REVIEW: The Game and the Governess by Kate Noble
Dear Ms. Noble,
An egotistical hero doesn’t usually spark my interest. I didn’t need another narcissistic Prince Charming. Seen it all a million times, and my immediate reaction is: Meh. However, the success of an overused archetype is due to an author’s treatment of it. The way you painted Ned in words, you made him vulnerable in his egotism, and that is why it worked.
His friends harbored a veiled resentment for him, believing he was only well-received because of his title. His exasperation at that thought was tangible. He wasn’t naive enough to think that everyone would like him to the same degree if he were lower class, but he was genuinely confident of his appeal as a good friend and person.
“And by the by, I resent the implication that I am nothing more than my title.”
“Now, Ashby, he didn’t say that,” Rhys began, but Turner strangely kept silent.
“Yes he did. He said that life is different for an earl than it is for a secretary. And while that is true, it implies that any good thing, any bit of luck I may have had in my life, is incumbent upon the fact that I inherited an earldom. And any lack of happiness Turner suffers from is incumbent upon his recent bad luck. Whereas the reverse is true. He is serious and unsmiling, thus he has bad luck. With his mill, with women, with life. I am in general of a good nature and I have good luck. It has very little to do with my title. It has to do with who I am.”
I could tell he was in for a kick in the pants when he proposed the swap with his secretary. I admit: I am a huge fan of the nobleman-in-disguise trope. From my first favorite, Man of My Dreams by Johanna Lindsey (not a great novel, but cherished in my memories), I have been an absolute sucker for this concept. It gets me almost every time, and it got me here.
Ned is privileged, and knows he is, but he’s not fake. He is a real person (insofar as a fictional man can be called real) who’s very aware he’s afforded attention and luxuries by virtue of his title, and he has the audacity to think he’d do well even without that title.
When his role is reversed with his secretary, people do not treat him well, and the marvelous thing is that he doesn’t get upset with them. He forgives them immediately and shrugs and tries again. He’s so amiable that I found myself charmed by him, very suddenly and surprisingly. Of course, he got his comeuppance on a number of occasions, and acted with blindingly foolish assurance of his own appeal, and he was immediately and repeatedly called out on it. Until then, he never truly comprehended the liberties he could take as a nobleman that no one would dare take as an untitled secretary. It was a rude awakening but he managed it well after admitting how stupid and disrespectful he’d been. The appeal for me was in the fact he was willing to apologize and admit fault. We need more heroes who accept defeat with grace.
I also enjoyed his backstory. Ned didn’t join the world of the nobility until he was nearly a teenager, when his uncle’s heir died. He and his mother lived in neither comfort nor privilege. He hauled water from the well like any normal citizen. It wasn’t something he talked about, really ever, but I think his formative years made a huge impact on his personality. This is why, although he’s admittedly egotistical, he was never insufferable. He was grounded in the reality of his former upbringing. I loved him.
And I loved Phoebe, our heroine, as well. In her youth, she wrote the earl a furious letter, saying in no uncertain terms that he was to blame for her father’s death. It’s an impassioned, pained letter with zero subtlety. A genteel lady with the nerve to damn a nobleman to hell in a personal letter? I’m so there.
But even better, we see her years later, when she’s rid herself of that anger. I could see how she matured and I liked the result. She just wanted to disappear and be unnoticed by the earl. She hadn’t forgiven him, but she no longer wanted to make him suffer for the pride he maintained that inadvertently ruined her father. Thank goodness for heroines who reflect on their actions and who do what’s right for their own mental health from the get-go. The tension of their history is still palpable without any need for a silly vendetta.
At first, she didn’t give this jumped-up secretary a moment’s notice, but he kept coming back. He obviously liked her from the start, and the inevitable happened: she started to like him back, just as I liked him. They fell in love so naturally.
No matter what, his life would have led to this moment. If he had stayed in the village and never been made the old earl’s heir, they would have met here. He would have owned his mother’s cottage, had some sort of profession, and he would have known Phoebe Baker as the governess of the Widcoate children. They would have danced here.
Or, if he had still been the earl, but a better one–one who had caught Mr. Sharp and prevented him from ever meeting her father, they would have met in London, during her season. He and the light-haired girl with dimples and laughing eyes would have danced at Almack’s, or in some other elegant ballroom.
The main antagonist was Mr. Turner. If I met him in real life, I would slap his face. He started as Ned’s best friend and destroyed their friendship because he needed to win the bet, because his entire family’s livelihood was riding on it. Okay, so your whole fictional family depends on the mill, but does that mean you become a complete bastard? Why not just be honest and let Ned know the great significance of the mill in your life, rather than play this silly game and betray the friend who has helped you for years?
Ned’s fatal flaw was that he did not understand how much the mill meant to Mr. Turner. He trusted in him as his friend and faithful secretary, never imagining how far Mr. Turner was willing to go in order to save his family’s mill; how malicious and unethical he would turn. One action of his near the end of the novel upset me so much that I could barely enjoy the lovely subsequent scene with our hero and heroine. I was angry at both you as an author and at Mr. Turner, that swine. But then I reminded myself that it would be okay, that they would love each other sincerely and that there would be a happy ending, and I was able to focus.
There were a number of things that frustrated me about the book: the whodunit villain in the end with flimsy reasons, the ruthless actions of an unlikable antagonist (but then, I suppose he’s supposed to antagonize), and the general way things seemed rushed near the climax. The timing could have been better for many things, with a more paced redemption and reconciliation.
But I really, truly enjoyed this book. I would give it a B except for the fact that I read it all in one go, in a few hours’ time, and that makes it a B+ for me. I couldn’t put it down. I had a lot of fun reading it. I loved the hero and heroine both, especially the hero, who had a lot of room to improve and was just so relentlessly optimistic the whole way through that I couldn’t help but appreciate who he was as a character and person. I’d fall in love with him, too, and he wouldn’t have to be an earl.
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According to Amazon, the paperback version of this book is $21.00?
Is it just me, or does that seem a bit steep?
Most of the paperbacks I look at are in a real store and cost about $8.00.
@Evelyn Alexie: The book retails for $7.99 and Amazon is selling it for $7.19. There is a second record for the paperback (lacking the ISBN and other identifying information of the main record), and that’s the one that’s priced at $21, but it’s being sold by a second party seller, who can set whatever price he or she desires.
This review shows how differently two readers can read a book! I liked this one too, and gave it a B, but I saw it as more of a personal growth story for Ned. And while I didn’t like John, and don’t want to make any excuses for his actions late in the book, I didn’t see him as an outright villain.
I don’t agree that Ned didn’t understand how much the family mill meant to John. I thought Ned started out conveniently blinding himself to the many privileges he had and John did not have, but using that power when it suited him. He could have helped John save his famiily’s mill, but he instead used John’s need of the money to rope John into serving him in the position of secretary. And then he pretended they were still friends, when in fact he’d made them into employer and employee, which was not what John had wanted or come to him for.
I liked that Ned got a rude awakening when he switched positions with John. It’s true, he knew that some people fawned over him because he was an earl and not because of his much vaunted luck, but he didn’t want to admit the extent of it. He also didn’t want to admit how differently he’d seen what happened in the battle during the war from what had actually happened. He was a bit self-deluded, and when his bubble started to puncture, it made him start reevaluating his situation.
He became a better person when that happened and when he got to know Phoebe–and though I came to like him, and to like them as a couple, she was the one I loved. To me she was the optimist of the story, the character who, when faced with a very tough situation, made lemonade from her lemons and found something to laugh about in every day, even if it was a bad day, despite the fact that her employer would not even allow her to smile in public.
I think that some of what you saw as Ned’s amiability I saw as irony. He said “Brilliant! Marvelous!” a lot–but half the time he was gritting his teeth as he said it. I liked that a lot actually–because it was part of his growth process to suffer a little and it was used to good comedic effect. His disposition got sunnier as he fell in love with Phoebe but it’s hard to say how much of that was natural optimism and how much the good feelings that came with being loved for himself and not for his position.
You’re right though that he accepted he had been in the wrong in a couple of situations with good grace. But they were such that if he hadn’t done so he would have come across as insufferable.
I had an interesting discussion with Kaetrin when I reviewed the book– she didn’t like it at (or Ned) at all. One of the reasons I liked the book as much as I did was that it treated aristocratic privilege much differently than most romances do. It showed how privilege can blind and spoil, instead of treating it as the marker of a heroic or sexy character.
I love historicals, and after reading your review and @Janine’s take, I can’t wait to pick this one up. Thanks!
@Janine: yup – pretty much I hated John and Ned both and wished they’d be miserable together for the rest of their long lonely lives. Not that I’m bitter or anything…
I had more sympathy for John after the war story he told, and while I agree that he betrayed his friendship with Ned, I still found him an engaging antagonist. This book has a conversation about status and position and worthiness, and I couldn’t quite accept that Ms Noble’s takeaway was that the poor, untitled man was the complete villain. Just very deeply flawed.
And I was assuming that John and the Doctor would each get their own books, which means John has to be redeemable. The problem with John as a hero is the shady Countess as a heroine: she’s a bit inconsistent in this book, and I’m over the Widcoates.
@Dianna: I liked Eliza. She and John will get their own book which should be interesting; I read that the title is The Lie and the Lady.