JOINT REVIEW: Remember Love by Mary Balogh
Janine and I have reviewed the last few Mary Balogh books together so we decided to continue that tradition with the newest release. ~ Kaetrin
Content warning: Fatphobia.
Kaetrin: Remember Love is clearly the beginning of a new series for Balogh – the first chapters introduce a huge cast of characters (so many names!!). I counted a potential of at least 6 more novels in the Ravenswood series.
Devlin Ware is the eldest legitimate son of the Earl of Stratton, owner of Ravenswood Park in Boscombe. There is an older brother, Ben Ellis (and I want his story so much now) who is illegitimate and was born before the earl’s marriage to Devlin’s mother. He came to live with the Wares as a very young child and appears to have been largely raised with the Ware siblings. Ben is now the steward at Ravenswood and he and Devlin run the estates for the earl.
The book begins in 1808 when Devlin is 22. The earl is vibrant and entrepreneurial, great at socialising and always the life of the party. Devlin is… not. Devlin’s next younger brother, Nick, has inherited their father’s affable flair but Devlin is more contained and introverted. He’s a serious young man and very self-righteous, valuing duty and integrity and service to those he loves. He’s not a stick in the mud though and he’s also not jealous of his brother constantly outshining him.
Janine: I thought what happens later revealed him to be a bit of a stick in the mud, actually. There was a rigidness to him.
Kaetrin: I guess it depends on your definition of “stick in the mud”. He was pretty rigid about duty but he was not humorless or lacking in emotion.
Janine: Yes, you’re right.
Kaetrin: Devlin is in love with their neighbour Gwyneth Rhys, daughter of Sir Ifor and Lady Bronwyn Rhys who own a property which borders Ravenswood. Gwyneth is 18. Nick, at 19, is closer in age to her and they basically grew up together. They are great friends and spend a lot of time with each other. It seems everyone thinks there is more going on than friendship – even Devlin, but Nick does not feel that way and Gwyneth has been in love with Devlin, for ages. Gwyneth thinks Devlin doesn’t see her; Devlin thinks Gwyneth doesn’t like him. Fortunately, that bit is quickly sorted out.
Devlin is a little shorter than Nick and less handsome but Gwyneth thinks he’s the bees knees. She longs for his attention and finally gets her wish at the annual Ravenswood fete.
Unfortunately, Gwyneth and Devlin’s romance is not as simple as all that; something is revealed at the fete which rocks Devlin to his core. The whole foundation of his world is damaged by it.
Janine: Since it’s in the blurb, I feel comfortable quoting this part: “he discovered his whole world was an elaborate illusion, and […] publicly called his family to account for it.”
Kaetrin: He reacts impetuously and publicly which causes a scandal and he is banished from Ravenswood. (I still do not have a good explanation on why that was necessary by the way. The one small conversation with the countess later in the book had insufficient detail for my liking.)
The story then picks up again in 1814. Devlin left Ravenswood and joined the military. Having spent 6 years fighting Napoleon, the wars are now over and he can no longer put off his duty. He was notified 2 years earlier that the earl had died and he had inherited the title. He does not want to go back to Ravenswood but he will do his duty. Duty is what has kept him going for the last 6 years. He has walled himself off from emotion and he no longer believes in or trusts love.
What Devlin finds at Ravenswood when he returns shocks him. His vivacious younger sister Philippa who is now aged 21 is a shadow of her former self. His younger brother, Owen, has all grown up and is about to leave for Oxford. Nick, having always planned to go into the military, is in Paris with his cavalry regiment. The baby of the family is Stephanie but she is now 15 and not a baby anymore. His mother is no longer the sparkling woman he remembers. She is quiet, composed and cold. She greets him as “Stratton” rather then “Devlin”. He calls her “mother” rather than “mama”. Their relationship is very strained.
Janine: His mother’s actions here didn’t square with the information in the conversation you mentioned earlier, I feel.
Kaetrin: No, they didn’t. *frowny face*
Ben had left Ravenswood with Devlin all those years ago for reasons.
Janine: This was connected to Devlin’s actions and I felt it was too good to be true for Ben not to hold that against Devlin even a little.
Kaetrin: Very convenient wasn’t it?
He has returned to Ravenswood with Devlin, a widower with a baby daughter, Joy.
Gwyneth is now 24 and as yet unmarried. She tried to fall in love or at least get close to it, with other suitors. She has had many very respectable offers of marriage but she could not say yes.
My favourite of Mary Balogh’s books is Heartless. There are some similarities to that book and this one. Like Devlin, Luke had been exiled from his family and returned home to do his duty after the death of his father. There is also a child called Joy (with the same kind of allusions of the emotion peppered throughout the story). Luke had favourite a sister who was deaf and he was extremely protective of her. Devlin has a favourite sister, Stephanie. Stephanie is not disabled – even though it is treated in the book as if she has a kind of disability – she is described as overweight. (More on this in a bit.)
Janine: I noticed a few similarities to Heartless too, and also some (spoilery, so I won’t describe them) similarities to Balogh’s most recent book, Someone Perfect.
Characterization-wise, Devlin reminded me a bit of Gil from Someone to Honor—both are dour, scarred and tough military officers whose smiles are rare.
Kaetrin: Yes, I noted that too but my connection to Heartless is stronger. I think Devlin is much softer than Gil though.
Janine: Agreed, and I liked Gil much better.
Kaetrin: Yes, me too.
Getting back to that thing I said I would talk about more… Oh dear. The fatphobia was strong in this book. I disliked that it was a thing at all. Stephanie and her “baby fat” and comments that she was not “a glutton”. There is a reference to some people just being bigger than others and it not being about what they eat or them being lazy but the whole thing was pretty distasteful.
Janine: I was also troubled by the way Stephanie’s size was handled. Had the book started when Stephanie was fifteen or so and had she had a governess who hounded her about her eating or fatness, I might have been okay with some of it. Society is disposed to judge women and girls based on their size—horrible but a fact. From an #ownvoices perspective on this issue, I feel a lot of us have internalized body shame and it takes some effort to shed it. Life experience can help, and I think there’s a place for examining that.
However, Stephanie was only nine in the 1808 section and yet she focused a lot on whether she would ever be slender enough to snag a husband. I don’t believe many nine-year-olds think in these terms unless they (or maybe a family member) have or are developing an eating disorder. Snagging a man when you are grown up isn’t a priority at age nine.
I don’t categorically object to reading about a child developing a mental health issue but it’s a delicate topic and should be handled sensitively. Without more context it was disturbing to see a child worry about catching a husband. It made me feel that the author was prioritizing setting up future books over careful handling.
Kaetrin: There were, arguably, some things that weren’t terrible about the representation but overall it left a sour taste in my mouth. I’ve been listening to the Maintenance Phase podcast and my sensitivities to fatphobia and the pernicious ways it creeps in are perhaps more dialled up as a result (though I don’t think that’s a bad thing.)
The biggest similarity with Heartless is that both male leads return to their homes walled off emotionally and are determined not to love. They will do their duty and they will show respect but they will not love. (And of course, they fail dismally at it.)
I can’t tell how much of my enjoyment of Remember Love harks back to my deep and abiding love for Heartless but I’m certain at least some of it did. Maybe even a lot.
There are differences too of course; they are not the same book. The conflict here is all around Devlin’s reaction to [redacted] 6 years earlier and his reaction to having been banished from his home, with more than a little war trauma added into the mix.
The 1808 section of the book is close to half of it. There is a lot of extraneous scene-setting, much of which was arguably not necessary.
Janine: The book begins with pages and pages of description of Devlin’s family’s house and grounds, and then the fete begins and we have pages more of names, descriptions, and occupations of the various guests…. I haven’t read such a boring beginning since the mind-numbingly detailed description of Jessica’s equipage in Someone to Romance.
Kaetrin: There were So. Many. People!
There wasn’t loads of time for anything very complicated to be dealt with in the 1814 section.
Janine: Agreed.
Kaetrin: I liked Gwyneth very much. I liked her bravery and her determination and her willingness to love Devlin regardless. I liked how she called Devlin on his nonsense and accepted him for who he was now anyway.
Janine: I liked all that too. Her Welsh background, harp playing, and wild child girlhood were also nice touches. And a dilemma she faced with regard to someone held my attention.
How did you feel about Devlin? I liked him somewhat better after he returned because he was more open to examining the past. I also thought his later dourness combined with the power with which he took charge made him more interesting. But he’ll never be one of my favorite Balogh heroes.
Kaetrin: Well, he was no Luke. But I liked his early sensitivity and I liked that his actions are neither lauded not pilloried. Rather, there is some nuance, even from himself, as to what happened and whether it was the right thing to do or not. And I liked that he was devoted to Gwyneth.
A sure sign I’m enjoying a book is that I get impatient to read and I was here. When I was reading I was eager to continue and reluctant to put the book down. But in hindsight there isn’t a lot to the plot, really.
Apart from the [redacted] there are hints about what the other siblings went through after Devlin and Ben left (with Nick leaving for the military as previously planned very shortly after) and there is a really nice egalitarianism about Devlin’s dealings with people and his understanding of his privilege.
Janine:
Spoiler: Show
I was annoyed by the way the examination of who it was who acted wrongly (Devlin or the person he called to account) proceeded. Early on there was ambiguity and ambivalence in some characters’ eyes, but as the book progressed, more and more people (and those who mattered most) said that Devlin had done the right thing.
I didn’t like the question of who was to blame. Two people can both be in the wrong even when they are on opposite sides of an issue, and I wasn’t ready to let Devlin off the hook just because someone else was even more in the wrong.
Kaetrin: I thought there was a fair amount of nuance overall to that discussion and I think the end result was a bit of “the victor writes history” but I didn’t end up thinking that Devlin’s method was right. In fact, I think there was a better path but he was too self-righteous to see it.
Janine: There was certainly nuance in the middle of the book and I agree with you on there being a better path. But I was annoyed by the binary nature of the question. The other party’s actions were very obviously wrong and had no justification. It would have been more mature for Devlin to only inquire about how badly his actions impacted the those who were hurt (so he could begin to make amends for his part of it), or to make a progression from self-blame to self-forgiveness.
Spoiler: Show
Kaetrin: The first part was too long and the second part was not long enough. I would have liked more time spent with Gwyneth and Devlin. I thought Devlin recovered his emotions very quickly (unlike Luke in Heartless).
Janine: Yes, the pacing felt off. I wanted more of a glow to the happy ending, too, if that makes sense.
Kaetrin: I did not like the way Stephanie’s weight was a thing in the book at all.
Having said all that, I gobbled the book down and enjoyed the reading experience. Adding that all together, it brings me to a B.
Janine: I liked it a lot less. It’s a C- for me.
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I just glanced at your comments, Kaetrin and Janine, as I’d like to read this book. Now waiting for the library’s copy to arrive.
I fell asleep reading those first few chapters. Literally. It got better, but the end was so abrupt…
@Kareni: Come back and tell us what you think?
@Claudia: Oh yeah…
I am a bit more than half way into this, and I am finding (a) that Devlin’s behavior in 1808 would have been more believable to me if he had been in his teens rather than his early twenties, and (b) he would have been more believable as a middle class Victorian rather than a Regency aristocrat.
@Kareni: Yes, please do tell us, Kareni.
@Claudia: Those first few chapters really were a good sleep aid. And I agree on the ending too.
@Etv13: Good points both. And honestly I think the book would have been better if Devlin has been eighteen in the opening chapters for other reasons too, like the emotional impact on him and Gwyneth. Although was eighteen old enough to serve in the military in the Regency era? If not, that may have been why Balogh made him older. Still–wasn’t Nick nineteen or twenty? It makes no sense.
I would love to hear from you after you finish, about some of the stuff I have in the hidden spoilers–places where I thought things made no sense (you can post a spoiler warning at the top of your comment and I’ll reply likewise, if you like).
@Etv13: Agree!
Okay, so I’ve read the whole thing, and I really think it might have worked better as a contemporary. The whole setup and many of the attitudes feel so anachronistic.
SPoILER ALERT
Even down to the white wedding dress.
Maybe it could have been set in the early 2000s and Devlin could have run off to fight in Afghanistan. (I loved it in Sherlock that Dr. Watson was wounded in Afghanistan, just like in the original.).
@Janine: I too did not understand why he had to be sent away. That seemed like a recipe to make the scandal worse, not better. Honestly, I think it’s just there to make the plot work. In fact, I think a lot of the book is there just to set up this very melodramatic situation that doesn’t really flow all that organically from the characters and (especially) the period. I will repeat that I just don’t buy Regency aristocrats getting all bent out of shape over an earl’s infidelity. I especially don’t buy that marquis calling Pippa “soiled goods.” (Unless maybe the earl had had an affair with the marquis’s mother?). Do you think he is going to end up being Pippa;s love interest?
I am also not buying the waltzing blacksmith’s daughter and, more broadly, the very egalitarian attitudes all of the Wares display toward the people from the village. Again, this would work better in a book set in the 21st century.
I did really like Gwyneth and her family. They were sort of the real deal loving happy family that the senior Wares were only pretending to be. I wish there were a pronunciation guide, though. I’m pretty sure a Welsh “f” is pronounced like ‘v”, but is it Eevor? Eyevor? I could never settle.
Digging a little deeper into the situation between Devlin (and since the door of my skepticism has been opened, I am wondering about the appropriateness of that name — isn’t it Irish? There was a Cameron I’m wondering about, too) and his father: I started to say I would have had no problem with Devlin confronting his father, if he had done it in private. I think I am still there, but I have some doubts about whether he really has standing to do so. Is his parents’ relationship really any of his business? I think I am coming down on the side of yes, to the extent he discussed it privately with his parents, but no, it was definitely wrong of him to make a huge public scene that was bound to humiliate his mother and cause trouble for his siblings. I am definitely NOT on the side of truth uber alles. There are countervailing concerns of tact and privacy and not self-righteously destroying your family. As the fortune-teller said, it was a destructive truth. I don’t think I agree that it was a corrosive lie, however. Everyone seemed to be pretty happy — and if she wasn’t, it should have been up to the Countess to do something about it.
Last thing I am going to say in this comment (because I have really rattle don too long): Why are romance novel fortune-tellers always so accurate? I guess this is just some sort of convention, but why? What is the purpose of it? Can romance novelists think of no better way to do foreshadowing?
@Etv13: I love your comment, thank you so much for it.
I am much more conversant in the late Victorian. I know many things were not the same in the Regency but some things were, and I love to hear about the differences, so I really enjoyed your comment.
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
Re the white wedding dress—I wonder when that started? I know that for at least a portion of the Victorian era previously unmarried women wore white wedding dresses (and orange blossoms in their hair) but these things signified maidenhood. Widows could not wear white—light blue, lavender and gray were all colors that were worn by widows. Tell me more about Regency wedding dresses, I’m very curious.
Yes, it would have worked better as a contemporary.
Agreed, the aristocrats would not have cared about the father’s unfaithfulness. Infidelity among the upper classes was not uncommon, and the same holds true for open marriages.
However, Devlin’s father went beyond that. He brought his kept woman into his small, close-knit community, and worse, into his house during a social event. He was going to have sex with her in the open, not far from the house. That would have been a scandal among the aristocracy, I’m pretty certain. Particularly the last, if they’d been caught by someone outside the family. Supposing that it had been a young unmarried woman of “good” family? Just the possibility that it could have been would have made it a scandal.
This being the case, I feel that Devlin had ample reason to take this up with his father. Not with his mother, though, and certainly not to announce it to the world. My biggest eye roller in the book was when Pippa exclaimed that he did the right thing and this needed to be brought out in the open. Why??? It’s not like Devlin’s mother, even had she been ignorant of the infidelities, could have divorced his father and moved on with her life. That would have been an even worse scandal and hurt her (and the children) more. So why is bringing it up in the open fine thing? And why would Pippa, who was so damaged by what happened, say so? It read like a ploy to absolve Devlin.
Would it have been a bad enough scandal for the marquis to call Pippa soiled goods? I doubt it very much. It was a cruel thing for him to say and particularly to friends who might spread rumors about her. That right there might have been enough to ruin her. I doubt he will be the hero of her book but I did consider it a small possibility.
With regard to the gathering and waltzing with the blacksmith’s daughter etc. I thought it probably wasn’t a thing but wasn’t confident enough to say so because of servants’ balls, which were a thing in the Victorian era. They were held at Christmastime and it was a time when the staff celebrated with their employers. This included earls dancing with housemaids etc. Obviously this was an exception but I wasn’t confident enough that it was the only one to say so in the review. I’m almost sure you’re right, though.
When I was reading the book, I looked up the pronunciation of Ifor online. Answers differed but I trust this BBC site best:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/livinginwales/sites/howdoisay/names/index.shtml?i
Especially since it was matched by this Welsh letter pronunciation guide:
https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/welsh-pronunciation
The other sites I looked at didn’t specify that the pronunciations they gave were Welsh.
I did roll my eyes at Cameron a bit. Balogh has often used names I’ve looked askance at. For example the heroine of Dark Angel, who was a member of the aristocracy or at least the gentry, was called Jennifer.
I agree that Devlin should not have gone public with his father’s infidelity. I think there was some indication that he may not have been thinking clearly when he did it because of his shock, but this would have worked better if he’d been only eighteen or so. It was irresponsible. It made the lives of everyone in his family harder (including, no matter what she said to the contrary, Pippa’s) and was not helpful to anyone. His mother was humiliated which would probably have resulted in tension in his parents’ marriage and the younger kids had no way to avoid being there for that. Not to mention that Devlin and Ben were absent from their lives.
Devlin’s actions brought on a lot of unnecessary pain which is why it annoyed me so much that the question that was asked over and over was who was at fault, Devlin or his father. They were both at fault. This question seemed like Balogh’s (and perhaps even Devlin’s) way of deflecting the responsibility from Devlin. As though if his father is at fault, Devlin can be let off the hook. No! He cannot. And I would have liked him much better if he had put on his big boy underwear and taken responsibility for his part of it.
Did this bother you (or anyone else here), or was I the only one?
Re fortune tellers. I like that actually. It gives me a nice moment of Twilight Zone pleasure. However, it has been used enough to be a bit cliched by now.
Do you feel that Balogh’s recent books have been more anachronistic than her earlier ones? I do, and I hope this trend doesn’t continue.
@Janine:
White wedding dresses were not absolutely unheard of, but they didn’t really take off until 1840, when Queen Victoria wore a white dress when she married Prince Albert. Before that, brides (even rich ones) tended to wear dresses they could wear again. According to one site I looked at, brown and red were popular colors in the early 19th century.
Thanks for the linked to the Welsh pronunciation guides. There’s a great line in The Sugared Game where Will Darling tells his friend Maisie Jones, talking about Welsh spelling, “You put two l’s in everything and you don’t pronounce any of them.”
SPOILER ALERT
Even if Devlin’s mother wanted to divorce her husband, I don’t think she could have in that era. I don’t think divorce was available to women on the basis of infidelity alone — there had to e an added factor, like cruelty. (And I don’t think by cruelty they meant ‘flaunting your mistress at a village fete.’). I agree that there was an element of recklessness in the earl’s behavior that, aside from the infidelity, would have justified Devlin’s taking the matter up with him in private. But Devlin’s response wasn’t about that. HE caused a huge scandal himself because he was so thrown for a loop by the discovery that his father wasn’t the ideal husband he’d allowed his kids to believe he was. As we’ve both said before, that would make a lot more sense if Devlin were a good bit younger, not a guy who’d gone to Oxford with a lot of upper class Regency Englishmen. (He must have gone to school somewhere, too — Owen did — and that likely would have been a public school with a lot of upper-class classmates too.). And it seemed that Devlin ALSO blamed his mother for perpetuating the deception. There’s a point where he says to Gwyneth something like, “Are you defending my mother?” Which suggests to me that he feels she is partially to blame, too. That just seems nutty to me. What the hell was his mother supposed to do but put a good face on things and raise her children in the happiest home possible?
I don’t know if Balogh has gotten more anachronistic over time. I discovered her after she already had a substantial backlist and read her books way out of publication order. Also, it may just be that I have gotten crankier as I’ve gotten older and I notice things more. I’ve always been annoyed by the ones where the hero beat up the villain and a bunch of aristocrats egged him on. That (a) seemed to be an action unworthy of a hero, however much the villain may have had it coming, and (b) seemed like an unrealistic portrayal of aristocratic behavior (not that they they were condoning violence, but that they agreed the villain had it coming , e.g., in No Man’s Mistress (I THiNK that’s the right title; it was the first Balogh I read, and it was a long time ago now). I do think that many of the characters in this book had attitudes and outlooks that are consistent with our attitudes now, and not with the attitudes of the early nineteenth century. Notably here, ideas about the way marriages are supposed to work, but also class attitudes as well. I also think her books have gotten more sentimental, and they’ve had, especially in the Westcott books, an increasing emphasis on extended family. That doesn’t express what I mean very clearly. What I am getting at is that in the Westcott books, and at the beginning of Remember Love, there are these large gatherings where we’re told that Uncle Joe Bleau the Earl of Diadem and his wife Aunt Adeline and their four children ranging in age from 3 months to 47 years came, and the marchioness’s widowed sister-in-law the Dowager Countess of Mawkish and her son Abner, Earl of Mawkish [god forbid they should ever just be “Lady Mawkish” or “Lord Mawkish”] and his wife and their infant son was there as well, and on and on and on. I find that gets old really really fast. I didn’t find it slow, as some of the commenters here seem to have done because (a) I skimmed through it, and (b) I have been reading House of Shattered Wings, which while well-written is extremely dense, and this seemed zippy by comparison.
I’ve been pretty critical above, but I do keep reading Balogh books, and I even paid a price for it I usually only pay for Murderbot novellas and I’ll probably do the same next time. So obviously there’s something there that draws me to these books, though damned if I know what it is. They nearly always make me cry, and this one was no exception.
I don’t actually mind the accurate fortune-telling — I just think it’s a little weird that fortune-tellers appear so often and are nearly always proven accurate. And if you want to see some very skillfully done foreshadowing that you won’t even recognize until you’ve read the whole book, read The Sugared Game.
@Etv13: Thanks, that makes perfect sense, since Queen Victoria and Prince Albert started so many trends (Christmas trees, for one thing–they weren’t common in England before Victoria’s reign).
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
Good point re. divorce. Devlin’s blaming for his mother really pissed me off too, and was one of the reasons I didn’t love him. Not only was it nutty (as you say) it came across as extremely judgmental. It was his tendency to judge and get on his high horse that made me view him as a stick in the mud despite his not being humorless or lacking in emotion as Kaetrin pointed out. The more I think about this book, the less I like Devlin. He wasn’t a bad person but he was really immature and unfair to others.
W/r/t Balogh and anachronisms, well, I don’t know if it’s the case, but I’ve noticed more anachronisms in the language. And you’re right, certain kinds of anachronisms have always been there, such as the crowding around a fist fight or whatever to cheer the hero on. But she did used to have duels or references to duels also, and I haven’t seen those much in recent years. I started reading her in the late 1990s, and somewhere in the 2000s things started sliding in this sense. Contrast Catherine’s situation in Indiscreet with Anne’s situation in the Simply series. I don’t want to say too much about Catherine because some of it is a spoiler, but in the Simply series Anne had son that she’d borne out of wedlock and was nevertheless a teacher at a girls’ school!
This was also the series where the crowds of families/friends started. See Jayne’s review of the book, where she mentions the “felicity and fecundity” of the characters:
https://dearauthor.com/ebooks/simply-love-by-mary-balogh/
Jayne and I both quit Balogh with this book but in my case I got back to her oeuvre ten years later. Jayne I think is still avoiding her whereas at one time she was one of the authors whose books she read regularly.
I forgot to add–I find her books generally easy to get sucked into, and I almost always cry as well. I think she has more emotional acuity than many other authors in the genre. Social attitudes notwithstanding, her characters react believably to the personal situations they find themselves in. And she has a way of making me feel some of those reactions more intensely than many other authors do.
Re fortune tellers–well, I think their predictions are accurate because they are meant to give readers that Twilight Zone jolt. Not just foreshadowing but a sense of inevitability–that these are destinies the characters can’t evade. If they were inaccurate there would be no point to including them at all.
PS--I am not going to read The Sugared Game or any KJ Charles book because another author, a friend of hers, whipped up her and his own fans into a froth over what amounted to a trigger warning for Think of England by one of our reviewers, their fans then had a pillorying fest on Goodreads where they called the reviewer a heinous cow, and neither Charles nor the other author (whom I also will never read) called them off (in fact author #2 doubled down). The reviewer took her personal blog and Twitter account to private, and I think another person they attacked did so as well.
I’ve heard much good of Charles’ books and they may be sublime, but there are plenty of great books in the world whose authors’ fans haven’t lashed out at friends of mine.
Counterpoint re anachronisms: I think modern readers expect a modern sensibility. It’s a fine balance I suppose but an author will be pilloried if the characters are accurate but unrelatable.
(Added to that, I mostly don’t pick up anachronisms anyway. They have to be pretty egregious for me to notice and probably more so for me to care.)
I’m an unashamed Balogh fangirl. It’s not that I don’t see the flaws – I do. Some things she is just not good at. But there are many things she’s exceptional at and that’s why I keep reading her. Even her “bad” books are pretty good for me. And yes, I cried in this one too!
This is not one of her better books but like I said in the review, I had an inclination to enjoy it because of Heartless and no doubt that helped me.
@Janine:
I did read her all the time. I even bought her books new. I have stopped reading her new books but occasionally have gone back and read her older trad regencies which I paid a fortune to buy used before the digital age.
@Janine: it’s a shame about Charles. Her books are some of my absolute favorites. I generally try to avoid knowing much about the writers I enjoy. Patrick O’Brian was apparently horrible to his first wife and their child, and a biography of Georgette Heyer put me completely off her books for about ten years — and I really love several of her books and have since I was eleven.
I read one or two of the Simply books, and disliked them so much I didn’t read the others. I also REALLY disliked one of the Web books, and I will probably never reread the Mistress books either. But there are several I enjoyed enough to reread, and I do keep buying the new ones. How many I will reread is another matter.
@Kaetrin: You’re right about the modern sensibility thing but I feel she could have maintained some of that without, for example, having Devlin be harsh on his mother for putting up with his father’s behavior. And some of her recent anachronisms such as her use of anachronistic vocabulary are utterly unnecessary. There is usually another way to say something that is in keeping with the time period. I understand refraining from period language if it’s offensive (sometimes it is), but in many cases there are perfectly inoffensive options in period language that she’s not choosing to use. Authors today have gotten lazy about using their thesauruses.
I completely agree that Balogh is one of the better authors of historical romance out there and that even her weaker books are usually worth reading. There are only a few authors of historical romance whose books I still read regularly and Balogh is one of them. But one of the reasons for that is that her books are less anachronistic than many! So I don’t want to see this change.
@Jayne: Recs, please! Which of her older books do you still reread? I haven’t caught up on all her Signet books yet.
I have to wonder: what is the appeal of a deeply anachronistic “historical”? Wouldn’t it be better to simply write a contemporary if you don’t want to come to grips in any way with the worldviews of the past?
@Etv13: Her books have been recommended to me many times. I’ve been put off Georgette Heyer for years. I try to avoid learning personal things about authors too, especially these days. But this particular controversy found me when I was minding my own business. The review that started it all ran here, and the trigger warning was for anti-semitic slurs. The person who mentioned it was thinking of me (as well as I imagine others). So there was really no way for me to avoid learning about it.
@Etv13: Yes. The second Simply book wasn’t good for other reasons besides just the ones I mentioned. I only read the first Mistress book and it was okay, but I’ve heard the second is to be avoided. I never got around to the Web books but I did hear that they don’t hold up well. Some of her other older books are very good, though.
@Etv13: I think maybe it’s the fantasy aspect—the fact that the books take them away from their normal lives in the way that contemporaries don’t. I’ve also always felt that the Cinderella aspect of many romances is closer to the fore in historicals. A duke or an earl is closer to prince than a CEO is.
@Janine @12:59: There still are dukes and earls, though, and I think some of them are even still rich, so it could be done. Lots of the same sorts of plots would work, too. The impoverished nobleman who needs to marry an heiress, for example. Or you could write straight up fantasy and create the world and attitudes you wanted (and the clothes and titles and so forth) custom. And speaking of fantasy, I think that may be what the accurate fortune-telling is about. It takes the book another step further from the real world.
Re Charles, I’m not going to try to talk you into reading her. Loyalty to friends and co-bloggers is a good thing, and, as you say, there are plenty of good books in the world. But I really do love her books and I’m sorry that a nasty incident should have cast a shadow over them. I think I signed up for Goodreads many years ago, but I never really used it, and that sounds like maybe it was just as well.
@Etv13: Oh yes, I agree. I didn’t articulate that well. I think there are readers who don’t want some kinds of historical social attitudes in their books. For example they want aristocratic virginal heroines to have one night stands. So I’m theorizing that for those readers, that fantasy is liberating or fun, but at the same time they want that “Cinderella and her prince” feel that historical romances can provide for them but contemporaries generally can’t, at least not to the same degree (hence the popularity of dukes). And the modern attitude (to use shorthand, because some people would have been ahead of their time in earlier periods, though society overall would not have) historical romance satisfies that need.
Generally speaking, I prefer my historicals to be imbued with some of what I call historical feel, which is not to say completely free of anachronisms (no book can be). But for me believability matters more than it does to some readers, I think. But, you asked what the appeal of the deeply anachronistic historical is, and the above is my theory.
(Obviously it doesn’t apply to everyone who enjoys these books, but I think it does apply to many.)
@Claudia: the beginning was the worst
As time goes on I like this book less and less. I think I should have given it a C/C+.