REVIEW: Irresistible by Mary Balogh
B- Reviews / C+ Reviewsbaronet / Blackmail / historical romance / Regency England / unrequited-love / veterans / widow13 Comments
Dear Ms. Balogh,
Earlier this year, I blogged about Indiscreet and Unforgiven, the first two books in your Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse series, which features four cavalry officers who served in the Napoleonic War. Irresistible is the third and final book in the series, concerning the last two horsemen, Sir Nathaniel Gascoigne, baronet, and Eden Wendell, Baron Pelham.
The main romance involves Nathaniel, a baronet who has come to London to marry off his youngest sister Georgina and his twenty-four year old, independent –minded cousin Lavinia Bergland. In London Nathaniel reunites with Rex, Ken (heroes of the previous two books) and Eden, his three friends from his military days, and with Sophie Armitage, another friend from the war, a widow who followed the drum.
Sophie lives on a military pension in a house that was given to her by the government due to her late husband’s heroism. At first glance she is plain and even dowdy, but amiable and difficult to perturb, even after Eden promises to find Nate a courtesan in her hearing. But the truth is a bit different from the impression she gives.
Nathaniel finds that he’s no longer interested in prostitutes, and while he is not ready to settle down, he would prefer an affair with an equal. One night he kisses Sophie, and then asks whether she’ll slap him or invite him to her bed. Sophie, having for years loved him from afar, invites him upstairs.
Nathaniel doesn’t know that Sophie is being blackmailed by Boris Pinter, another army acquaintance who does not like her friendship with Nate and the other horsemen. But Nate soon catches wind of it and his attempts to protect Sophie from Pinter complicate his and Sophie’s relationship and give rise to a conflict that makes Nathaniel aware that his feelings for her are shifting.
There is also a secondary romance involving the occasionally rude and somewhat immature Eden, a rogue determined to sow his wild oats for as long as possible, and Lavinia, who refuses to dance with him when he asks her in a conceited manner. Sparks fly whenever these two are together, but will either of them ever agree to settle down?
Initially Nathaniel annoyed me slightly because he saw his affair with Sophie as one between equals, by which neither would be harmed, while I could not see it that way. Sophie was financially strapped and had none of his social rank and power, and her gender put her in a precarious position as a respectable woman inviting a gentleman to her home late at night.
However, I quickly grew to like Nate because of his perceptiveness and his care for Sophie. Bonus points: He was perhaps the only Balogh hero I’ve come across who actually discusses preventing a pregnancy with the heroine. Even more points were earned when, following a conflict with Sophie, he apologized and tried to resolve the problem in an adult and mature manner. And when he remained determined to be there for her no matter what in the face of multiple difficulties, I began to see him as a true hero.
But oy, Sophie. She never struck me as worthy of Nathaniel. Sophie spent a great deal of the book passively resigned to the fate her blackmailer had decreed for her: that of the victim.
While there were some reasons for this, it took her an awfully long time to do anything proactive about her situation, even after it became obvious that Pinter would never back off and that he fully intended to ruin her and her family after he’d bled her of all of her funds.
Sophie also dressed in a dowdy way for much of the book and did not view herself as attractive. There were reasons for this, as well, but they, and her backstory, were not fully revealed until the last 10% of the book, and that felt too late. Then, too, some aspects of her backstory (such as her late husband’s actions on their wedding night) were hard for me to buy.
What I liked best about Sophie was her years of following the drum, which gave a bit of character to an otherwise lackluster woman. But other than that, it was hard to see what it was about her that attracted Nathaniel’s passionate protectiveness and devotion.
Spoiler (spoiler): Show
The resolution to the secondary romance between Eden and Lavinia was more satisfying. Eden starts out too immature and socially inappropriate for my taste, but he grew up some under Lavinia’s influence. And Lavinia was a loyal friend to Sophie, instrumental in assisting her, as well as a strong woman in her own right. In many ways, she was the true heroine of the book.
Grading this book is tough because some parts of it were very emotionally affecting and Nate was a wonderful hero. Lavinia was a wonderful secondary heroine. Eden and Sophie were more middling-to-annoying characters for me, so I have to conclude that if only Nathaniel had been paired with Lavinia, this could have been a stellar book. As it is, it was worth the time it took to read it, but I doubt I will read it again.
Indiscreet remains my favorite book of the trilogy, Unforgiven remains my least favorite, and Irresistible lands in the middle, with a C+/B- grade.
Sincerely,
Janine
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Aww, this review made me feel quite bad for Sophia. Not every woman is a confident and proactive force of nature. It sounds like she’s been through quite a bit too. If it takes a survivor time to rediscover their own self worth, it doesn’t mean they’re “unworthy” in the meantime.
@Anne:
Oops, Sophie, not Sophia.
@Anne: I didn’t say she was unworthy, just that she wasn’t worthy of Nathaniel. By which I mean that he deserved someone better. It’s not I bear her ill will but rather that I thought he deserved better that he got from her.
@Anne: Her name actually is Sophia, but everyone calls her Sophie.
This was an OK book for me for the same reasons, more or less. I guess Indiscreet, one of my favorite Baloghs, makes the other books in the trilogy pale too much in comparison.
Having said that, Irresistible is still 100% than most historical romance out there these days!
Sorry, meant 100% better than…
@Claudia: Yes. I agree with you that Indiscreet (especially the second half) makes the others pale in comparison.
Irresistible is by far my favourite book of the Four Horsemen trilogy and it ranks at about number 3 of my all time favourite Balogh books. I haven’t read it in a long time but it is one I’ve read more than once. I remember Sophie as being resourceful and brave and the four guys saw her as an equal in the sense that she had shared something of the war experience with them and that they regarded her as on the same social class and intellectual standard as they. Certainly from an economic point of view Nathaniel is wrong to see her as his equal (if he does – I can’t even remember!) and obviously in terms of what was okay for women and men from society’s POV is not at all equal. But from memory, Nathaniel thought of her as his equal and respected her as his equal. And that was important to me and I think, to Sophie as well.
I liked, too, how Nathaniel came to realise that his viewing Sophie as a kind of “good egg” in that superficial way he had done before they became intimate did her a disservice. That, while he did think of her as an equal he didn’t think about her *all that deeply* and there was so much more to her than the surface.
As to Eden and Lavinia, I remember them both as being over the top and I delighted in their enemies-to-lovers romance. It felt like a lighter storyline to balance out the more serious and darker aspects of the main story.
The only thing I don’t love, in hindsight, is the portrayal of the queer character – although I haven’t read the book in a long time so I’m unable to be more specific. When I first read the book I was less socially aware and let that go through to the keeper but I expect I’d look at it differently now?
Still, I loved both romances and I didn’t feel Sophie unworthy of Nathaniel at all. I liked her very much. She seemed to me to be a woman who had been constantly beaten down and who had resolved to put on a brave face to the world. It took a lot for her to let Nathaniel in and for her to trust him with her heart and her person. I found it entirely understandable given her experience of marriage the first time around and her experience since then. I recall that the Four Horsemen had been somewhat “fair weather” friends until the book began, and had been quite cavalier about how she was actually doing. (Which is why I liked Nathaniel’s arc so much – he realised he’d been a bad friend to her before.)
Perhaps I’d take a different view of Sophie now – it’s been so long since I’ve read the book but I expect my interpretation will always be coloured by my very fond memories of my previous reading experience. I remember Sophie as pretty not plain so who knows how much my rose-coloured glasses were impacting me or how much my memory has failed me!
@Kaetrin: I’m glad you commented, because I haven’t read the book in at least a decade, but I liked it a lot when I read it and I didn’t see Sophie as not worthy enough for Nathaniel. Nathaniel I remember as being nice and well-meaning but kind of oblivious, and I enjoyed watching his growth (and that of the other men) when they realized they’d taken Sophie for granted and not really thought of her as a complete person. I thought Balogh did a good job of showing why she would be beaten down and lacking in self-confidence.
But then, I am also the only person I know (and probably on of the very few on the planet) who really likes the second book of this trilogy. Yes, they bicker and spar a lot and seem not to like each other, or at least to be Very Very Angry a lot of the time. I enjoyed watching Balogh work with that in what was otherwise a pretty traditional romance.
@Kaetrin & Sunita: I agree that Nathaniel starts out a bit oblivious and grows more aware of Sophie’s appeal and depth, and I too appreciated his journey. That’s a big part of why I wanted Sophie’s appeal and depth to become as apparent to me as they did to him. But I felt that we were told about them a lot more than we were shown them.
What did Sophie for Nathaniel do that was on par with all Nathaniel did for her? Did she even once fight for their love? She came across as a wet noodle and martyred herself even in the very last scene.
Yes, she had been beaten down, but to buy into that aspect of her characterization, I would have to buy into the backstory of SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS her gay husband vomiting after sex with her on their wedding night and for several nights afterward. As I said in the review, I found that far-fetched.
Throughout the book, Sophie also thinks about how if Nathaniel and his friends knew the truth about her, they would hate and despise her. I didn’t see anything in her backstory to substantiate that fear. Perhaps if she had done something wrong in the past, and had good reason to feel that way, I would have been more engaged by her character, but the so-called sins were all her husband’s, not hers.
That also made it hard to understand why, even after she realized that her blackmailer would never stop until he’d bled her dry, and would go on to bleed her family dry and then expose them all to scandal, because what he really wanted was revenge, she didn’t warn her family that this was going to happen, or tell Nathaniel the truth, or else immediately do something about Pinter herself. Instead she let Pinter dictate who could be her friend, even at the point where she knew there was no salvaging her family’s reputation.
As for the secondary characters, I didn’t see Lavinia as over the top, just as rebellious. Eden, yes, especially in the beginning. His initial rudeness bothered me.
With regard to the queer character, Kaetrin, I’m not sure if you mean Sophie’s husband or Pinter. I had issues with Sophie’s husband’s vomiting but other than that, I thought that for a book of its era, Irresistible was careful not to make Sophie’s husband into a villain, and to make it clear that most queer people are not villains, and that Pinter was warped independently of that (although Pinter did have sadisitic tendencies that were said to be sexual, and that didn’t work so well).
It is also stated by the main characters that they believe queer people are born that way and aren’t making a lifestyle choice. Considering the book was published in 1998, not long after it had been common to see a lot of gay arch-villains in historical romance, I felt okay with it on that score.
@Sunita: I liked all three books in this trilogy (so you know at least *one* other person who liked book 2!) but IIRC, I read Irresistible first and it has always been my favourite of the three.
@Janine: As to Sophie’s first husband and Pinter, I admit I don’t remember a lot. But I’ve criticised other books where the only gay characters are villains. I can’t remember all the details but Sophie’s husband didn’t *have* to get married at all and he certainly didn’t have to marry Sophie under false pretenses. That’s hardly noble. There were no other queer characters (that I remember) to balance out that representation and that’s what I expect would bother me now. I didn’t feel all that enamoured of Sophie’s husband. I thought he treated her very poorly. I do think it was good that the main characters acknowledged that being gay isn’t a choice so there’s that. For it’s time, I think it was fine but if I were to read it again now I expect I’d notice that the only gay characters were not good guys.
As to the rest – I really have to re-read the book to remember exactly why I had the reaction I did to Sophie. I don’t remember thinking she was at all weak or wet noodle-ish but perhaps I might take a different view on a re-read! :)
@Janine: If you see her as a wet noodle then that’s what she is for you, and since I haven’t read the book in forever I don’t have examples to hand to offer alternatives. But my recollection is also that it was her social position (generally and in terms of the way she was integrated into the military community) that made her feel inferior to these men she put on a pedestal, which her difficult marriage exacerbated. She looked up to the men and thought of them as out of her league socially and in other ways.
I didn’t have any more trouble believing that Sophie’s husband was made ill by sex with her than I have had with some of the other ways authors exaggerate real motivations and events. I’ve known gay men who described the idea of sex with a woman as making them feel ill, so this was prosaic license to me. There’s an Edith Layton historical romance with a gay character who can’t bring himself to have sex with his wife and it’s presented sympathetically, but it’s a key part of the storyline.
@Kaetrin: LOL. Good to hear.
@Kaetrin: I expect reading Irresistible first took some of the pleasure out of Indiscreet, since a big part of the latter is the slow uncovering of Catherine’s secret. And I wonder if Rex’s behavior in the first half would be tolerable to a reader aware of Catherine’s past going into that book for the first time.
Incidentally, on a Yahoo group I belong to, we once had a poll of favorite Balogh novel and out of the sixty or so books that were published at the time, Indiscreet was the top favorite. I was so glad when it finally came back into print.
@Kaetrin: I actually felt a little sorry for Sophie’s husband. True, he wasn’t a good husband but I didn’t feel that was deliberate. I didn’t see him as a villain. You’re right that there were no other queer characters who were more positively represented, but there was a reference by one of the Horsemen (I forget which) to having known others who were not villains.
I make some allowances for older books to have less enlightened views than today’s; I don’t read them as if they were brand new. If I did, I might find them more upsetting and less satisfying. I started reading romance back in the 1980s and have seen so much worse than this book in terms of queer villains that I was too relieved that it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been to be more upset by the absence of positive queer portrayals.
@Sunita: There was a class difference element but I don’t recall it being explicitly articulated as being the one of the reasons Sophie was in awe of the men. If it was, then their handsomeness and their bravery in battle stood out more to me. Sophie herself was born to the middle class but had married into the upper classes and her brother-in-law was a viscount. Perhaps it was part of the subtext that Sophie’s class was one of the reasons she felt lesser than the men, but I would have liked for that to be brought out more and also, I think it would be helpful to the story for Sophie’s brother and sister-in-law to be of the gentry rather than the aristocracy. Nathaniel himself was a baronet, IIRC.
Even putting the men on the pedestal doesn’t explain why she was so certain that to have her husband’s secret revealed would make them hate and despise her.
I could easily buy a queer character feeling ill, or even vomiting on one occasion after sex, but it sounded like there were multiple nights that went this way after Sophie married, and that seemed over the top to me. If he felt that revolted, would he even be able to perfom? And to perform repeatedly? Those were the kinds of questions that went through my mind when I read the book, which shows that I wasn’t entirely engaged.