REVIEW: Seize the Fire by Laura Kinsale
Dear Laura Kinsale:
I want to say I began reading romance around 1992. I’d read romances in my teens, here and there, though I was mostly on an extended horror binge through those years. Circa 1992 I read Outlander, and though it’s still a matter of debate in some circles as to whether that book or series qualify as “romance”, I was hooked.
Alas, I was also, in that era, internet-less and very much at sea*. That means I read a lot of bad books that I didn’t care for at all (Coulter and the at-the-time seemingly universally beloved Woodiwiss), and a few bad books that I did kind of like (I mean, Brenda Joyce was not the pinnacle of literature, but I made it through her entire oeuvre speedily – her books were entertaining and HOT). Of course the word “bad” in this context is entirely subjective, but from my perspective, I kissed a lot of frogs while encountering only the occasional prince.
* The trade-off for a complete lack of online resources was the existence of actual brick-and-mortar bookstores. I spent a lot of time at those stores sampling and considering and buying books. I longed for romances that were both (subjectively) good – well-written, with depth of characterization – and actually romantic.
I don’t remember where I first heard of Laura Kinsale, but one day I pulled Seize the Fire from the bookshelf at Barnes & Noble, and started reading. The opening passage shocked me (in a good way!) in its depiction the hero in the middle of a naval battle; the reader knows by his own internal monologue that Sheridan Drake is feeling anything but heroic and is only interested in saving his own skin.
Now *this* was something different. Through all the brutal “heroes” I’d encountered in my year or so of reading romance steadily – through the rapists and the adulterers and the just plain assholes – I hadn’t ever encountered one who was anything less than traditionally brave and manly. I was immediately drawn in.
Retirement from the British Navy and internment in his father’s dilapidated and trap-filled home in the English Fens brings Sheridan to the attention of Olympia St. Leger, a sheltered and anxious neighbor who daringly calls on Sheridan without her chaperone one afternoon. Olympia has been following Sheridan’s naval exploits from afar, and she imagines him as just the sort of person who can help her. You see, Olympia is more rightfully addressed as Princess Olympia of Oriens (Oriens being a small country located near the French Alps).
Olympia has never been to Oriens, it’s true, but she knows enough (or thinks she does) about her ancestral homeland to be concerned about the political direction it’s taking. Her grandfather, the king, is old. Her parents are dead, murdered (it’s rumored) by the second son, Olympia’s uncle Claude Nicolas. Now there are rumblings that her grandfather might choose Olympia as his successor rather than Claude. Olympia has a few concerns, not the least of which the rumor that Claude is trying to get the Vatican to grant a dispensation to allow him to marry his own niece (that would be Olympia) in order to take control of Oriens.
Then there’s the matter of Olympia’s political leanings, which are a tad revolutionary. Revolutionary in that she literally wants to lead Oriens in a democratic revolution.
When presented with Olympia’s plea for help, Sheridan is torn between lust, greed and wariness. He eventually gives into the greed and the two set off on quite an unlikely adventure, with twists and turns aplenty. (It’s weird for me to call this book an adventure, because it’s so dark and angsty and character-driven, but rereading it reminded me that the plot really is full of action.)
Seize the Fire may be the most stark example of the cynical hero meets innocent heroine trope I’ve read. But rather than have the contrast between the characters’ worldviews simply be a vehicle that allows the hero to learn to love with the help of a pure woman, the story treads a different, darker path. Olympia has to change too, because her naiveté is dangerous; it can (and does) get people killed.
Seize the Fire was published almost 30 years ago, and there were a few issues that I ascribe to “it was a different time.” The first is simply technical – there are numerous POV shifts in the middle of scenes, which I found confusing and offputting. Perhaps others don’t see that as an era issue but a stylistic choice of the author. I would say that it’s definitely something I saw more of in the 1990s and rarely see today. YMMV.
The others are a little thornier.
First, there’s at least one love scene where Sheridan ignores Olympia’s struggling physically against him and thinks, essentially, that he knows how to get around the objections of a woman. Now, this behavior was nothing compared to that of the heroes of countless older romances, who, as we’ve established, were actual rapists. I’m sure I didn’t bat an eye reading the scene in 1993. Further, I may not have batted an eye reading the scene a couple of years ago. But the current zeitgeist is such that it stuck out for me. Of course, Sheridan is something of a villain already, but it’s odd, in a way, that even relatively recently, this particularly would not be remotely seen as a sign of his villainy. Today it makes a reader (well, this reader) go, “hmm” and possibly “ugh.” I guess this isn’t so much a criticism of Seize the Fire as it is a question about how we reconcile modern reading and modern writing with characters from other eras. When the reading, writing and setting are each in three different eras, it becomes even more complicated.
Perhaps even more troubling is the depiction of Sheridan’s Arab manservant, Mustafa. Sheridan is verbally and mildly physically abusive towards Mustafa, though those behaviors could be seen as simply in line with Sheridan’s general misanthropy. What’s more uncomfortable to read of is Mustafa’s cringing servility, which is somewhat reminiscent of the Stepin Fetchit stereotype. He’s referred to as “the little servant” four times in the course of the book; he’s also described as moving “like a monkey up a palm tree” at one point. He’s not a finely drawn character, to be sure. Of course, none of the characters are very finely drawn in Seize the Fire, save Sheridan and Olympia. The Brits are clueless, entitled stuffed shirts and the Indian and Arabic characters are brutish and violent. But having Mustafa portrayed as a comic character (alternately lazy and deceptive or showily submissive) felt different and borderline offensive.
I mention this because while it is something that I can get over/put in context because of my love for the book and the characters, other readers may feel differently. I almost feel like I can’t talk intelligently about it because I certainly don’t want to come off as defensive of racist depictions. I don’t know. Maybe both above examples are just positive signs that times are changing quickly, and readers expect a defter handling of issues of consent and cultural sensitivity.
Sheridan is not merely a cynical character or a world-weary one; he suffers from such severe PTSD that he has episodes where he questions his own sanity. Much of his façade – and it is a façade, though a very solid one – is simply a protective layer he has built up in order to bear the things he’s seen and done. He has enormous survivor’s guilt.
I loved Sheridan’s sarcastic sense of humor, even if it’s often directed at Olympia and her high-minded notions (though it usually goes over her head; Olympia is very literal). It’s another weapon he employs to protect himself. In general he is almost reflexively smart-ass, as when he and Olympia are aboard a ship under the control of (incompetent) pirates:
“What’s wrong?” she hissed.
“Democracy at work,” he said sourly. “We’re voting on whether or not to break off our anchor and drift onto those rocks.”
So. I love this book. I don’t know that I can fairly rank Kinsales when the only ones I’ve read with any recency are this and The Prince of Midnight. But if I were going by old rankings, I’m pretty sure it would be Flowers from the Storm, Seize the Fire and The Shadow and the Star in the top three spots (I am also AWFULLY fond of The Dream Hunter; maybe I should re-read that one next?).
My grade for Seize the Fire is an A.
Best,
Jennie
AmazonBNKoboBook DepositoryGoogle
This was a book I had mixed feelings about even when I first read at the time it came out– it impressed me but I also thought the ending was far from my idea of a HEA. I haven’t read it since then because it was so painful. However, a friend recently tried to read it and couldn’t finish. When she told me about the comparison of Mustafa to a monkey, I was shocked by the racism, which had somehow flown over my head back in 1989. Kinsale wrote some other books that I loved back in the day, and now I’m scared to revisit them.
@Janine: It’s not the happiest of HEAs, for sure. These are two very damaged people. But I think that’s true for a number of Kinsale books – though perhaps usually it’s more one of the characters than the other. As awful as it was, in a way I liked the balance of both of them being so traumatized – it allows for the possibility that they’ll heal each other, rather than the more typical “heroine heals hero” or (as was maybe the case with Prince of Midnight) “hero heals heroine.”
I think my meter for a HEA relies a lot on whether the characters are in a better place by the end of the book than they were when they first met. I can see how this might be true of Sheridan, but not of Olympia. She is actually (in my view) worse off at the end than in the beginning.
I listened to this one last year (or maybe the year before?) when it came out on audio. Nicholas Boulton narrates and his delivery of both characters opened the book up to me in a new way. I ended up finding the HEA a lot more satisfying actually.
There are certainly problems – the racism and the other consent issue you mentioned. There was something about him being prepared to leave a maid to be treated very badly while being prepared to rescue Olympia (if I recall correctly at least) which was less than heroic for sure.
That said, like you, I love this book. And the scenes when they are on the Falkland Islands are by far my favourite of any Kinsale. Also like you, I think Flowers From the Storm is my favourite but the Falkland Islands scenes are ones I read for comfort sometimes. I love them.
@Janine: I guess I feel like Olympia was so naive and sheltered that her disillusionment was inevitable. It’s still hard to read about, but in a weird way it makes her equals with Sheridan.
@Kaetrin: That’s a good point about the treatment of the maid but I guess I saw it as in line with the person that Sheridan was – he really wasn’t a good man.
Their whole castaway sequence in the Falklands is so poignant. The baby penguin they adopt and the development of the relationship between Sheridan and Olympia – all of it so well done and basically makes me cry even thinking about it. The only part that makes me cry more is the letter Olympia leaves for Sheridan after everything goes wrong in Oriens.
Hm, I read The Prince of Midnight and not this one precisely because TPoM inverts the standard innocent heroine/cynical hero pairing to great effect, but I guess I will have to pick this one up now too, if only to compare with TPoM. Granted, the delusions under which Olympia labors are clearly of a different variety than ST’s, the former being a Disney Princess deconstruction, while ST is a deconstruction of the vigilante hero/Robin Hood archetype.
re: the racist caricatures and forced seductions, yeah … in light of all the blatant attempts to commodify and profit off of nostalgia for older properties, revisiting stuff from the 90’s has been pretty eyeopening, the kind of ugliness that we were collectively okay with.
@Jennie: Her disillusionment may have been inevitable, but SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER her causing other people to die was not. I just can’t imagine having to live with that kind of guilt for the rest of one’s life. So…Sheridan is less alone in having had that experience, because Olympia now shares it, but where does that leave her?
@E.L.: For me the best Kinsale with a cynical heroine and trusting hero was For My Lady’s Heart. The Prince of Midnight (or for that matter, Seize the Fire) didn’t hold a candle to it.
@Janine: I guess I just always imagine that they help each other get through a shared guilt. It’s romantic to me in a perverse way because at least it’s equal – you don’t have one character (usually the heroine) having to heal and emotionally support the hero for the rest of their lives.
@Janine: Yes, For My Lady’s Heart is my favorite of what I’ve read of her oeuvre so far. Love the paranoid and Machiavellian Melanthe, and love the masterful use of Middle English.
However, given that it’s Melanthe whose worldview is shown to be the more distorted and destructive one at the end, I kind of feel like TPoM is the more direct inversion of the naive girl/worldly hero trope. Ruck is gullible, but that’s not the same as being deluded, and I think he’s shown to be the one who is more … in the right? … grounded? Melanthe eventually acquiesces more to his worldview is what I’m trying to say. ST on the other hand (and it sounds from the review that Olympia qualifies as well) verges pretty close to suicidal delusion at times. It’s Leigh, in spite of her trauma and rage, who is the one with her head on straight and the firmer grasp on reality, and ST by the end sort of comes to see her point.
@Jennie: SPOILERS, SPOILERS. Olympia is given this trauma so that Sheridan can begin to heal—that doesn’t feel equal at all to me, because his well-being is prioritized over hers. What happens to her forces him to open up; she has to be brought low so that he can begin to rise.
@E.L.: My reading of Ruck and Melanthe’s worldviews was very different than that. I felt Ruck to be the more naive. Melanthe only acquiesces because Gian dies. And Gian dies by a complete fluke. It always read to me like no one could have succeeded in killing him; he was too powerful and too paranoid. If not for his unlikely death, Melanthe would have been proven right in her worldview and in having done all that she did to protect Ruck. It was just pure luck that Ruck and Melanthe came out on top, pure luck that things worked out for Ruck’s worldview. But once they do, Melanthe is able to relax her guard and be happy with him. I always sided with her and her view of things in that story.
@Jennie: I do find the ending of the book romantic, not because of equality but because the barriers between them finally fall. It is a more healthy relationship in that now they are communicating, rather than talking past each other. But is that enough to overcome the trauma? I guess I come down on the side of no. They are both damaged and broken people; that much weight of guilt, even when shared, can’t bode well for their future. I think it’s interesting that it ends in the place where it does, because that feels to me like the only place where it can end. I can’t picture them moving on from there. It feels like the book ends where it should; it’s not a HEA to me but it is an appropriate ending to their journey.
I’ve always felt the book was somewhat hellish and purposefully so; from “It was hell being a hero” at the beginning to “If we all got what we deserved…pray God spare me that” at the end (paraphrasing from memory), it’s a book that doesn’t try to pretty up or romanticize war or any kind of violent conflict, nor does it try to say that human beings are particularly good or deserving. I read it as a book that says that life is suffering, and small moments of grace like the one at the very end are the best we can hope for. Heroism is bogus, and a big happy ending ain’t coming. I admire that aspect of it, but I think it doesn’t entirely fit with the romance genre.
@Janine: I remember being disssatisifed with the ending when I first read the book. It didn’t feel happy enough. But when I listened to it more recently I changed my view. I did believe in their HEA. I think Olympia had to have some ragged edges of her own so they could fit together with Sheridan’s. There was no way Sheridan was ever going to be smooth and pure. And Olympia did need to learn was real life was like. She couldn’t live in her bubble forever. The whole book is about her realising that IMO. I found it a bit subversive actually. In many romances, it is the hero who has to be brought up to scratch to be worthy of the heroine. Here, while it’s not about *worth*, the heroine had to step down off her pedestal to get her HEA with the hero. When I listened I appreciated that but it didn’t even occur to me when I first read the book.
@Kaetrin: SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS I agree with every single one of your points (and have since reading the book) except for believing in their HEA. I do agree they fit better together than they ever would have had this not happened to Olympia. But I just can’t imagine them going happily about their lives given their feelings of responsibility for other people’s deaths, and I see nothing in the text that suggests they can.
What happens to them would be my worst nightmare, personally, and not something I can imagine recovering from. The guilt and shame would be lifelong and inescapable. There was recently an article in The New Yorker on the topic of how hard self-forgiveness for people who have accidentally killed others IRL. I’m not saying that Sheridan and Olympia deserve to suffer, but just that I just don’t see how it is possible for their suffering to end.
@E.L.: @E.L.: Olympia is definitely deluded and I think so unhappy and dissatisfied with her life that she idealizes the idea of being the savior. I don’t know that her thought process (at least at the beginning) goes far enough to realize that the consequences of her desired actions will be death (possibly her death).
S.T. was sort of different to me, because he was in a different stage of life. He’d had the adrenaline rush of being a highwayman, and I don’t think he was really self-destructive then. Just kind of dumb, like Olympia in his way. But later, he is trying to come to terms with what his losses mean, and I think then he’s reckless in a different way – more like Olympia later in the story, where he’s single-minded on a goal and not so much on himself.
@Janine: I don’t see it as her being brought low so that he can heal – it’s just sort of how it happens. I mean, they could have gotten together when they (SPOILER) first have sex when they are under the “protection” of the sultan. Sure, she naively thinks that losing her virginity will protect her from a bunch of nonsense in Oriens, and he knows that it’s not that simple. But maybe they’d have gotten out, and she could have avoided the trauma and I do think she could’ve healed him to a certain degree. It’s just not how it happens in the story. Ultimately it meant something to me that he went after her.
@Janine: I think your point about StF being more about suffering than romance is a good one. But I still see some redemption possible in two broken people coming together.
You know what just came to mind? The M. O’Keefe books. Those aren’t as explicit, IIRC, about the guilt the characters carry and what they’re guilty of (I’m mostly thinking that they end up pulling punches on the reality of the heroes’ criminal acts, but I may be remembering wrong). But the sense that both the hero and heroine feel very damaged and in some ways need someone who understands that damage – I see a little similarity.
@Jennie: SPOILERS — I agree it meant something that he went after her and yes, some redemption is possible in two broken people coming together. That’s what the ending of the book is all about. I guess I see a difference between some redemption and a HEA.
With regard to the HEA, RWA’s definiton of romance is “a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending.” Regarding the emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending, it is defined this way on RWA’s website: “In a romance, the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love. ”
Where is the emotional justice in the ending of Seize the Fire? The ending is all about how the world is an unjust place. That is why I see the book as fitting uneasily in the genre.
I do think that once Olympia has been through her trauma, she and Sheridan are probably better off together than apart. This damage is what I see as the glue that will hold them together (which is why I don’t think they could have gotten together in a lasting way before that). But I can’t foresee a happy future for them, because how do you fully unburden yourself of guilt for something that had such a heavy cost, and that you can never make restitution for? Maybe if they didn’t have strong consciences I could understand how that would be possible, but then I would think less of them.
With a few of the M. O’Keefe books, it was different for me because nobody had caused any deaths except perhaps in self-defense. Burn Down the Night, which I think is the book you’re referring to as pulling punches, was one that didn’t gel for me the way O’Keefe’s others did. I also had difficulty swallowing the happy, shiny epilogue in that book. Kinsale made the right call, IMO, in not writing one of those for Seize the Fire.
So two broken people together can work for me, but I see the brokenness in Seize the Fire as more profound.
@Janine: It’s been a while since I’ve reread most of Kinsale’s books, but there are several where I would say an “optimistic” ending would be going too far. The Prince of Midnight is one, because Leigh has simply suffered too much IMO to ever not be profoundly sad on some level. She can have happiness, even joy, with S.T., but her losses are always going to be an intrinsic part of who she is.
For My Lady’s Heart is another, though I haven’t read it in ages. My recollections of Melanthe are as someone who is similar to Leigh – she has this past which has hardened her. True love has tempered that, but not entirely. She’s always going to be angry and fearful on some level because of what she lost.
@Jennie: The difference is that Leigh and Melanthe suffered their losses before those books begin. So when I ask myself “Is the heroine better off at the end of the book than she was at the beginning?” Or “Did her journey take her to a happier place?” I can answer with yes. With Seize the Fire, that is not the case.
I’m a big fan of hers but haven’t read this one or a few others. Is there anyone who is similar to Kinsale? I love her writing.
@Janine: I get that the HEA didn’t work for you here and that’s entirely valid. For me, I like the idea that someone who is bruised and battered by life can get a HEA. There are plenty of romance books where the hero or heroine go through something awful within the book and end up HEA. If the something awful is caused by their own actions that’s obviously a harder sell for you (and that’s fine) but I don’t think that’s a universal thing. I can buy it in the right situation.
I don’t like the idea that HEAs can only belong to people who don’t make mistakes. And I’ve never taken a HEA to mean that there’s no sadness or grief in their lives again ever (and I don’t think you do either).
In this book, for me, the “emotional justice” is, perhaps strangely, in the fact they’re both on “equal” footing re their scars. They understand each other’s pain in a way that another could not. They’re better together than apart. They love each other and while that love does not repair the damage in their lives, it does make it easier to bear (not necessarily easy, just easier).
@Kaetrin: I don’t have a problem with the idea of a bruised and battered character getting a HEA or with a character who has made a mistake getting a HEA, and I wish you wouldn’t represent my views this way.
It is harder for me when the mistake is the unintended death of another or others, which is something that I see as much harder to recover from, but even that may not necessarily preclude my enjoyment of a HEA–I’m not sure.
An equal problem for me here (and in the other book you’re thinking of) is structural–that not only does Olympia make a deadly mistake, but she makes it toward the end of the book, so that the reader (at least this reader) isn’t given the time and space to absorb the blow before we arrive at the end.
Quite honestly I’ve read and enjoyed many books where the characters have traumatic histories or suffer serious traumas in the course of the novel, as well as make some colossal errors, but as long as this comes up in the first half, rather than late in the novel, it’s doesn’t generally impinge on the HEA in the same way.
With regard to emotional justice, I think of it as one of the elements that makes the difference between a Shakespearean comedy and a Shakespearean tragedy. Stage comedies classically start with their world in disorder–something external that’s gone wrong and has to be put back to rights. Tragedies start this way too, but in tragedies order is never restored, or only restored after the main characters die. At the end of a comedy, whatever was off-kilter at the beginning is resolved and the sense is that “All’s right with the world.” Romances too have this–something wrong at the beginning and by the end, all is right with the world.
Seize the Fire, if memory serves, has a lot of senseless villainy and cruelty early on, from Julia’s treatment of Olympia to Sheridan getting sent to join the navy as a child, to the villains that crop up during the story. This sense of senseless violence sustains itself throughout the book and even in the last scene, when Olympia, needing comfort, says that the people who died didn’t deserve it, Sheridan’s response essentially boils down to this not being a world where people get what they deserve. That IMO is the antithesis of emotional justice– the sense that the good have been rewarded, the guilty punished, and all is right with the world.
I understand what you’re saying about the last scene and I actually feel that way too. That is the reason the last scene is the only part of the book I have ever reread, and I’ve reread it multiple times. It’s the best possible way to end a novel like this, as I’ve said before. But because justice and order aren’t restored in Olympia and Sheridan’s larger world, and can’t be, it is only a partial comfort in terms of what a book in the genre is generally viewed as being expected to provide. I actually have a lot of admiration for that aspect of Seize the Fire, as I said before.
@Janine: That makes sense. Olympia was better off at the beginning of the book, but she was pretty miserable still. She may have lost more than she gained by the end, but she did gain something. But I can see someone not seeing it that way.
@Jennie: Thanks. I agree she gained something, it’s the first part, that she may have lost more than she gained by the end, that is my issue in a nutshell.
@Janine: I wasn’t “misrepresenting your views” Janine. That’s what I understood your view to be from what you wrote. And I was only referencing this book.
Clearly it’s time for me to withdraw from this conversation.
@Kaetrin: Sorry! I’ll withdraw as well.
What a great review, and what a fascinating discussion! I know I’m late to the discussion, but I was the friend that @Janine referenced in her first comment. She’d recommended it to me because she knew of my interest in revolutions, specifically the French Revolution, and she recommended StF as an interesting depiction of an aspiring revolutionary. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get that far. The writing struck me as very twee– Olympia is compared to a “woodland creature” at one point– and I wasn’t too crazy about Sheridan’s sleazy, predatory ennui. Right off the bat I wasn’t really interested in reading more.
Of course, this was nothing compared to the racism in depicting Mustafa. You described it so well, Jennie. The whole portrayal reminded me of the comic ethnic sidekick from 1930s comedies. It pissed me off so much.
So yeah– DNF.
I loved this book, but I haven’t read it for years. I saw Sheridan’s PTSD described beautifully. In some ways he reminds me of GM Fraser’s Flashman, but where Flashy accepts his cowardice and sees it as a saving grace, a way to counteract the hypocrisy of the time he lives in, Sheridan is consumed by guilt.
Olympia is the second lead in this, and that’s why her fate isn’t so vital. There aren’t many romances where the male takes the part of the protagonist, but I believe this one is.
I tried once to write a story about the emergence of the abolitionist movement in the 1750s and 1760s, but I found the task nearly impossible. Even the people who cared, saw the injustices and tried to set them right, used the kind of language that makes today’s reader shudder. And I couldn’t even write them.
So when you write a story in the mouths and minds of the people of that time, do you use modern language, avoid the terms a modern audience dislikes, or do you go for authenticity?
It’s not a question I have an answer for, which is why I gave up the book.
Okay, so I am going to have to listen to Nicholas reading me this story… oh, the burden! [wry smile]
I don’t think I ever read this one. So I’m very interested in it for several reasons. In general I have loved her angsty books and I loved the whimsical Midsummer Moon [is that the one where the heroine is the mad inventor?] and honestly at the time could envision it as a Spielberg movie with his wife-at-the-time Amy Irving playing the delightfully off-kilter inventress.
Or if Midsummer Moon is the Irish one, it slides back toward the angst, and I loved it, too. Of course like almost everyone FftS tops my list of Kinsale books. And btw I once had the opportunity to ask her about naming the totally unchristian hero Christian [especially in a book where the heroine’s Quaker religion is vital to the plot]. And to my surprise she said–with a sense of surprised thoughtfulness– she’d never even thought about it, which implied she hadn’t been asked about it before, either? Maybe? And this was a few years after the book was published.
Surely I am not the only one who saw the name Christian and immediately pondered its significance and irony? Or is it such a common name in romance of that era that people accept it without even considering it’s meaning? I have a cousin who named her son Christian and she didn’t do it without consideration of what it meant. Maybe that’s why I’m more aware? I don’t know.
Anyway, off to listen to Seize the Fire. I’m wondering how I’ll feel about the hero since no matter how much present-day Pooks abhors the actions of Cam in Once More, Miranda, I still love the book and that kind of tortured hero is one of my guilty pleasures.
@Joanne Renaud: I can definitely understanding having a different POV reading it for the first time now.
@Lynne Connolly: I know what you mean – even before they became less common, I found I couldn’t read Civil War romances with Southern heroes or heroines. There were just too many instances of authors trying to soften or justify the actions and beliefs of the characters. OTOH I didn’t want them to be unrealistically woke, so I realized it was better just to avoid those books.
Sometimes with historical romances I benefit from not knowing too much (and thus thinking too much) about characters behaving unrealistically for their time. But once I know something I can’t unknow it.
@Patricia Burroughs aka Pooks: I think Midsummer Moon is the inventor one. With the hedgehog as the animal mascot!
I once did a post somewhere analyzing the names of Kinsale’s characters because I thought there was some interesting stuff there. Not only Christian’s name, but his heroine being Maddy. She’s a Christian and he ends up in a madhouse. I can’t believe that wasn’t intentional!
I love the mention of Once More, Miranda. Was that the one that in spite of being first person somehow managed to include frequent references to the heroine’s long red hair and voluptuous body?
Oh, it probably was! The hero was a writer and the heroine began as his servant and began, as I recall, writing stuff for him? All I remember is they both became writers and this did Not Go Well with him. Much jealousy and simmering anger. Much conflict and angst and passion! He was very much the Alpha hero with all the baggage that can entail, but she was very much the spitfire/Alpha heroine who gave better than she took, and I loved it.
By the way, Jennie–if you ever run across that post, share the link! I’d love to see it!