’d need to change.  But dammit, she wanted to be accepted just as she was, imperfections and all.

Sawyer and Chloe’s mutual need for acceptance is somewhat standard Romance fare, but the addition of Chloe’s asthma creates an opportunity for more emotional intimacy between them. The asthma becomes a means through which Sawyer can show true care and concern for Chloe, and it allows Chloe to become vulnerable with Sawyer in ways she might not otherwise allow. The book does not treat the condition as a gimmick, nor does it become an all-consuming issue for the couple.

I’m sure there will be many, many readers who adore the way Shalvis resolves the conflicts between Sawyer and Chloe. I have a number of quibbles with the book (the “sayings” introducing every chapter seem gimmicky now, and the tendency to use humor to deflect seriousness can feel diminishing), but my most substantial issue is with the way Chloe’s struggle between settling down and setting out is resolved. Without giving away a spoiler, I will say that for me Chloe’s free spirited nature was somewhat betrayed by the resolution, and the reason this matters for me is that so much of the book – of the series, in fact – is constructed around the character of Chloe as a woman who truly enjoyed her freedom and was not just running from something. And while I could lay out the logic of the movements made in the book, I still find them a problematic compromise, and one that highlights the theme of “settling” the series repeats as a chorus.

Throughout the series there is an attempt to distinguish settling down under the right circumstances from just plain settling. One difficulty, of course, is that Romance tends to favor traditional or conventional endings, so an untraditional heroine is already at risk of being made somewhat traditional in the end. The Lucky Harbor series seems especially fond of wrapping things up rather neatly for its main characters, and in Chloe’s case I think the neat wrap-up sells Chloe (and Sawyer) a bit short. And while not a deal breaker for me, it was a disappointment, despite my overall enjoyment of the book and the series. B-

~ Janet

Goodreads | Amazon | BN | nook | Sony | Kobo

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Instant Gratification by Jill Shalvis
2. REVIEW: The Heat is On by Jill Shalvis
3. REVIEW: Naughty But Nice by Jill Shalvis

Who doesn’t love a small town Romance? Given Jane’s observation in her 2011 RWA wrap-up that small towns remain very popular, apparently a lot of readers do. Given the comments to that post and various lamentations from readers online, there are many readers who absolutely despise the small town Romance.

While all genre devices have advocates and critics, the divide over the small town device seems especially wide. Critics charge it with being anti-feminist and reactionary, not to mention candy-coated fantasy. Advocates point to the strong family and community bonds, the often quirky characters, and (sometimes) a focus on more traditional social values.

I admit that I tend to avoid the most saccharine of the small town books; I’ve been wary of Robyn Carr’s books, for example. But among those I do read, I find some true diversity. For example, I’d put Jill Shalvis’s Lucky Harbor and Sunshine, Idaho books in the candy-coated category. Lucky Harbor seems a very idyllic small town, with the reunited sisters/heroines elevating domesticity to an epic level by deciding to refurbish and re-open the inn their deceased mother owned. The protagonists may have wild, difficult, unloved, even abused pasts, but somehow the current incarnation of the town seems to polish up even the roughest edges of life. It’s a bit like Lucille Ball meets Frank Capra. The insularity is rendered as charming rather than dark; community as a source of strength, support, and outstanding baked goods; and love heals all. It is, after all, Lucky Harbor.

But I’ve also read a number of small town Romances that have more of an edge. Victoria Dahl’s Talk Me Down, for example, brings heroine Molly Jenkins home to Tumble Creek in an attempt to escape her stalker ex-boyfriend. And while the town offers her a delicious diversion in the chief of police’s uniform (Ben Lawson),  Molly can neither escape her ex nor the scandalous implications of her secret career as an erotica writer. And who can forget Jennifer Crusie’s Welcome To Temptation, where Sophie Dempsey hopes to make a name for herself with a documentary featuring an old-time actress and ends up in a battle between her very warm feelings for the handsome mayor, Phin Tucker, and his mother’s feelings for her, which are much cooler and more disapproving. It’s pretty much a meta-novel on the small town Romance, where the “family values” aren’t always what they seem.

Still, the small town Romance seems to have a big reputation for being over-idealized, anti-feminist, and dangerously blind to the real problems that too much insularity can breed.

Part of the issue may be that inspirational Romances often make use of this device, as well, blurring subgenre boundaries. I know many love the Robyn Carr books, but the imagery of the “Virgin River” and the whole love and healing motif have kept me from reading the series. And I think we’ve all read those small town books in which the heroine seemingly inexplicably throws off the chains of her ambitious career and chic urbanity for the SAHW+M role, with the small town world idealized to the point where the heroine’s motives for choosing that life apparently don’t need to be carefully considered and explained to the reader.

The more traditional books in the small town panoply reminds me of some of the books within the sentimental novel tradition, characterized by novels like Fanny Burney’s Evelina and even Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and the domestic fiction tradition of the mid-19^th C. Books by women like Catherine Sedgwick and Harriet Beecher Stowe, which portrayed women learning how to make good choices, especially a good choice of marriage, which, as Cathy Davidson notes in Revolution and the Word, was probably the most important decision a woman could and would make in her life. These novels glorified domesticity as the ideal realm for women, motherhood as the pinnacle of a wife’s service, and reasonable sentiment as the greatest power for women to cultivate in themselves [recklessly simplifying all through this paragraph]. Novels like Eliza Wharton’s The Coquette demonstrate the perils that can befall women who ignore their good judgment in favor of unreasonable passions (unwed pregnancy, social humiliation, poverty, death, etc.), giving the sentimental novel a general ethos of moralism that may or may not be subtly subverted within the text itself. And some of those values have moved straight into a number of small town Romances.

Which, when you think about it, makes a certain kind of sense, especially given the social conservatism of marriage. And by conservatism, I don’t just mean in terms of moral values, but also of preserving a coherent, lasting social structure, which the West considers to be rooted in the nuclear family.  Combined with the small town motif, which brings to mind myriad cinematic and popular media fantasies (Frank Capra, Norman Rockwell, and Thomas Kinkade, for example), especially for Americans, there is a tendency, perhaps, to idealize and naturalize social conservativism. When you add a benign insularity to the mix, it can feel both comforting and claustrophobic.

In many of the small town Romances I’ve read, while the heroine’s life simplifies in some ways once she moves into the small town environment, it becomes more complicated in others. Often, the other ways involve a developing romantic relationship. I’ve enjoyed a few books that feature a hero’s return to a small town, notably Theresa Weir’s Bad Karma and Jill Shalvis’s Instant Attraction, both of which feature men who are grappling with deep emotional trauma. Victoria Dahl’s Good Girls Don’t features a hero who has returned to small town life from Los Angeles with deep physical and emotional wounds to heal. More often, though, it seems that it’s the heroine who is the focus of the small town idealization, which may add to the difficulties some readers have with this device.

Despite the difficulties protagonists may face from the small town environment – everything from criminal activity to nosy neighbors, interfering eccentric family members, and cute dogs – there does seem to me to be a benign fantasy element to most of the small town Romances I’ve read. Many of the overwhelming choices the heroine has to make have been stripped away; her priorities change to be more emotionally and romantically charged; and the romance seems to play a significant role in resolving some or all of the problems plaguing the heroine in her “old” life. What I’m not sure about is how many of these fantasy elements are exclusive to small town books and how many are Romance genre staples, magnified in a different way when combined with the small town device (economic prosperity comes to mind here).

In fact, the small town fantasy reminds me quite a bit of Nancy Friday’s theory on the submission fantasy, namely that it’s “a chance to relieve ourselves of all responsibility for the delicious, forbidden sex we crave” (Beyond My Control: Forbidden Fantasies in an Uncensored Age, 2009). Instead of being forced to submit sexually as a way of feeling free from the burden of responsibilities and choices, the heroine submits to a new life, which is often undertaken with great reluctance or even active resistance, and which strips her of many of the previous responsibilities and choices she previously had. It’s a submission fantasy of another type, more emotional than sexual.

My own view is that it is definitely possible to create a small town fantasy that does not look like a somewhat reactionary idealization of life before second-wave feminism, although it may be difficult to do that without satirizing the small town fantasy. Not that it isn’t possible, but for me that possibility is exercised in well-crafted romantic development that enhances rather than substitutes for other priorities in the heroine’s life. Or, if the heroine chooses to leave her big city life behind, I need to feel that her choice is as independently and intelligently made as we would expect of a choice to pursue a position as a NYC corporate CEO.

But what do you think: is there a dividing line for you in what small town books you love versus those you despise, or are you an unabashed lover or hater of this subgenre of Romances, and why? Do we overgeneralize small town books in the genre? Can/should small town Romances should be more socially progressive, or is the benign community ethic and the fantasy of the simpler, healthier life the necessary appeal?

Related posts:

1. Urban Fantasy Appeal Increasing Steadily
2. REVIEW: Heartbreak Town by Marsha Moyer
3. Giant Dog Turd Sweeps Through Swiss Town

I have been slowly working my way through your backlist titles, so when I came across the re-released, reasonably-priced digital edition of Bad Karma at the Kindle store, it shot to the top of my TBR list. I have to admit that I’m not the biggest fan of the “psychic heroine” trope, but the interesting twists in Cleo’s characterization, as well as the undecorated prose style and dark emotional landscape of the book as a whole made me a believer.

Cleo Tyler fancies herself a fake psychic whose visions have always been frighteningly real. She’s been having dreams, too, which recreate the terror of the Halloween night her fiancé was killed in the car accident that merely threw her from the car, her injuries as yet unseen. In the weeks that followed the accident, the emotional hurt over losing Jordan and their unborn baby made her a virtual prisoner in her apartment, unable to eat or function, spending every moment trying to conjure Jordan’s ghost. After being rescued by her brother, she is finally back among the living, although to say she has recovered would be a massive stretch. Still, some folks have gotten it into their head that she can solve crimes, and after her visions led to the return of a missing child in California, she has garnered a reputation. Which is how she comes to be in Egypt, Missouri, posing as a blind woman so she can keep her dog, Premonition, with her on the train, and willing to do whatever is necessary to secure the money promised for finding the town’s missing master key.

Daniel Sinclair does not believe for a second that Cleo Tyler is psychic, and despite his momentary surprise at meeting an attractive blind woman with her service dog at the train, he is determined not to be taken in by such an obvious scam. He had seen a lot in Los Angeles, before he had to come back to take care of his developmentally challenged adult brother, Beau, following his mother’s death, and there is nothing new about this woman. Daniel is certain that there is no room in Egypt for this “Queen of the Scams.”

Still, Daniel feels a slight twinge when he takes her to the town’s only motel, a disheveled dive that “was like something from a Quentin Tarantino movie.” Maybe it is the way Cleo treats Beau “as an equal,” or the way Beau takes immediately to Cleo and her dog. Or it could be her “tumbling red curls” and “big, sleepy eyes,” and compelling blend of poise and fragility. Regardless, Daniel is certain that it won’t be long before Josephine Bennett, Egypt’s chief of police, realizes that Cleo is a fraud and this whole charade will be over.

Like the other Weir books I have read, Bad Karma is deceptively simple in its prose and profoundly tortured in its emotional substance. Cleo would rather have people believe she is a fraud than deal fully with the import of her involuntary visions. At one point she explains to Daniel that “people need to believe in something…That they have control. Because the alternative, that life is random and nobody is in control, is just not acceptable.” And yet Cleo perpetually struggles to feel in control. For one thing, she’s drifting. She has a linger eating disorder that makes little besides milk palatable to her; the color orange triggers panic attacks; and the chronic dreams of that Halloween accident keep her from sleep. And once she arrives in Egypt, she is also getting visions of something bad in a farmhouse that seem to have nothing to do with the missing master key. Daniel, on the other hand, seems to have everything under control. He feels responsible for his brother; he feels responsible to protect the people of Egypt from Cleo’s fraudulent game; and, once Cleo comes into his life, he even feels responsible for her, despite his bone-deep mistrust of her motives and her character.

I don’t want to give too many plot details away, in part because a large measure of the book’s appeal is in following a number of seemingly mundane details and plot and character threads until they reveal a deeper significance. In fact, Bad Karma is very much a book about facades. Not all facades are dishonest, even as they hide something else. For example, there are the facades of the romantic and suspense elements of the story. Daniel and Cleo must be in close proximity for their attraction to grow, and this is facilitated by a number of seemingly simple devices: Beau takes care of Premonition so he won’t have to live in that awful motel; Cleo has enough at one point and leaves town, forcing Daniel to go after her and bring her back; Cleo finds herself in danger and Daniel has to assist her, etc. Then there are the superficial details that make up the suspense portion of the book: Cleo is brought into town to find the master key but instead stumbles upon something darker; characters appear to be one thing but are really another; Daniel gets reluctantly drawn into the mystery and the tension mounts as he and Cleo move closer to uncovering the truth, etc.

All of these facades work simultaneously to hide and reveal deeper truths. For example, Cleo gives the superficial impression of aloof disdain for those who believe in her abilities, while underneath she is emotionally traumatized and volatile. Still, there are layers beneath that truth, as well, a deeper strength and perceptive intelligence that have made her more survivor than victim. Daniel, beneath the surface control, has his own emotional trauma from years as a California cop and coping strategies that tend toward smoking and drinking. As much as he fancies himself caretaker of his brother, in reality Beau is more suited to that role, and not only with Daniel. And like Cleo, Daniel’s own skepticism is more a scar over a broken heart than a true cynicism, and every encounter they have picks away at them:

He pressed her down until she was lying on her back, the fog swirling around them, enveloping them. At one point, he laughed, a low sound, full of wonder and delight, that filled her head, that melded perfectly with the tone of their coming together.

This time there was no anger. No resentment. No holding back. It was all sweet, open, aching vulnerability, a hoping, a wanting, a dreaming in a dark room with no walls, in a dark room with no color, with magic swirling about them.

Having a scar picked at is painful, though, and it makes the healing process more difficult and yet more urgent, as well. The challenge is to heal without just superficially covering up the hurt, and this process is complicated by all the ways in which the world is an insecure place, full of facades: a bucolic looking barn can hide all sorts of darkness; people leave; children are kidnapped, women are tortured and murdered. The world of this book is one in which love is not enough, but surviving without it seems impossible.

Bad Karma is not a light book, despite the wry humor that permeates the writing. Daniel and Cleo are damaged in real ways, and Cleo’s emotional injuries are especially deep and abiding. The only things that marred my enjoyment were the clichés that I never felt the narrative successfully rehabilitates, especially the use of Daniel’s brother Beau to reveal Daniel’s character and accelerate his emotional growth and the revelation of the true mystery Cleo’s visions uncover. Still, despite some of that narrative heavy-handedness, Bad Karma turned out to be good luck for me, breaking a small Romance reading slump. B+

~ Janet

Goodreads | Amazon | BN | nook | Sony | Kobo

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: The Orchard by Theresa Weir
2. REVIEW: Karma Girl by Jennifer Estep
3. REVIEW: Just Desserts by Scarlet Blackwell

I had been planning to review Good Girls Don’t, but by the time I got to it, Bad Boys Do was out and Real Men Will was imminent. So I figured I might as well review all three, since the trilogy’s release dates are so close together. I’m not a stickler for reading a series in order, and I don’t think the Donovan family series needs to be read that way, but I will say that reading it in order made a definite impact on how I experienced each book, sometimes for the better and sometimes not. In general I enjoyed each book, though, and am glad I read them together for the full Donovan experience.

Good Girls Don’t

Despite being the youngest of the Donovan siblings, Tessa carries the weight of the family’s coherence like an increasingly heavy burden. When the Donovan Brothers Brewery is burgled, and it turns out that older brother (and reputed reprobate) Jamie was spending the night with the daughter of a potential corporate client, Tessa senses that her burden is starting to overbalance, threatening to topple and break what’s left of the family. With their parents now dead for almost fifteen years, the three Donovan siblings are all that’s left, and Tessa has been doing quite a dance to ensure they all remain on relatively good terms and dedicated to the family business.

When older brother Eric finds out about Jamie, he will think the worst of Jamie – again – and this time he may be right, since the big wig client with whom oldest brother Eric was negotiating a big wig deal to provide Donovan brew on their family-run airline was ready to call the deal off after seeing Jamie with his daughter the morning after. Tessa is used to stretching the truth when the ends justify it, and this incident is no exception; whatever she has to do to salvage this deal she will do before Eric finds out the truth, especially when he already doubts Jamie properly secured the Brewery the night of the burglary.

When Luke Asher and his partner, Simone, are called to the Brewery to investigate yet another theft of computers, payroll records, and credit card numbers, he’s surprised by the force of his attraction to Tessa but intrigued that she seems to return his interest. Jamie, though, who partied hard with Luke in college, definitely plans to stand in the way of any potential relationship, believing, like the rest of the town, that Luke both impregnated his partner and left his ex-wife back in California while she was sick with cancer. One dog can instinctively scent another, after all. Fortunately or unfortunately at that point, Tessa takes one look at the 6’2” Detective Asher and decides she needs some under-the-covers fun with a guy like him.

Luke and Tessa make an interesting pair. Luke is sort of a protective OCD-type, the kind of guy who secretly reads baby books so he can be there for Simone when she has the baby, even though she refuses to disclose the father or even talk about the impending birth with former best friend Luke. And to protect Simone’s reputation, he hasn’t disputed the common accusation of paternity, which creates a bit of conflict in his budding relationship with Tessa. It’s not so much that Tessa believes he’s lying to her when he tells her he’s not the father; it’s the fear that she might be “that stupid girl who falls for someone awful.” And because Luke may be the very first man she hasn’t been able to manipulate in exactly the way she wants, she can’t break through his reticence in confessing the truth behind the most scandalous stories that follow him through life in Boulder.

For me, Good Girls Don’t was a pleasant read that served primarily as background and set-up for the next two books. The conflict between Tessa and Luke seemed a bit overblown on both sides, and while I enjoyed Luke’s almost obsessive gallantry where Simone was concerned, at times I felt he was more emotionally invested in his relationship with her than with Tessa. Learning the secret of his past might have created a stronger bond of understanding earlier for me with Luke, too. Also, Tessa’s manipulative inclinations, which made her somewhat unique to me, don’t really survive the book, a surprising (to me) disappointment, since I liked the idea of those qualities being a central part of her personality and not an insecure coping mechanism she seems to shed by the end. B-

Goodreads | Amazon | BN | nook | Sony | Kobo

Bad Boys Do

Jamie Donovan is used to his bad boy reputation, even as he chafes beneath its limitations. As the “face” of the Brewery, he’s used to all the crazy stunts Tessa puts out on Twitter under his name, and while he doesn’t mind wearing the kilt and keeping the female customers happy, he’s also read to show both his siblings that he has more to offer the Brewery. In particular he has an idea to expand the business to include a limited food menu, and his determination to present a convincing plan to Eric leads him to a no-credit business course at the local college.

Olivia Bishop cannot believe that the handsome bartender from Donovan Brothers who flirted with her is a student in her class. The 35-year old adjunct faculty ex-wife of a tenured professor who cheated on her with students and told her she was “no fun,” Olivia is just starting to break out of her good girl shell, which is particularly disconcerting to ex-husband Victor, who simply cannot understand why Olivia divorced him. And Jamie’s expressed interest disconcerts Olivia, not only because he’s clearly younger than she, but also because he’s a sort-of student and totally hot. Too hot for a conservative, sheltered woman life Olivia, who is afraid that Victor was right when he called her “boring.”

Still, the idea of going to a faculty party alone is too much for Olivia, and when she asks Jamie to accompany her, the mutual attraction is undeniable despite Olivia’s concern that she’s too old and too boring for someone like Jamie. So they strike a deal of sorts: Olivia will help Jamie with his business plan (she has always secretly wanted to start her own consulting business) and he will help her learn to have fun, some of which will occur sans clothing.

Bad Boys Do is my favorite of the Donovan books. Olivia is likeable and her insecurities and sheltered personality understandable. The academic politics are rendered believably, even though I found Victor a bit extreme in his characterization. My one issue with Olivia is that she skewed over 40 for me, and while this wasn’t a problem with the relationship, I kind of wish she had been identified as a few years older. Jamie, whose charisma is palpably rendered in his characterization, is appealing and sympathetic, especially when he starts to take control of his own reputation, wresting the Twitter account away from Tessa and carrying on a surprisingly mature relationship with Olivia.

My primary issue with Jamie was that his reformation, which was the nominal subject of the book, seemed to take place off-page between this book and the first. In some ways he seems more committed to the relationship than Olivia, who is understandably insecure about both her feelings and Jamie’s, given the fact that until Jamie she only slept with one man who then proceeded to tell her in myriad way that she wasn’t enough for him. So all of the angst around how Jamie would be able to convince Eric, especially, of his willingness to take on more responsibility, seems manufactured. Either we have to see Eric as monumentally blind and unreasonable or ignore Jamie’s consistently mature behavior throughout the book. There is also some important information on the source of Jamie’s past recklessness that would have had far more impact on me if it had been revealed much earlier. Still Olivia’s character growth was sufficiently compelling for me to find the book a solid B read.

Goodreads | Amazon | BN | nook | Sony | Kobo

Real Men Will

Eric Donovan has carried the responsibilities of a father and a business owner since he was 24, when his parents died in a car crash, leaving him two substantially younger siblings and a family business to manage. His feelings of obligation to Michael Donovan go beyond the typical father-son bond, and Eric still operates from a sense of gratitude and self-expectation that is exacting, if not downright exhausting. Still, Eric has a secret, a sexy little secret he has spent months trying to forget, until the evening she walks into the Brewery asking for Jamie Donovan.

Beth Cantrell manages The White Orchid, the local shop supplying everything from the sexiest lingerie to the latest in self-pleasuring toys. But despite the reputation of the shop, which extends by association to her, Beth views herself as stubbornly vanilla in her tastes, happy to be an advocate for others who want to get their freak on but quite certain her own inner freak is on permanent strike. Another character in the series with a secret past shame (that, like the others, is revealed far too late in the story to have sufficient emotional or dramatic impact), Beth has a more recent secret she’s been trying to forget – a one-night stand with an incredibly sexy man named Jamie Donovan whom she met at a local business expo.

Except, of course, Beth’s Jamie Donovan is really Eric Donovan, and once the hypocrisy is publicly revealed, Eric finds himself in trouble with Beth, Jamie, and Tessa, none of whom can believe the selfish, insensitive lie. Beth, especially, is humiliated, and even worse, still attracted to the deceitful Eric, who had given her a sexual thrill beyond anything she had anticipated or experienced before. And Eric, who had always been in control, had “lost his hold” on his life. Everything he’s worked for now bores him and despite his shameful actions toward Beth, he cannot get the memory of her out of his head – or other parts of his anatomy.

Eric turned out to be my favorite hero of the series, in large part because his conflict was the most interesting to me. The combination of shame, desire, and hypocrisy worked well with his backstory and as a nice contrast to his sibling’s stories. Beth was a tougher sell for me. I liked the idea that she was being written against type – the manager of a sex shop who wasn’t hyper-sexualized. However, that portrayal also set her up to be the somewhat undersexed heroine who finally finds her sexual freedom with the book’s hero – which is essentially what happens to her. Further, her own shameful secret (which, when revealed late in the book, was way tamer than I had imagined) is supposed to be bad enough to make her father call her teenaged self all sorts of horrible names, and yet the man is presented in the novel as a loving, devoted father who is proud of his daughter for running a lingerie store, the lie she tells him to ward off his disapproval. It was difficult for me to see a man proud of his daughter for managing an underwear store as so disapproving of her as to warrant the fearfully perpetuated lie.

This untruth plays a large part in the story’s conflict via the Donovan Brewery burglary subplot that commenced in the first book, and it exemplifies a persistent issue I had with Beth’s character, namely that she was walking a line between being sexually open and confident but not too open and confident. I had this line-walking issue with several of the series protagonists, in fact, a sense that the envelope was simultaneously being pushed open and pulled slightly shut. Shame is a clear theme in all the books, and there were moments I felt that each book held back a little where it could have absolutely soared in its exploration of this provocative and multi-faceted theme. The series as a whole contemplates the process of overcoming shame and finding happiness in one’s own skin, and I appreciated the attempts to play the characters against type, even though I don’t think it always worked.

Reading the books in one shot probably exacerbated my response, and had I read Real Men Will without the other books, I would not have noticed Jamie’s regression nor been so shocked by information revealed about Eric’s past that would have helped clarify a lot in the first two books. And in the same way that Good Girls Don’t read stronger to me as part of the series, Real Men Will suffered a little bit, resolving into a B- read for me. Olivia and Jamie’s book turned out to be my favorite, but I am glad I read the series as a whole, and while I don’t think the books need to be read in order, I do think they are each enriched by the whole.

Goodreads | Amazon | BN | nook | Sony | Kobo

~ Janet

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Start Me Up by Victoria Dahl
2. REVIEW: A Little Bit Wild by Victoria Dahl
3. REVIEW: Talk Me Down by Victoria Dahl

When someone on Twitter mentioned that your older book, The Mistress Deception, features a virgin widower, I bolted right over to Amazon to purchase a digital copy, excited at the idea of a Harlequin Presents playing against type in this way. That was not the only pleasant surprise of the book, and despite some cringeworthy behavior on the part of the hero, I enjoyed The Mistress Deception quite a bit.

Matthew Riordan always gets extremely drunk on the anniversary of his wife’s death. When he shows up in a completely disreputable and obnoxious state to a formal dinner party where Rachel Blair is working security, the hostess begs Rachel to do something before he ruins the entire evening. Something turns out to be discreetly tripping him into the pool and then taking him to the guest house where he can change clothes and, hopefully, sleep it off.

Matthew has other plans, however, with Rachel’s lush body mere inches away as she helps him remove his sodden clothes. All evening he has been sexually crude and provocatively insulting to the voluptuous stranger, and now he demonstrates how close his disrespect is to his physical desire for her. After an extended physical struggle, Rachel has to subdue Matthew physically, eventually tying his hands to the headboard of the guest bed after he pulls the top of her dress down and begins fondling her breasts, begging her for more. Which partially explains Matthew’s incendiary reaction to the photos he receives in the mail several days later, which detail the more lascivious moments between him and Rachel, including a whip on the bed of which he has no recollection. The photos were actually sent to his father, for whom Matthew is filling in at his father’s waste-disposal conglomerate while his father recovers from a heart attack. While Matthew is thankful he intercepted the envelope before his father saw its contents, he is enraged at the thought that Rachel Blair would dare to try to humiliate and/or blackmail him!

When Rachel receives the package from KR Industries, she has fleeting thoughts of an early birthday present, until, that is, she sees the photographs and the note from Matthew Riordan that promises retribution:

What will happen to Weston’s reputation for probity and discretion when your corporate clients find out that their security rests in the whip-hand of a blowsy, over-blown dominatrix who looks as if she’d be more at home in a brothel than in a boardroom?

Rachel is doubly baffled; not only is she as scandalized and confused by the photos – and their possible source – as Matthew, but she cannot imagine why the man would want to ruin a woman who had gone out of her way to be discrete about what had happened at the party and in the guest house. And how dare he call her “blowsy”! Rachel hadn’t even wanted to wear that figure-hugging dress, going out of her way under normal circumstances to downplay her curves and neutralize her physicality. Her own past taught her to do that, but beyond those secrets, Rachel has worked hard to be taken seriously, both as a fitness trainer and half owner of a security company. Despite the strange things that had been happening to her since she inherited the company and her home from her fiancé, following his unexpected death – bureaucratic mistakes and bogus anonymous complaints against her – Rachel was determined to keep Weston Security intact, if not for herself, then at least for her fiancé’s brother and business partner, Frank. And those party photos could endanger more than Weston’s present future contracts, one of which is a pending deal with KR Industries.

Fortunately, Rachel is not the hand-wringing type, and she sets out to surreptitiously follow Matthew to determine his intentions with the photos. An accident of timing and a coincidence involving Matthew’s mother brings the two together in the hospital where Matthew’s father is recovering and into combat that reveals their mutual mistrust and reluctant but no less mutual attraction:

“What do you think you’re doing?” she screeched as he kicked the door shut behind them. Her shoulder bumped against a shelf of folded sheets as she hastily tried to widen the distance between them in the narrowly confined space. The overhead light threw Matthew’s grim face into harsh relief as she protested shrilly, “This is a supply cupboard!”

“I stand in awe of your powers of deduction,” he sneered, leaning back against the door as he tore open the envelope in his hand.

“That was addressed to your father, not you!” she accused.

“And what is it you’re so keen for him to see? Ahh, what have we here? Another episode of the Lifestyles of the Sick and Shameless? He flashed her a familiar set of images and she sucked in an appalled breath.

“Oh, my God!” She raised her bewildered gaze to his.

“You bitch!” He exploded away from the door. “You had to keep turning the screws didn’t you? Even when you knew it wasn’t going to get you what you wanted!”

It’s not long before Rachel delivers the obligatory slap, which changes the tone of their exchange substantially:

“You looking to get physical with me?” he growled, leaning closer.

. . .

“How do I look? As if I want to eat you?” He nipped at the succulent flesh, keeping it captive between his teeth as she arched her neck away, then releasing it to press his open mouth into the sensitive hollow between the stem of her neck and her collarbone and drink in the taste and texture of her skin. “That’s because I do! God, how can someone so bad taste so damned good…?” he groaned.

Since she was fifteen Rachel’s worst nightmare had been to find herself pinned down by superior strength, trapped and helpless against a greedy male assault. But where was the revulsion, the fear and the fury to defend herself now? She was rendered helpless – not by the violence of Matthew’s sexual need, but the uncontrollable desires that raced recklessly through her own veins.

Had I not been familiar with the melodramatic structure and language of Harlequin Presents, I might have put the book down following this exchange. The cheesy double-entendres, the contrast between Rachel’s experience with sexual assault and Matthew’s, uh, sexual assault, make me wince when I read them back out of context and outside the heat of the moment I was reading the book for the first time. And then, when Matthew “kidnaps” Rachel and takes her to his compound, literally locking her in, I knew it would take very little to push the rest of the book around the bend to Krazy Town, no U-Turn allowed.

Instead, these two capricious caricatures morph into rational, interesting people, who are actually able to talk to each other about who may be setting them both up and why. And in a nice role reversal, it is Rachel, not Matthew, who is the “expert” when it comes to strategy:

“Let’s remember that I’m the professional in this field; you’re just a –“

“Gifted amateur?”

“Bumbling amateur,” she corrected.

“Oh, I get it. I’m Watson to your Holmes.”

She frowned. “This isn’t a game.”

“No, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy it.”

And despite the previous lack of control their passionate attraction seemed to foreshadow, their physical relationship develops slowly, in large part because the more they talk to each other and share their pasts, the more obvious it becomes that sex is a very big deal to both of them, albeit for different reasons. Thus the investigatory partnership creates a bond of equality between them that builds trust and intimacy without the uncomfortable power dynamics HP’s sometimes utilize to generate relationship drama.

However, there is enough tension in Matthew and Rachel’s personal histories to infuse their budding relationship with emotional drama. The circumstances of Matthew’s marriage and his wife’s death are much more complex and tragic than is commonly known, while Rachel has her own secrets that make her protective of her independence and her work and family. Those secrets make a moment of wavering faith Rachel has in Matthew somewhat understandable, although what truly saves the moment from being a mere Mandatory Plot Obstacle To True Love is Rachel’s quick recovery of her usual reasonable, evidence-based thought-process.

The Mistress Deception is an interesting book. There are elements and sections of the story that cohere to some of the stereotypes associated with the Presents line, while other aspects of the book subvert those stereotypes thoughtfully and compellingly. Throughout I was compelled to keep reading, even when I was wincing, and I even enjoyed much of the melodrama, especially when it revealed layers of significance for the characters (the scene where Rachel ties Matthew to the bed, for example, is a provocatively written exchange, changing in significance once the truth of Matthew’s past is finally revealed).  Rachel had moments of pseudo-martyrdom, but her practicality and independent intelligence compensated greatly, and the general respect she and Matthew develop for one another created a lot of good will for me in terms of trusting in the wisdom of their union. The mystery of the photos was not a big surprise to me, but it fit with the characters and the storyline, and it served a rational purpose in catalyzing the romantic relationship. By the end, The Mistress Deception resolved into a B read for me.

~ Janet

Goodreads | Amazon | BN | nook | Sony | Kobo

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Mistress for a Weekend by Susan Napier
2. REVIEW: Public Scandal, Private Mistress by Susan Napier
3. REVIEW: Accidental Mistress by Susan Napier

A while back you posted on Twitter a couple of drawings that your late husband had done, explaining that while he was an accomplished artist, he never felt comfortable thinking of himself that way or having his art made public. At the time I thought it was sad that someone who so obviously had the talent his drawings exhibited never thought of himself as an artist. Now, after reading your memoir, The Orchard, I feel that I have a deeper understanding of why that would be, and an even deeper sadness about all the reasons that it would, could, never be any different. But I also came away from The Orchard with a deep respect for your storytelling skill and the austere beauty of your prose. Even the harshest, ugliest moments of The Orchard are rendered carefully, gently, even lovingly, not in a way that softens their blow, but rather in a style that deepens their impact and significance.
So here’s the thing about apples: perfection on the outside can hide a multitude of ugliness on the inside. Worms and disease. Bruises that don’t show up until at least an hour after the fruit is handled with anything but the lightest touch. And producing the perfect apple requires incredible vigilance, sacrifice, gallons upon gallons of pesticides, and ideal weather conditions. And still the apple can be rotten on the inside. This irony permeates the narrative of The Orchard, starting on the first pages when the 8-year old narrator (referred to as Theresa only once throughout the entire course of the book*) is offered a mushroom by the neighbor:

 

“Have one, Theresa. I’m sure your mother won’t mind.”

She smelled like soap and clothes that had just been ironed. She wore pink lipstick, yellow beachcombers, and white sandals. She was so unlike the moody women in my family.

I ate a mushroom.

Later my mother and aunt put their dark heads together and whispered their concerns about the food.

They could be poisonous.

Oh, yes, they look poisonous. . . .

I didn’t tell anyone that my life was over. Instead I went to my room, lay down on the bed, and waited to die.

The mushroom was not poisonous, but that did not stop Theresa from experiencing all manner of ills, often from the very people in her life who should have been nurturing and protecting her. From her thoughtless father, who simply announced to her one day that he was leaving and would not be back, to her moody, self-centered mother, who brought man after man into her life, yearning for a happiness she could never create within herself, Theresa was too often a casualty of other people’s decisions and desires, never cherished as the center of someone else’s world. Even some of the people who loved her the most ended up failing her in one way or another.

It is therefore no surprise to the reader when she impulsively marries Adrian Curtis, the son of a prominent Illinois apple farmer, local royalty in 1970’s Henderson County, a handsome young man who picked up Theresa in her uncle’s bar and carried her to his family’s orchards, a few miles away from where she lived but forever away from where Theresa had ever imagined her life going. The vagabond child of a mother who didn’t want her and the niece of an uncle who couldn’t offer her much beyond his own affection for her suddenly became the 21 year old wife of a 23 year old apple farmer without even knowing what marriage would entail, let alone life on a farm with in-laws who despised her for her lack of pedigree and a young husband who could never articulate why he had wanted so badly to marry her, let alone ever tell her he loved her.

And yet the marriage and the family Theresa and Adrian built over the next 18 years became the very substance of Theresa’s life and of the story of The Orchard, with all of the bittersweet moments strung together in a narrative of incredible emotional resonance. Of her uncle, Theresa remarks with approval that unlike the women in her family, “he wore his cloak of despair in silence.” Adrian is the same way. No matter how long she spent with him, she “still felt he harbored a secret self none of us would ever know. In the middle of the night, I would wake up and lie very still, and I would feel his sadness in the bed beside me.” His incredibly controlling and cold mother (she tied toddler Adrian’s left arm to his side until he learned to be right handed) had almost inhuman expectations for her son, who toiled on the family farm like any hired laborer, until one day he would inherit the farm and virtually nothing would change. Except that Theresa was soon pregnant, and her son would be expected to follow in his father and grandfather and great grandfather’s footsteps.

Although The Orchard is Theresa Weir’s memoir, Adrian quickly becomes its central figure, in part because he and their children were the most important people in her life, in part because of how she struggled to understand her enigmatic husband, in part because of Theresa’s conditioned instinct to remain unobtrusive, and in part because Adrian’s life provides such a powerful vehicle through which Weir can investigate the intertwined themes of beauty, artistry, fragility, and devastating loss. Adrian could never tell her he loved her, but he bought her a horse after her beloved grandmother died, and Theresa recognizes this as his way of acknowledging her grief and trying to soothe her loss. He is a devoted father who will not let his children participate in the toxic rituals of apple growing, even as he puts himself in harm’s way every single day to meet the demands of the fruit’s elusive perfection and his own mother’s ever-looming rejection. In fact, Adrian’s devotion to his disdainful parents is so complete that early in his marriage he even eats suppers at their house, leaving Theresa alone for all but the late night hours, when they didn’t even speak to one another in the darkness of their tiny, musty cottage on the orchard property. Later in their marriage, when Theresa proposes they move away from the orchard, Adrian brings her to his parents so she can understand why such a thing would be impossible:

Adrian’s father made eye contact with me, and I almost recoiled at the iciness I saw there. Then he turned to his son: “If you move, don’t bother ever coming around here again. You won’t be welcome.”

And yet this man, who learned to draw right-handed because his mother had tied down his left hand when he was only three years old, is passionate in his own way. He draws beautiful pictures he won’t show anyone. He draws the things of his life, the “weeds,” as Theresa points out, the things that plague him like the codling moth that could destroy a harvest of apples like nothing else. He appreciates the beauty of the orchard and strives to develop his own type of apple, the Sweet Melinda, which “would have given Adrian a voice, given his ideas weight and validation.” In short, “[t]hey would prove his worth in a place where worth shouldn’t have to be proven.” And as Theresa shares in Adrian’s excited anticipation, she “understood the reward for seeking perfection.” Unfortunately, falling short of perfection could be a devastating drop.

What ultimately happens to the Sweet Melindas is, like so much else that happens to Theresa, an omen of things to come. Perfection on the outside, whether in the beauty of her husband or an apple, or even an apple farm, could hide all sorts of ugliness on the inside, and while you worked and sacrificed to keep that patina of perfection intact, worms or cancer or past fears and disappointments could be eating away at the soft, fleshy inside.

At one point Theresa notes that “[m]odern farmers were artists, destructive architects of the land.” As sublime as the aroma of the apple blossoms was, it could never eclipse the garlicky odor of the pesticides that was always in the air. Every beautiful site, every beautiful moment held the possibility of its opposite and the probability that something bad was the price to be paid for that beauty. And as she narrates her tale, Theresa returns again and again to the dualities of this world of which she was such an integral part but to which she never fully felt she belonged, observer and participant, her story unfolding like testimony, a confession of how helpless she often felt in the face of her fears and a chronicle of how stubbornly she survived, and in many ways, thrived in the beautiful but treacherous world of mortally engineered natural perfection. Like the apples, yet not quite the same. Similar in the way an apple so easily bears the scar of an overenthusiastic or aggressive grip, just like the human heart. Different in that where an infected orchard has to be plowed and burned, human beings continue on, given more opportunities to suffer or thrive.

Although we tend to read memoirs as “true,” I read The Orchard as a captivating, suspenseful, dramatically compelling story, and whether its details are strictly accurate is of no concern to me. The narrative consistently reflects a profound respect for art and beauty, as well as an appreciation for small blessings and the very human struggle for survival and happiness. And the interesting juxtaposition of Theresa’s strong-voiced narration and her apparent desire to be inconspicuous (the single use of her name, for example) raises fascinating questions about subject v. subjectivity, presence v. being present, identity v. identification, etc.

Ultimately, though, there is an emotional truth in Weir’s writing that is characteristic of the best fiction, and all of the characters in this narrative are vivid and “real” at a visceral level. I cried through most of the second half of the book and highlighted more passages than I could ever recount in a review, struck again and again by the straightforward artistry of the text, the depth of its metaphors, the complexity of its themes, and the absolute stark beauty of its truths. That Weir also writes Romance and Romantic Suspense is both astonishing and completely understandable if the events of this book are anywhere near the truth of her life, and while Theresa’s writing is a part of The Orchard, it is not, by any stretch, the focal point or even a main point of the narrative. Indeed, I hope this book reaches far and wide in terms of readership, because it’s so powerfully crafted and so satisfyingly cathartic. There is a great deal of sadness here, but it’s rendered with such care and such sensitivity that it becomes beautiful in its own way, sublime in the reader’s experience of every mundane and profound tragedy. And, for me, a perfect A read.

~ Janet

* note: when I refer to “Theresa,” I am referring to the narrator of the book, and when I reference Weir or Theresa Weir, I’m referencing the author of the book, which I see as distinct from, although related to, the narrator.

Goodreads | Amazon | BN | nook | Sony | Kobo

Related posts:

1. Guess That Book

First I want to formally introduce our newest tag at Dear Author: mistorical. Now tags don’t generally get such an officious welcome, but this one, in particular, might be a wee bit controversial, as it means, quite literally, “mistaken historical.” In other words, it’s the tag we’re now going to be using to describe all manner of historically inauthentic and inaccurate books on the blog – a catchall term that can be used for books of any time period or any type of mistaken, misused, mythologized, missing, or otherwise inaccurately portrayed historicism.

Why have such a tag? Because for many readers (myself included), the historical authenticity and accuracy of a book labeled “Historical Romance” is an important element of its construction. This was certainly the case in DA January’s review of Phoenix Sullivan’s Spoil of War, in which the author explicitly defended the historical representations of her book:

As an indie author (or whatever term will eventually come to define us) by choice and a content editor by trade, I absolutely own any copyediting errors in the book. However, the two specifically pointed out are not errors. “Fagging courage” is correct; one of the definitions of the verb fag is to weary or exhaust. And “prob” is more akin to “pushing futiley at” than the word “probe” is. I’m happy to review comma errors that may have been made — with the understanding that commas can be a rather “gray” area when it comes to style and pacing.

I’m also not here to go point by point through the research, but I will mention that “Ryan” is the anglicized version of the many variants of a name that is ancient Gaelic in origin (Rian, Rion, Riain, etc), much like the name Arthur itself is an anglicized version of any of several variants from Roman or Welsh origin.

The question of historicity dogged the comment thread, with Maili responding to Sullivan’s defense of Ryan:

Rían, Ríon and Ríain aren’t variants of one name nor do they have anything in common, except for one thing–this prefix: rí.

‘Rí’ on its own does mean ‘king’ (or in contemporary sense, ruler), but it doesn’t mean it’s just that when used as a prefix. Please, Irish – certainly old Irish – is a lot more complex than that. As a prefix, it implies anything that suggests high position or influence.

As it stands, there is nothing so far that can confirm the meaning of Ryan is ‘little king’. Four reasons: a) the supposed etymology of Ryan/little king doesn’t fit in with the traditional Irish naming system – same with the (Scottish) Gaelic naming system, b) some say that in Irish, it’s grammatically incorrect, c) it doesn’t fit geographically, and d) every intensive search so far had failed to make a solid connection between Ryan and ‘little king’ and/or ‘Rí’. Any decent Irish or Gaelic name etymologist can and will tell you all this.

As Sunita and Dhympna, a medieval historian, have detailed, the historical representations in the book are anything but historically sound, which cuts quite harshly against the author’s own defense of the book on those grounds.

Which raises the question of what the uses and limits of history are in fiction, and especially in the way readers evaluate fictional stories that depend, in their worldbuilding, on recognizable moments from the past.

Anyone who has conversed with me for longer than two minutes knows I’m pretty enthusiastically adamant that “historical Romance” should take history seriously, and that books we describe as wallpaper or historically inspired, or historical fantasy, or the like should have another label. Because as Dhympna’s analysis of Sullivan’s Spoil of War demonstrates, historical accuracy, even in a book set in the 5^th century, is hardly impossible. Further, a sense of historical authenticity — that is, the larger atmospheric context that makes the world building believable — is obtainable for an era in which we have a decent amount of historical data and analysis available. And this may be naïve of me, but any time I hear an author say something like “I love history,” or “I love researching history,” or “I think historical research is so fascinating,” that raises my expectation for the historicity of their book. Because, like Sullivan’s defense of her novel, I read that as a kind of credentialing, albeit more casual than the inclusion of an author’s note or footnotes or bibliography or the like.

All that said, I do not think that historicity can save a bad story (and again, see Sunita’s review of Spoil of War for an example of this), or that its lack can ruin a masterful one. An example of the latter can be found in the long discussion pursuant to my review of Julie Anne Long’s What I Did For A Duke. Each reader determines what constitutes a masterful story, however, and readers can, indeed, be fatally distracted by what we perceive to be too many errors, historical or otherwise. By the same token, we can be mistaken about what is and isn’t accurate or authentic in a book, creating frustration for authors and indirectly, perhaps, perpetuating inauthentic but widely accepted elements.

One of the more perplexing issues for me around historical accuracy, though, is exemplified by the nature of the Regency Romance and the extent to which accuracy seems to be partially defined by genre progenitors like Jane Austen or foremothers like Georgette Heyer. In fact, the extent to which books like Heyer’s are now viewed as historical sources themselves demonstrates how muddy the concept of “historical accuracy” can be for a period like the Regency, which has much more significance and endurance in the genre than it does generally. As Maili pointed out on Twitter recently, much of the historical critique of Regency Romance deals with cultural and social faux pas rather than larger political or economic issues. It almost seems as if there’s a specific type of history readers of Regency Romance expect from the subgenre. I often feel confused by discussions about Regency accuracy, because I’m not well-versed in Heyer, and I don’t read Austen as genre Romance. So my question, as someone who does not have expert knowledge of the Regency, is how much of that alleged accuracy is derived from Heyer and Austen, and how much from a thorough knowledge of general historical sources?

One particular difficulty with Heyer seems to be the extent to which the author herself has become an icon and a beacon, which was very much in evidence throughout the Smart Bitches thread on The Grand Sophy, with author Anne Stuart objecting to Sarah’s frustration with the book’s stereotypical slur on “Jewish moneylenders:”

I saw the grade and thought, are you fucking crazy?  In general I glaze over racism etc. in older books (and remember, this book is 61 years old, came out before GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT (the first major movie to tackle anti-semitism).

Then again, I adore Heyer so much that I simply ignore the appalling classism (the adopted son in THESE OLD SHADES—horrors!) etc.  Either you adore Heyer or you don’t.

However, I am sorry that it was personally painful.  I do think 1950 was long enough in the past to overlook the casual racism.

Given the contrast in tone between discussion of Phoenix Sullivan’s book and Heyer’s Grand Sophy, the question of historicity is pointed: how much does “real” history count, and does the author’s own history count? One author intercepts discussion of the book to defend her own research credentials against claims of offensive characterization, while in another context readers use “historical accuracy” to defend an offensive characterization. Sullivan goes so far as to suggest that readers who disagree with her portrayals in Spoil of War “demand anachronistic thinking from characters.” Which seems to be similar to what some readers are saying about those who take issue with the portrayal of Jewish characters in Heyer’s novels.

So what’s the difference? Is there a difference?

I think there’s a crucial difference, but will leave it to others to measure the validity of my distinction: In one instance, readers are being asked to accept the alleged historical accuracy of an author’s portrayal, offensive or not. In the other instance, readers are being asked to dismiss aspects of a portrayal that may or may not be historically accurate (or if accurate, certainly not universal). It’s especially ironic when you consider the fact that Heyer’s portrayal is probably more accurately reflective of both her time and the time of her books.

And yet the sheer depth and breadth of reader investment in Heyer’s books adds another layer to the dilemma of historicism, because in some cases it seems Heyer is not only being invoked as an author, but as a historical authority herself, for her own books and those derived from her body of work. Heyer seems to be both source and author, which shapes not only what is seen as “true” in her books and those influenced by her work, but also what is deemed appropriate in terms of reader response. That is, it seems that Heyer’s influence is influencing not only what we read in Regency Romance, but how we should be reading it, as well. Which for me diverges substantially from the notion and relevance of historical accuracy in the Romance genre as a whole.

So what if we remove the author from the analysis? At this point, is that even possible, especially with Regency Romance? And if it’s possible, will it make it easier or harder to assess the historical validity of a story?

Related posts:

1. Past is Prologue, A Brief Look at History of Romance Communities on the Internet
2. Query No. “Repeating History”
3. The Limits of an Open Reader Standard

I think I have been waiting for you to write a book like The King’s Courtesan since I read Broken Wing.  This book has a confidence and maturity, a depth, in fact, that impressed me, despite the numerous well-used genre tropes and devices it employs and the predictability of the overall story arc. As I was reading, I was actually highlighting passages simply for their narrative force, and I was impressed at how immersive and detailed the Restoration setting felt to me. While not a perfect book, The King’s Courtesan took me by surprise in the best sort of way and made me happy I spent several hours in its company.

When a young soldier rescues Hope Matthews from a clumsy fall amidst a parade celebrating Cromwell’s triumphant return to London, she believes she has found her very own prince. Until, that is, she returns to the Covent Garden bawdy-house she calls home, where the brothel’s owner, Hope’s mother, informs her that she has just sold Hope’s maidenhead to a rich nobleman: “You’re a whore, my dear. Born into it right and proper, though I was married to your father for all that. You’d better get used to the idea because you can never be aught else.” Hope’s mother goes on to tell her that she is actually doing the young girl a favor, since marriage makes women “property,” and even Hope’s father was “a useless bastard,” while Hope will be “no common whore,” but “a rich man’s mistress.” Hope stands to earn half of what Sir Charles Edgemont will pay for her, a price that will be conveniently inflated in a staged “auction” for Hope’s innocence. Edgemont, predictably, disbelieves Hope’s untouched state and, enraged, forcibly drags her off to her fate.

Noting the irony of her own name, Hope “took the name and made it a talisman. She did was she needed to keep her own hopes alive,” which meant that she “stopped dreaming about what couldn’t be, and started planning for what might.” From that point on, Hope is forced to forget her dreams of marriage and respectability, trading them for the dubious power of knowing how to please and manage rich men, and over the next decade Hope becomes one of Charles II’s mistresses, a year after he is restored to the English throne.

Charles is very fond of his beautiful, vivacious mistress, and even after a year with her he is still smitten. Hope feels as close to Charles as she has to any man, which means that she still has emotional distance but is very fond of him. Still, she values her independence above any man, and with Charles’s impending marriage, Hope knows that her lack of title and property will make her persona non grata with the new queen. Having saved quite a bit of money over the years, Hope now wants to lead a quiet life, by herself, well out of court. Charles, though, is not ready to let his common-born mistress go, and when the wife of one of his former cavaliers begs Charles to help one of her old friends keep his family estate in Nottinghamshire, Charles sees the perfect opportunity. He will marry Hope off to this man, give him an earlship to make Hope a countess, and stash them in the country until he can recall Hope to court as his titled mistress.

Only a desperate man would agree to Charles’s scheme, and Robert Nichols is, indeed a desperate man. A soldier since his mid-teens, Robert has spent all of his adult years trying to stay on the right side of English politics while privately pursuing the five men who took his young sister’s life right before his eyes. Haunted each night by Caroline’s screams and pleading eyes, Robert has managed to dispatch all but one of his sister’s murderers, and not coincidentally, it is that man who has managed to convince the Crown to grant him Cressly Manor, Robert’s country estate.

Except for a long-ago crush on the wrong woman, Robert has relished his independence, albeit for different reasons from Hope. So how do you get a woman who wants nothing more than her hard-won independence to marry a man who wants nothing more than to be left alone to avenge his sister’s death? The circumstances of that event demonstrate how little independence either Hope or Robert really has and set in motion a drama that shows how intertwined the political and personal are in the world of the novel.

Reading The King’s Courtesan reminded me of how often historical Romance glosses over, discards, or diminishes the political in order to focus on the personal triumph of love. Before the Enlightenment, though, personal autonomy did not have the same philosophical primacy it does by the 19^th century, and this novel acknowledges that fact by bracketing the romantic development between Hope and Robert with the incredibly fickle political realities of the time. For even though Hope and Robert are technically married, both are subjects of the king, and subject to his whims, whatever they are, making love a risky proposition.

Beyond that, though, we have the Romance stereotypes of the good-natured courtesan who loves kittens and flowers and the steel-hearted soldier bent on vengeance. If the political layer did not add complexity to these characterizations, I think the novel would have been a very derivative, uninspired read for me. But because the political truly shapes the personal for these characters, the clichés took on more depth. For example, Hope may have a luminous personality, but, as she points out to Robert, she has learned to be a good actress:

“My mother sold me . . . I stayed with a man whose touch made my skin crawl and made him believe I liked it. I didn’t have the delicacy or decency to die of shock or heartbreak. I locked my soul in a gilded cage and I laughed, I joked, I thrived!”

She has endured numerous jibes and insults, being called “Cinder Whore” and derided for her own background. Interestingly, it’s not the sexual experience that brands her, but her lack of title, good family, and independent property that makes her suspect. When the king gives Robert a “dowry” for Hope, she realizes, cynically, that it was more than what her mother sold her for but less than a necklace that Charles gifted to his other mistress, a countess. She rails against the idea that she had no choice in her marriage to Robert, a man who, she fears “thinks to treat me like a whore and rule me like a husband.” For Hope, seeming gay, winning over people’s loyalty, learning to negotiate delicate situations, are all part of making her own way in a world that otherwise has little use for her beyond her beauty and sexual appeal. She is not naïve despite her appearance of innocence, which is an interesting twist on the stereotype of the virtuous woman of supposedly low morals.

I found Robert’s character less interesting than Hope’s in part, perhaps, because his misery is much of his own making, something Hope actually points out to him:

“It is not the sweet sister that you played with in the garden that plagues you. You torture yourself. She sought to save you just as you sought to save her. I can’t believe she wanted you to be unhappy or to spend your life in a prison of your own making, my love –“ her voice was urgent “ – and perhaps, perhaps it is you who refuses to let go. Perhaps it is you who traps her.”

This has never occurred to Robert, of course, and he is not particularly open to the idea, for it would contradict the purpose of so much of his life. It would force him to take a different kind of responsibility of his feelings, the kind of responsibility Hope has never even had the luxury of. Which is what makes her feelings for him so dangerous. Despite her seemingly innate idealism, Hope understands very well the dangers in becoming dependent on a man. Robert, on the other hand, cannot decide how to see Hope. Part of him wants to see her as a scheming jade of a woman, a whore, as she fears, while another part of him wants to see her as his “elf,” as a fae beauty whose goodness only serves to accentuate his darkness and feed his brooding suffering. Neither view of Hope is realistic, but both serve his own emotional limitations.

Because the set-up of the novel was so interesting to me, I enjoyed the first half more than the second. There are a number of places where it feels that a genre blueprint constructed the behavior of the protagonists, especially in the way the romantic tension is sustained through the couple’s mutually aggravating trust issues. The middle of the novel, in particular, suffers from this, ironically making the resolution to the numerous conflicts seem a bit anti-climactic.

Still, one of my persistent problems with both Broken Wing and Highland Rebel was the feeling that the history and politics of the era were not well-integrated into the lives of the characters and the plot. And in The King’s Courtesan that fracturing is absent and the world of the novel feels authentic, detailed, and much more naturally rendered. From an elaborate May Day celebration to the architectural contrasts between London and Nottingham, I felt there was a true sense of place and time in the book that I really appreciated. There is even a debate between Hope and Robert over the true nature of Robin Hood – vigilante or hero – that beautifully illustrates the difference in their social positions. Robert sees the legendary thief as a man who exploited the poor to facilitate his thievery, while Hope sees him as rebelling against the dominant social structure. It was clever details like this that compensated for the clichés elsewhere.

I described The King’s Courtesan to a friend as a Jo Goodman-esque novel of the Restoration. The writing styles are not the same, but there is a psychological authenticity and a thematic preoccupation that the two authors share, I think. Goodman is currently a stronger and more seasoned writer, but if James keeps growing, I think she could become a master of pre-19^th C historical Romance. For The King’s Courtesan, however, a B/B+.

~ Janet

Goodreads | Amazon | BN | nook | Sony | Kobo | eHarlequin

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: The King’s Courtesan by Judith James
2. REVIEW: Libertine’s Kiss by Judith James
3. REVIEW: Highland Rebel by Judith James

I have talked with you on Twitter for several years now, and I even purchased another of your books from Amazon, but Carnal Secrets is the first of your books I sat down to read all the way through. For those people suspicious of self-published books, I am happy to report that I would recommend this book as an example of a professionally produced product on par with New York published books. Even the cover manages to represent the protagonists accurately and appealingly. In terms of the book itself, my reading experience can be summarized this way: Carnal Secrets turned out to be a pretty interesting book that had almost succeeded in convincing my otherwise.

Natalie Hall is the adopted daughter of a prominent U.S. Senator, who happens to be up for re-election in Virginia. Her mother and sister both seem to resent the hell out of Natalie, which baffles her, considering she is the adopted Asian daughter who never felt she fit in to this family of blue-blooded blondes. Still as a Wharton grad and newly promoted to Senior Financial Analyst at Damon Defense Engineering, Natalie has a lot going for her. She doesn’t know much about the circumstances of her adoption, but she knows her father loves her and she tries her best to be a dutiful daughter, despite her mother’s constant cold criticism.

Alex Damon knows that someone is spying for his biggest rival, Rodale International, and the payback is going to be personal. Emily Rodale, who also just happens to be Natalie’s godmother, managed to ruin Alex’s father and his company, something Alex has not forgotten nor forgiven. Ethan Lloyd, Alex’s best friend and Damon executive, is convinced that the spy is Natalie, not only because of her relationship with Emily, but also because of her close friendship with Charlie Rodale, Emily’s son and head of Rodale International. Alex, however, doesn’t want to believe that the beautiful and intelligent Natalie is the spy, although he finds his attraction to her as scary as it is powerful, given his father’s devastating involvement with the wrong woman.

The first half of Carnal Secrets reminded me strongly of a Harlequin Presents melodrama, but without that compulsively readable quality. Natalie arrives at work to find that her boss and the firm’s director had been unexpectedly fired. Disoriented, she must adjust to this shock, as well as the shock of Alex Damon’s physical presence in the office:

His entire body emanated authority and raw sexuality. The dark, tailored suit he was wearing tried to throw a veneer of civilization over him but failed. He would’ve been frightening if it weren’t for the iron control in the winter gray eyes that said he ruled, not his primal instinct. She shivered as his gaze brushed over her, head to toe and then back up to her face. She had the most absurd feeling that he was undressing her with his eyes.

Alex is predictably attracted, as well:

The black skirt suit had flattered her lithe figure, although she’d done her best to appear serious and aggressive — a corporate Amazon look he found distasteful in general but singularly sexy on her. And those stilettos had done amazing things to her legs. Long, shapely, and deliciously erotic. A legman’s fantasy come to life.

Alex invites Natalie out for a “work dinner” that evening, which, predictably, turns into a conversation about what it’s going to take for Natalie to indulge the “chemistry” between her and Alex. After all, Alex is the kind of man who makes Natalie “acutely aware of her femininity,” while Natalie is the kind of woman who makes Alex forget his father’s betrayal at the hands of Natalie’s godmother. A betrayal completely unknown to Natalie, whose relationship with the Rodale family seems much more happy and normal than the one she endures with her own family.

The set up here is pretty obvious – or at least it seems so. And the slow build-up in the novel is one of the things that worked against my full engagement. Natalie is saying ‘no no no’ to the interoffice dating thing, even though we know she’ll eventually submit, and that Alex will rock her world, especially after two bad relationships in her past. Alex is courting Natalie, not only because he’s enthusiastically attracted to her, but also because it gives him a way to get closer to her father and to the Rodales. And on the way to romantic bliss are a number of predictable miscommunications between the couple, which seem intended to increase the emotional angst and plot suspense.

Had I not been reviewing the book, I might have put it down after the first third, which would have been a shame, because what unfolds over the course of the book is really quite interesting and thoughtful.

First there is the relationship between Alex and Natalie, which goes from that over the top instant attraction to typical clueless male/oversensitive female dynamics to something more nuanced, where both characters actually try to communicate and better understand one another rather than drawing unflattering conclusions and bailing. Let me also express my appreciation for the way in which the book refuses to rely on racial stereotypes, either in exoticizing the heroine or in the way the heroine’s background plays into the suspense plot. Because Natalie’s personal history is entwined with the larger issues around the rivalry between Rodale International and Damon Defense Engineering, in so far as Alex discovers something explosive in regard to Natalie’s origins that could be used to blackmail Hall and either secure his loyalty to the Rodales or compromise it.

As for Natalie’s background, it remains on the novel’s carnal secrets, at least until she hears the story from her mother that Brian found her in a D.C. trash can and brought her home to adopt, well before Louise had a chance to give Brian a “real” son or daughter. Which helps to explain Louise’s intense resentment toward Natalie, but does not get Natalie any closer to understanding her origin story (and, as it turns out, that is not the last story Natalie eventually hears about where she came from). This element of the story was fascinating and I wish it had been further developed, especially because the question of who she really was seemed always at the back of Natalie’s mind, and could never be fully resolved by Alex or any other man. Developing this aspect of the book might also have fleshed out the characterizations of Natalie’s mother and sister (Belle), both of whom come off as somewhat shallow. Even once we understand the root of Louise’s anger, Belle’s resentment and insistence that Natalie was the one who got everything from their father seems a bit over the top and underdeveloped. I think the novel, and especially Natalie’s characterization, would have greatly benefited from the further development of these relationships.

Another important “secret” in the book is that of who is spying on Damon’s company. From the point of view of an outsider, the evidence against Natalie is strong. She lets Charlie Rodale escort her to parties, and at times it looks as if they might be a couple. She shares private meetings with Emily Rodale, who, fully admits to ruining Alex’s father’s company and marriage. As a reader, we see the moments where both Emily and Charlie are, in fact, begging Natalie for Damon intelligence, and we know from her refusal that she is not the corporate spy, despite Ethan’s insistence to Damon that he will resign if he is wrong about her.

Still, it looks shady that Natalie refuses to cut the Rodales out of her life, even though from a personal point of view her decision is perfectly understandable. Given her own troubled family relationships, Emily Rodale’s maternal support and Charlie’s seemingly unflappable friendship are valuable assets in Natalie’s life portfolio. And I liked that about Natalie and found it a nuanced aspect of the book that also served the suspense plot well. These relationships are also the means by which we find out an additional secret that Damon has not been able to uncover in his private investigations, but which explains nicely why Emily Rodale did what she did to Alex’s father.

Even Alex turns out to be a more interesting character than his early behavior would suggest. From the guy who’s seducing Natalie at their first dinner meeting to his “white knight” rescue of her at an awkward family event, to his clueless fed-exing of a ruby necklace to her from Hong Kong after they’ve slept together, he eventually turns out to have a functioning brain he can apply to a difficult problem like why it seems certain that Natalie spied even though every “masculine instinct” in him screams otherwise. Rather than letting her beautiful legs or lush red lips seduce him out of his suspicions, he actually manages to figure things out rationally, which was both refreshing and immensely satisfying, on both an emotional and intellectual level.

I think Lee has a good ear for dialogue, too, especially between Natalie and her best friend Kelly (they actually sound like young women!), as well as between Natalie and Emily Rodale.

Actually, as I write this, I realize that for me the romance itself was the least compelling aspect of the novel, in large part because so much else was going on in a relatively compressed time frame that HEA or even HFN love seemed premature. The couple spend a great deal of time apart, for example, and a good deal of that at odds, and while the lust is certainly believable, I really felt they were still working on a solid romantic friendship at the end of the book. Had the book been longer or the pacing different (more emphasis on the secrets and suspense early on, so that the romance could be built more strongly in the second part), I might have bought the love relationship more readily. However, it’s as if a really quite interesting story about several families is being disguised as a relatively stereotypical romance, such that the really interesting parts never get the chance to imbibe the romance with the emotional resonance it needs to match the other elements of the book.

In the end, despite my disappointments, I’m glad I read Carnal Secrets, and I would certainly try something else by Nadia Lee, with the hope that the romance is as interesting as other story elements. C+.

~ Janet

Goodreads | Amazon | BN | nook | Sony | Kobo | All Romance eBooks

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Carnal Innocence by Nora Roberts
2. REVIEW: The House of Secrets by Elizabeth Blackwell
3. REVIEW: Suburban Secrets by Donna Birdsell

I had been wanting to read Hello Kitty Must Die for a while, and when I found out it was free at the Amazon Kindle store, I enthusiastically acquired and read it. In some ways, it was precisely what I expected: a dark, biting, satirical revenge fantasy. In other ways, though, it was both more and less than I expected. More in its twisted amorality, which was a refreshing change from so many heavy-handed moralistic crime stories. And less in the way I felt it failed to challenge many of the stereotypes it attempted to satirize.

Fiona Yu is a twenty-eight year old, Yale-educated law associate at a prestigious corporate firm in San Francisco. While she makes a six figure salary, she still lives with her Chinese parents, who own a Laundromat and continually set up their single daughter with an increasingly unappealing array of unmarried Chinese men, hoping to marry her off as soon as possible.

Contrary to her parents’ wishes, Fiona does not wish to marry or have children, and while she doesn’t particularly love practicing law, she does enjoy the myriad designer shoes and handbags she can buy. Despite the fact that she has no intention of letting any of the men her parents set her up with get past first base with her, Fiona is horrified to find out that she seems to have been born without a hymen. So horrified, in fact, that she decides to consult a vaginal reconstruction surgeon, who will charge her a mere $2500 for a new hymen.

Except that when the doctor steps into the examining room, he turns out to be one of Fiona’s best friends from Catholic school, a boy who taught Fiona how to stand up for herself to bullies and who was himself sent away when he set one girl’s hair aflame after she told everyone Sean was gay because he didn’t want to kiss her. Sean wasn’t gay; he just didn’t like hypersexualized females or bullies and was not averse to taking care of them in a not-so-polite way.

In the intervening years, Sean has become more proactive in dealing with his nemeses, while Fiona has become more and more reactive and passive aggressive. She used to get a kick scrambling up orders in her parents’ Laundromat, for example, to make it seem that a husband has been cheating on his wife. Unhappy couples, she felt, who needed a push toward divorce. Meeting Sean again reminds fires Fiona’s anger at her parents and their (in her mind) old-fashioned superstitions and cultural values. She is sick of being a “Hello Kitty,” a term for Asian American women who are seen as harmless and, ideally, as voiceless:

I hate Hello Kitty.

I hate her for not having a mouth or fangs like a proper kitty. She can’t eat, bite off a nipple or finger, give head, tell anyone to go and fuck his mother or lick herself. She has no eyebrows, so she can’t look angry. She can’t even scratch your eyes out. Just clawless, fangless, voiceless, with that placid, blank expression topped by a pink ribbon.

Poor Hello Kitty. Having to go around itchy, unlicked, un-scratched. Tortured by her own filth.

Like my mother.

Fiona doesn’t want to be like her mother, who “[a]fter nearly thirty years of marriage . . . still asks . . . for money to buy Payless shoes.” And in some ways she is not like her mother, at all. She has pictures of serial killers as her computer screen saver; her best friend is a serial killer who uses her to pick out his victims; and, at some point, Fiona refuses to tolerate the humiliation heaped on her by men.

It is this element of Hello Kitty Must Die that makes it a revenge fantasy. Sean, with whom Fiona has always been “half in love with” and half in fear with,” is exacting his own revenge on bullies like his father and “sluts” like his mother – “doing God’s work,” as Fiona puts it. There are many figures in Fiona’s life she would like to exact revenge on, and some seem to get theirs, while others don’t. Fiona is understandably enraged by the historical privileges afforded men, especially white men, and she spends much of the book skewering people like her parents for their old country superstitions, her anorexic, bleached-skin cousin, for telling Fiona she was too fat and too dark, her bosses, for demoralizing and harassing their associates and secretaries, and anyone else who is either a direct or indirect source of Fiona’s imprisonment in the dimensionless Hello Kitty stereotype. This aspect of the book is fueled by a refreshingly dark, twisted, and amoral sense of humor.

But Fiona is still her parents’ daughter. As much as she tells her parents she won’t marry any of the men they find for her, she continues to go out with every single one. If some of the people around Fiona seem to die early and unexpectedly, no one seems to notice anything amiss. Because Fiona is a “good girl” – she works 80 to 90 hour weeks at her firm and does what her parents say with only nominal resistance. She lets the reader know that the word for “yes” in Cantonese, “hai,” also means “cunt,” when said in a higher tone, so we know that every time she said “hai” to her father, she is aware of her abdication and her traditional place in the family as a daughter, not a son (or even the mother of sons).

This aspect of the book complicated the humor and stereotype-skewering for me, undermining the success of the dark satire. For example, when Fiona uses the word “hai” to her father, it felt like the affirmation of a Hello Kitty, rather than an independent, feminist woman who was trying to throw off the chains of her patriarchal Chinese-American upbringing. This image of Fiona as lacking agency – or, perhaps more accurately, abdicating agency – is reinforced by her decision to live at home so she could buy more designer shoes on her six figure salary. She feels so harassed by her parents’ old country superstitions and attitudes, and yet she willfully puts herself in a position of dutifully obeying her father’s truly hideous suitor choices and tolerating her mother’s passive acquiescence to a way of life that offends Fiona.

From this perspective, it becomes more difficult to completely sympathize with Fiona, or to simply vicariously enjoy her revenge fantasy. Comparing Fiona to her parents does not result in Fiona’s characterization as a stereotype-busting voice; to the contrary, Fiona becomes stereotyped in ways that similarly reinforces the very stereotypes her narrative superficially, at least, seems to critique. And because the satire exists at a relatively shallow level, I did not find enough self-awareness or self-consciousness in the narrative voice to view Fiona’s character, and her self-defeating critique, as meta. The irony of having a white male character be Fiona’s inspiration is not made less problematic by the fact that he is a serial killer abetted by Fiona’s own cultural victimization.

I have to admit that I had high expectations for Hello Kitty Must Die. Let’s face it; the title alone is killer. And the biting voice of the narrator is wonderfully entertaining for at least half the novel. The problems really become apparent as the narrative moves toward its ultimate completion, and various questions around where the story is taking Fiona and where it will leave her begin to weigh down the dark satire. It would be one thing if the shallowness of the narrative ensured an uncomplicated reading experience; although maintaining the reader’s engagement at that level requires substantial narrative control. The problem is that the issues on which the novel’s satire is built – gender, culture, family, various forms of morality – are already problematic enough to make impossible a purely superficial reading. Or, more accurately, they make impossible a purely superficial reading that shows the book in its best light.

There were also quite a few noticeable errors in the book, from Karl Malden spelled with a “C” to “cholericly” for either “colicky” or “choleric” (not sure which was intended) to simple typos I don’t think should be so prevalent in a professionally published book.

According to the bio at the back of the book (which highlights several superficial parallels between her life and Fiona’s), Hello Kitty Must Die is Choi’s first novel, and for me the narrative demonstrated a lack of maturity that made sense when I understood the book to be a debut work. Still, I have to evaluate it on its own terms, and on that basis, the book was ultimately a C read for me.

~ Janet

Goodreads | Amazon | BN | nook | Sony | Kobo

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Here Kitty, Kitty by Shelly Laurenston
2. REVIEW: Beyond the Dark by Angela Knight, Emma Holly, Lora Leigh, Diane Whiteside
3. Friday Film Review: Kitty