REVIEW: Someone to Care by Mary Balogh
Dear Ms. Balogh,
Let me begin by stating that I am leaving Someone to Care ungraded. I enjoyed the first 79% of this novel tremendously and was thinking this was the best new Mary Balogh book I had read in ages. Then, at the 80% mark, something was revealed that threw me for a loop. It involves a spoiler (one I have hidden), a potentially triggering one that disturbed me. I don’t know how to reconcile my enjoyment and uneasiness to a grade; therefore, there will not be a grade on this review.
Marcel Lamarr, Marquess of Dorchester, is stranded at a remote country inn with his brother André when a horseshoe comes loose on one of his carriage horses, leaving him at loose ends. Not that the widowed, thirty-nine year old Marcel has led a life of industry. For the past sixteen years, he has avoided his responsibilities, which are many, and include his son and daughter, Bertrand and Estelle, seventeen-year-old twins.
There is almost nothing I dislike more in a romance than a neglectful parent, but I didn’t have a big problem here, because it is amply evident that Marcel loves his children and has only left them in the care of their strict aunt and uncle (but for biannual visits) because he genuinely believes they are far better off with Jane and Charles than with him. There is a tragedy in Marcel’s past that he blames himself for, and he carries a great deal of guilt.
Who should Marcel spot at the inn but Viola Westcott née Kingsley? Fourteen years ago, Marcel had a flirtation with Viola, but she, a married woman with young children, sent him away and nothing ever came of it. More recently, Viola’s late husband was revealed to be a bigamist and her marriage to him invalidated.
Marcel doesn’t know that the forty-two year old Viola, mother to three grown children, goes by Miss Kingsley these days, but he wonders if she would be more amenable to an affair with him now. On a whim, he sends André home in his carriage, thus stranding himself at the village, where an end-of-harvest celebration is to be held to raise money for a new church roof. Marcel invites Viola to explore the festivities with him.
For her part, Viola is also stranded, in her case due to a near-broken carriage axle. Before she arrived at the village, Viola was in Bath, where the Westcotts, her late faux-husband’s family, had gathered to celebrate the christening of Viola’s youngest grandchild. Viola had been looking forward to the reunion but once her former relatives arrived, some part of her snapped and she had to get away. Now Viola is alone, as she insisted on being, but at a village inn, rather than at home. She debates with herself about accepting Marcel’s offer but ultimately says yes.
Viola and Marcel have a wonderful time at the village celebration, purchasing each other a horrid handkerchief and gaudy jewelry, dancing, and discovering that their attraction is as powerful as ever. They spend that night together, and in the morning, almost part, before Marcel, thinking of the unpleasant responsibilities awaiting him at home, impulsively proposes that they run away together for a week or so, and Viola even more impulsively agrees.
Viola writes to her daughters and her housekeeper that she is joining a friend for a week or two and not to worry about her, but the letters, tucked into a maid’s apron, end up in the inn’s laundry, ruined and lost.
Viola and Marcel meander on their way to his Devonshire cottage, located above a beautiful valley near the sea. Their sojourn at the cottage is lovely, punctuated by countryside walks, lovemaking, and genuine conversations. Viola discovers that there is more to Marcel than she thought and that, just as she did fourteen years ago, she is falling in love with him.
But of course, this idyll cannot last forever; the world is bound to intrude. When it does, Marcel and Viola are on the outs, each believing that they are alone in wanting the relationship to last.
There aren’t many historical romances about older characters, much less older characters who spontaneously take off together without benefit of marriage to escape their responsibilities. That aspect of the novel made it feel quite fresh. I could believe that Viola, having already been “ruined” by her “marriage” to a bigamist, might agree to this because she didn’t feel she had much of a reputation left to jeopardize.
As I said before, I loved a big chunk of this novel to bits. A lot of this is due to Viola’s character. It was wonderful to read about a forty-two year old heroine, but beyond that, there was also something touching about a woman who had kept to the straight and narrow all her life only to lose her place in society anyway throwing caution to the winds to grasp at some happiness for herself. Viola also had a quiet dignity that she could retreat behind when necessary. In the second half of the book, she finds herself in some rough waters with Marcel’s family, but she navigates them with fortitude and poise.
Although Marcel did not appeal to me quite as much, he had a roguish charm and a protectiveness of Viola and even of her daughter Abigail that I liked. I also had a great deal of sympathy for him. Who among us has not procrastinated facing the things that scared us? It wasn’t because Marcel didn’t care that he avoided his responsibilities; it was because he cared a great deal.
Further, Marcel had a wry sense of humor that tickled my funny bone and he was self-aware enough to admit his faults easily.
The thing was, though, he did not want to start looking at things from other people’s point of view. His own was quite bothersome enough.
And:
But his heart ached a little bit. Well, a whole lot if he was going to be honest with himself.
On the whole it was easier not to be honest.
All of the above won me over, and I was hugely enthusiastic about the book until I hit the 80% mark. This is where the nature of the tragedy in Marcel’s past is finally revealed.
Trigger warning:
Spoiler (Spoiler): Show
Besides this, I also had a few other, less troubling issues with the book. I didn’t buy that Marcel, conscience-stricken as he was, could ever really forgive himself for his past. I thought that in the flashback scene to the trauma, events unfolded in an unlikely and contrived way. I was uncertain whether Viola could go away with Marcel for weeks and not face more social censure than she did. And I was also a little confused about the circumstances around Marcel and Viola’s flirtation of fourteen years earlier.
(On the one hand Marcel says he has never slept with a married woman and never would have with Viola when he believed her married to Humphrey Westcott. But later, he states that he only left when she sent him away because he loved her. That implies that if he hadn’t loved her, he would have seduced her, despite her “married” state.)
All these were more minor issues for me, though. To be clear, I enjoyed this book a great deal. I loved Viola to bits and I felt for Marcel. I finished reading the book—I have a weak spot for redemption stories so I appreciated seeing Marcel begin to make amends to his kids for his long absence in the novel’s final stretch.
I still have some interest in the other Westcotts’ stories, too – Elizabeth’s, Abigail’s, and Harry’s. I even (in my heart of hearts) hope Matilda will get a secondary romance in one of their books; she deserves to be more than comic relief. But none of the above is enough to assuage my uneasiness with Marcel’s past.
It is not that I question whether Marcel deserves forgiveness—I believe that most people who feel genuine remorse do, and I would include him among them—but rather that I question why the book went there with his character at all. I wish it hadn’t, because then I would have been able to give it an A- grade without reservations. Now, I can’t give it a grade at all.
Sincerely,
Janine
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Thanks for the thorough review. You sold me this book.
This sounds like a story about two very real and flawed human beings (as opposed to the shiny, tidy, too close to perfect people that I often find in romance.)
I don’t know how to hide spoilers, so.
Spoilers.
He did something in a bad moment when he was exhausted and his wife was exhausted. Something that he shouldn’t have done and something they both paid a horrific price for.
I’m a little confused on why you believe we’re supposed to see his first wife as a lesser person, especially when from your review, I gather the hero spent the years after her death in mental and emotional hell over what happened.
I’m impressed that the author went there and wrote about it.
I read the spoiler and can understand your hesitancy and that would have ruined the whole book for me if I’d read it. I know I shouldn’t comment on books I haven’t read but in a hypothetical, I just couldn’t see myself finishing it. That is disturbing and very disappointing.
Thanks for a thoughtful review, Janine. I skipped the spoiler so that I can read the book without knowing too much. FYI: Surprisingly, the book is currently on sale for Kindle readers (US) for $1.99.
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Great review, Janine. I love Balogh and have tolerated and/or loved many of her male MCs with questionable claim to herodom (Edmund Waite and Adam Kent come to mind), so when I heard rumblings that this book would include another, I wasn’t initially worried. But when I started hearing that this one might be truly problematic, I decided to let myself be spoiled – and I’m glad I did because I really don’t like the sound of this character. I know some people do like dodgy (e.g. violent, criminal, cheating) heroes, but books featuring those types seem to target much younger readers, so it’s possible I’m getting too old to love them unreservedly and unquestioningly #curmudgeon-in-training.
My question is: in the era of #metoo, how does something like this, at a major publishing house, get past editing? I also get that the book production process is long, but still. Even if you discount the fact that DV and spousal abuse have been unacceptable – at least to women – for-pretty-much-ever, #metoo’s been around for enough time to theoretically make an impact on the production timeline, and someone could have said something along the lines of “you know, there’s a good chance that a lot of readers have basically decided that enough is enough with violent men and that they will object to this characterization of a ‘hero’.” This is one of the reasons sensitivity readers exist – they really should have used one.
Janine, I just realized my comment is spoilery. I’m so sorry!!! Could you please add a spoiler warning at the top??
Spoilers.
It sounds less like an issue of DV and more like a single, terrible moment where two parents who’ve gotten no sleep start fighting with each other, escalating to a protective if impatient reaction that results in unintended tragedy.
I see a difference there. I appreciate that not everyone will.
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I don’t know that I’d classify shoving an angry person trying to snatch a baby from my arms the same way. The first time I heard about the spoiler, my reaction was a hard no, but the more details I hear, the more it sounds like a father defending his infant children, resulting in a tragic accident.
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I don’t know if I will read the book ( although I am quite interested now ) but after reading Kaetrin’s review I was definitely interested in more detailed spoiler . Based on the description alone I also don’t count this as domestic violence – it will not take me much to forgive the hero either . No scratch that – while I understand his guilt over his wife’s death -because it was his wife’s death, I don’t think he is guilty at all except being involved in the tragic accident. JMO of course . I guess I am buying and reading the book after all :). Thanks for the review Janine .
Please add spoiler warnings to any spoilery comments.
@Kareni: Thank you for letting readers know about the $1.99 sale. It is an otherwise excellent book. If I had been okay with the spoiler, I would have loved it. So I do hope that everyone who wants to give it a chance picks it up and tries it. If you’re okay with this plotline, it otherwise a beautifully written book.
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@sb:
It isn’t that I think we’re supposed to view her that way. It’s that I think society generally does value a woman’s life less than a man’s. That’s part of what sexism is. Misogyny isn’t just creeps who harass and abuse women, it’s also intenalized by the rest of us. My point is that this book relies on this social attitude for readers to be okay with what Marcel did.
The reason I think so is that I can’t imagine, if their roles had been reversed and Adeline had shoved Marcel, a husband she’d loved, out the window, that readers would want to read her book. He would have to be a serial abuser for that to be palatable to readers. Adeline was not a serial abuser. Yes, she woke the children up because she wanted sex, but that’s the only bad thing we know about her.
@Keishon: Thanks!
@cayenne: Yes, reading this book in the context of #metoo has made a difference. Perhaps if I had read it at another time, or if I were living in another country, like Kaetrin, it would not have made me uneasy to this great an extent. I know that after I read it I thought about all the abusers in positions of power here and the way the system protects them. And I asked myself, if it had been Adeline instead of Marcel who’d shoved her spouse hard enough to cause him to fall out the window, would she have gotten off with it being ruled as an accident, the way Marcel did?
Marcel had his title, holdings and position of power to protect him, the same way men in power who abuse women have privileges that protect them. I’m sure this wasn’t what the author wanted me to focus on, but living in the #metoo era, it was hard not to think about that.
@sb: To me domestic violence is violence by an adult in the house. It doesn’t have to be serial to be an incident of domestic violence. Also, as my husband pointed out when I described it to him, you’d have to shove someone very hard to cause that person to slip with enough momentum to fall out the window.
@Ren Benton: That was Kaetrin’s viewpoint as well (we discussed the book by email). I can see and understand that viewpoint but it isn’t mine. Perhaps this is because I don’t have children. There is no prior indication in the book that Adeline had ever abused her children in any way. She did wake the one baby up when she put her in the crib, and that baby cried loud enough to wake up the other. But it isn’t stated that she’d shaken the baby or harmed her in any way. It wasn’t clear to me, when I read the scene, to what degree Marcel was protective and to what degree he was simply upset that she’d woken the babies after it took him an hour to get them to fall asleep.
I should add here that another thing that bothered me was that we only have Marcel’s word for what happened. There don’t appear to have been any witnesses. And Adeline is dead and can’t tell us her side of the story.
@Sirius: You’re welcome. As Kareni mentioned the book is on sale for $1.99. And other than this issue, it really is, IMO, Balogh’s best book in years. That was why coming up with a grade was impossible for me.
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@sb: I feel as you do after having read the spoiler. While I agree with Janine’s excellent points about misogyny, power and so forth, I see this as a tragedy, an avoidable and heartbreaking one. Intent, in my own head, plays a large role here, and I don’t see any of that on Marcel’s part (based entirely on this review).
@Janine: I’ve read a few Balogh books, primarily because of your enthusiasm for them, and will definitely read this one. Thank you.
@Darlynne: I do agree it was portrayed as a tragedy—I was just uncomfortable with this sort of tragedy taking center stage in a romance. My problem was not with Marcel but with the authorial choices. And you’re welcome! I want you and everyone else to feel welcome to return and tell me what you thought of the book.
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Personal story: 9 years ago I had an argument with someone close to me. To this day I can’t tell you exactly how this escalated but when I tried to leave the room because of how escalated the argument was becoming this other person blocked my way. I lost control and I hit them. More than once. left the house, walked to a hotel and sobbed for the next 12 hours. I couldn’t believe what I had done. I ultimately took some time off work, and I did see a counselor. I appreciate the non judgemental way that they treated me. One bad act did not make me a bad person. I have not raised my hand to another human being since that day but I worry every single day that I’m capable of it. I am female.
Situations escalate. I would like to think that Ms Balough is trying to write some nuance to situations that are not always black and white. I realise I suffer from bias here because of my own situation but not all domestic violence scenarios are the same and I think you need to be careful when demonizing the perpetrator. I cannot excuse my actions and I can’t forgive myself for what I did. But I can recognise that in almost a decade since I have not repeated my mistake. What if the gender roles were reversed in this book? How would that have been viewed?
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@Anonymous: Thank you for your courage in posting that. I am sure you’re not alone in your genuine remorse and your willingness to work on your issue, which you deserve credit for. Yes, these things are not black and white. That is why I do not condemn Marcel.
I think we all have baggage that we bring to our reading. To put mine on the table–I’ve been close to hitting another person once in the past, though I stopped myself in time. I’d rather not detail my childhood history but there was a lot of anger and some abusive behavior in the household I grew up in, too. So I see the taboo against striking another person as a valuable one. I’m sure it played a role in your evaluation of the situation and your openness to seeking help.
For me, this book felt like Balogh was pushing at the edges of that taboo and I struggled with that, partly due to living in the #metoo era. I do think that if the gender roles were reversed, the book would have been written differently, with the dead spouse having done worse, because readers’ tolerances would be different. But I also feel that anyone who is genuinely remorseful deserves forgiveness, and I would absolutely include you in that.
Quick note now:. I found Someone to Love for $1.99 Kindle (US), not Someone to Care.
@MikiS: Someone to Care did go on sale briefly (I got a notification about it from ereader IQ), but the sale is now over.
My last comment as I have no stool to stand on but one bad act doesn’t make a person bad at all. It’s just that the author decided to include this tragedy as background that could be triggering I think is part of Janine’s point as I understood it. I could be wrong and have left myself wide open for that to happen so with that I’m off. My comments can be deleted, Janine since in truth they add nothing to this discussion.
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@Ren Benton: Yes, as Janine says further down the thread, I thought about it for a while and then decided that Marcel was acting to protect his son from an angry screaming wife coming at him to snatch him away. When I thought about it in that context, it didn’t seem at all odd that Marcel (or any parent) would act the way he did. I wondered how much of my reaction to the storyline was because I am a parent? I know my maternal instincts are fierce and I would be capable of a lot if I perceived I was defending my child – things I would (most probably) not do otherwise.
Janine challenged me as to whether I’d forgive a heroine for this kind of action and my response was that I’d find it easier to do so actually, as I think it’s easier to see the action as protective when an angry man is coming to snatch your child from your arms.
That said, I want to make it clear that even though I took a different view of the book than Janine (after some thought, I can’t say I jumped to it straight away, I had some discomfort), this is one where there is a pretty wide range of opinion – all of which is entirely valid and open on the text.
I did find the whole “well actually when I said I felt guilty for killing my wife this time my actions actually DID lead to her death” thing quite subversive. Usually the trope is that the hero feels guilty but the guilt is misplaced. I, too, was expecting something like that. Like I said in my own review, Balogh is an author who has proven she’s not afraid to take risks in her writing. They don’t always pay off but even when they don’t I have to admire the way she’s prepared to turn a trope on its head.
@Keishon: I liked your comments and see no reason to delete them! Yes, it could be triggering to some readers and that was one of my points in the review.
@Kaetrin: Agreed, this is a book where there is going to be a wide range of opinions, all of which are valid. I too like that Balogh takes some unusual turns in her writing—it’s one of the reasons I keep reading her even when a particular book doesn’t fully work for me. This is in many ways one of her better books, even though it’s one trope I’m not comfortable seeing subverted.
I am about 30, 40% of the way done with this book and so far, as Janine described, it’s the best Balogh in years and surely thus far deserving of an A plus. I’m loving Viola and her dilemmas, loving Marc too and his efforts to remain aloof (we all know how that usually ends in HR). I’m girding my loins about the spoilers mentioned here and wondering how I am going to feel. I often wonder how much of a sexist person I am, having grown up in the 70s and 80s in a country where ‘machismo’ is very much alive even today. But I suspect I’m going to come down to intent, as Darlynne mentioned. He no intent to commit the heinous act.
@Claudia: Thanks for your input—please come back and let us know what you thought when you finish if you feel so inclined. I wonder if your experience will also be different from mine because you have some idea what to expect. I really didn’t and was simply joyfully enjoying the book the whole way until I got there, so when I reached the point where it was revealed, I was taken aback and therefore had some difficulty absorbing it.
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Janine: The reason I think so is that I can’t imagine, if their roles had been reversed and Adeline had shoved Marcel, a husband she’d loved, out the window, that readers would want to read her book.
If their roles were reversed in the same scenario, I would read that, too. Maybe I’m in the minority.
Janine: Also, as my husband pointed out when I described it to him, you’d have to shove someone very hard to cause that person to slip with enough momentum to fall out the window.
I thought he pushed her and she tripped on the hem of her gown? You wouldn’t have to push very hard to cause someone to trip on clothing. My impression was that that would’ve been the momentum that carried her up against the window. But of course I haven’t read the book yet. I’m just going by your review.
@Janine
I will make a point of gathering my thoughts when I am done… And I can totally see how reading about it beforehand may soften the blow. That’s what it happened when I read Gaffney’s To Have and to Hold, one of my top 5 romances of all time. I knew going in that Sebastian had done something, at a minimum, very reprehensible. I love, love the book but I STILL go back and forth on that one event… It just tells you how much it affected me. I suspect this one will be similar. Needless to say I don’t feel comfortable recommending To Have and to Hold to most people, although I do think it’s awesome.
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@sb: The way I pictured it in my head, it was momentum from both the shove and the tripping that sent her out the window, but another reader might visualize it differently. To be honest the tripping on the hem thing seemed awfully contrived to me.
@Claudia: To Have and to Hold was my favorite romance for years and years. The last time I read it I had more difficulty with it, but it’s a complex, redemptive novel and yes—one I wouldn’t recommend to all readers, but that I still have some appreciation for. There’s a joint review I did with Angela / Lazaraspaste and an interview with Patricia Gaffney that Jennie and I did years ago, both on this site… You might want to dig those up if you’re a Gaffney fan.
I really do have a soft spot for redemption stories—it’s my favorite trope of all. I think that no matter how problematic they might be, there will always be a place for them because we all sometimes find ourselves in need of forgiveness.
Janine, before deciding to give To Have and to Hold a go, I did read the post and the interview you mentioned, read countless GR comments, and after all that it is still somewhat unresolved in my head, LOL!!
One more thing to add — I know Balogh gets a bit criticized for her mechanical sex scenes, and sometimes people do have a point, but I must say that the writing in that regard is great in this book, which was a good surprise for me. Overall, she’s one of the best writers of HR out there, and I never feel she’s phoning it in like I’ve felt with other authors lately.
@sb: I felt the same way re the trip but I think it does depend on one’s mental image of the room, its size and the kind of window. I’m also not a physics expert but I wondered if there was a momentum thing given she was “forced” to change direction suddenly by the shove which may have put her off balance even further?
I haven’t read the book yet but my hold just came in from the library, way sooner than I expected, so I’m diving in as soon as I can.
I’m on the “tragic accident” side of this debate at this point, and I’m curious to read the passages and see if I stay there. I don’t have any trouble imagining the trip because I’ve found it’s pretty easy to step on a floor-length hem when you’re moving backward (I’ve done it more than once while wearing a sari). I have more trouble with the window setup, because I can’t envision a window (in a nursery, no less) that is big enough that someone can fall through it without having anything to grab onto. But again, I need to read the book myself to see what’s going on.
I hadn’t read any Balogh novels for ages, having burned out on her, but I read the previous installment in this series after reading Kaetrin and Janine’s joint review and I really enjoyed it.
@Sunita Great point about it being easy to step on a floor-length nightgown of that era, and I had the same reaction to the window thing, but mostly I think because I have kids and I’m forever paranoid about windows, balconies, and swimming pools, as we all have been trained to be these days!!
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I’m just at the part that they are ‘caught’ and hero has to lie to Viola’s family, but in doing so he describes exactly the true nature of their feelings so poignantly! It’s clear he thinks it’s a lie, though, something too good to be true and to be happening to him, but it was a beautiful moment nonetheless.
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@Claudia: I loved the irony in the scene you describe—that’s he thought he was lying but was telling the truth. There are a lot of beautiful moments in this book. There was one that just about killed me with how beautiful it was late in the book, too. It really is a near-perfect book otherwise, so if a reader is okay with the one issue I brought up above, I don’t think that reader can go wrong with this book.
@Sunita:
Spoilers, spoilers
I didn’t articulate my thoughts well before—it was the whole way she fell I found contrived. I agree it was a tragic accident, otherwise Marcel wouldn’t have screamed after running down to her. But he still shoved her, you know? So it wasn’t his intention to push her out the window but it was his intention to shove her away.
Anyhow, I will be curious to see what you think when you finish. Although I think your reading experience is bound to be different, partly because it won’t come as a complete shocker to you as it did for me.
@Janine: 100% agree.
And I loved the whole “I think I’m lying but I’m actually telling the entire truth” thing too. It was perfection.
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@Janine: I had to imagine a window that was more like French doors or one with a very low ledge for it to make sense. (The babies were so young so I didn’t have a problem with them being in a room where this was a risk – they weren’t walking yet.) The description in the book is extremely vague. We need an architectural drawing to really know! LOL
I finished this book yesterday. On the strength of the first half alone, I’d have graded it A+. On the whole, I’d still grade it high, possibly an A. Ms. Balogh created quite a story here, and one I won’t forget anytime soon (and honestly that’s to say something, since with certain HRs I struggle to even remember the names of the MCs a day after finishing the book).
Here are my observations:
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Yes, hero did shove wife. I come down on the side of tragic accident, not domestic violence.
To classify it as a domestic-violence act and to classify hero as abuser, I needed to see the incident as part of a pattern. Not necessarily a pattern of physical violence, but a pattern of neglect, of abuse by way of controlling acts, demeaning words/actions, etc. That was not present and by all accounts hero and first wife were happy together, if somewhat playing house as anyone would be marrying that young. There was also no intent to harm, and no premeditation.
Yes, he did shove her. Hard enough that she lost her balance, trip or did not trip, and fell to her death. But say it was his sister that entered the room and for some reason was intent on snatching the children from his lap and putting them to bed. Or the nurse, somehow intent on the same thing. He would have shoved the sister or the nurse, and it would have been a tragic accident in the end. If hero and first wife’s roles were reversed, I’d still come down on the side of tragic accident.
That’s not even getting into the mitigating factors like a sleepless night (most recent of several, it sounded like), cranky twin babies, etc. All that clouds one’s judgment, and makes a very ugly part of ourselves come to the surface, for sure.
My other trouble with the book was that the second half pretty much hinged on my most hated of romance crutches, “the big mis.” I got impatient when neither character spoke up and revealed their true feelings. I got annoyed that they both needed their children to intervene, and that the hero’s kids forced him to face the truth and take action.
But here’s the thing: Perhaps it was meant to make us think that sometimes our elders do not know any better, and are only human. That sometimes we need the help of the ones who love us to save us from ourselves. That sometimes we are the horse being led to the water, because we can’t get there alone. Hero lived his life answering to no one but an abstract code of honor; the whole book shows him shedding layers and layers of that learned behavior, and answering to familial and romantic love rather than some misguided notion of duty (and it’s not like he was doing a great job with that duty anyway).
It fits beautifully in what the series has been about so far, which to me is first and foremost about what we are when we are ourselves, not what we are in relation to other people or to our station in life.
I’m now extra excited about Elizabeth’s story, out in November. Older woman, younger man pairing, yay. I want to see who Elizabeth is when she’s not being the most sensible and agreeable person in the room!
@Claudia: I’m glad you enjoyed the book so much. So much of it was lovely that I wish I could trade my reading experience of that one thing for yours!
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I agree there was no patten of abuse, nor was there enough to label the hero as an abuser. But domestic violence to me means any kind of violent behavior in the home, which this clearly was.
Do you mean his sister-in-law, Jane? (I don’t recall a sister). If so, then here’s another place where we diverge, because I can’t see it escalating to that with his sister-in-law, much less with the nurse.
The argument Marcel and Adeline were having was a very personal one. Adeline and Marcel had planned on having sex, and Adeline went to her bedroom to wait for him, but he never showed. She was angry enough that she couldn’t sleep, that she came to the nursery to have it out with him. Marcel had been putting their children to be and was angry that she would come to the nursery with her argument, and that she was undoing all his hard work in getting them to sleep. That was, as I saw it, why he pushed her.
That they were husband and wife was integral to the anger that prompted what happened. The argument was over sex and over their two children. If it had been about something less personal than that, I doubt he would have been angry enough, nor felt it was okay in that one moment, to shove her.
If he had been unhappy with his sister-in-law or the nurse he would probably have just flexed his power as the head of the household and ordered them to leave. Unlike Adeline, they probably would have. So I see the marital relationship as a factor here.
With regard to the kids intervening late in the book, that didn’t bother me. Marcel had been stuck in his patten of avoidant behavior for so many years that it made sense to me that he would need a push.
One thing that did bug me a little that I didn’t go into in the review was that Viola at first didn’t trust him to have come as far as he had but then, within a short span of that, told him he had nothing to prove to her. It seemed like she was contradicting herself.
I will also add that for me the HEA felt a little shaky. As I said in the review, I’m not sure I believe Marcel will ever fully forgive himself. I’m also not sure he’s not capable of doing something like that again, given the right set of circumstances. As you point out when you mention sleeplessness, human beings don’t always have perfect control of themselves.
I do get that that’s the last thing that Marcel would want to have happen. But Balogh’s choice to put that in his backstory and reveal it only in the last quarter of the book punctured some of the sense of safety I expect to get from romances as we head toward the HEA. Therefore, I think it is very possible that I would be more open to reading about someone with Marcel’s past in a novel outside the romance genre.
Janine, he has a sister who shows up later in the book, named Annemarie… Yes, likely the end result would have been different had the sister or a nurse showed up with the same intent, but I just meant it as way to say that had it been anyone else we’d not be considering the possibility of domestic violence. If roles were reversed, as I said, if Adeline had been the pusher not the shover, :), I would still come down on the side of tragic accident.
I do have to say though that having plenty of warning that this was coming made the whole thing way easier to digest for me! Not sure how I’d react if I had zero warning — maybe tempted to throw the book at the wall!
I wanted to ask you what else you found super romantic toward the end of the book, the reappearance of the pearls?? I didn’t see anything extra romantic and feel I’m missing out on something, LOL!!
@Claudia:
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Yeah, the zero warning thing made it harder to process. To be fair to Balogh, Marcel does say he killed his wife before then. But how many romance heroes have we seen say that when it isn’t literally true?
The moment I found terribly romantic was at the 86% mark and reads like this:
ETA: It was romantic to me that each one denied their desires, in Marcel’s case for Viola’s sake. And that they admitted it to each other, and that their words / sentiments matched so closely, even when describing feelings from that far in the past. I thought the matching of the paradoxes was romantic.
Janine,
That was indeed a beautiful moment!
@Claudia: I agree with your take Claudia.
As to the pearls, I found that a lovely ending to the book. It told me there would be laughter and fun in their marriage and that made me very happy.
@Janine: That scene was all the things!!
@Kaetrin:
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Yes, the pearls were a great touch too.
I finished this last night and really enjoyed it. For whatever reason the series is working very well for me. It’s a bit like the Slightly/Simply series but with a premise which allows Balogh to explore family and social relationships in a deeper way. It’s a historical-romance version of the found family theme we see in other subgenres. And it lets her write optimistically about relationships and love without becoming too treacly (which started to happen for me in the Simply series).
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I still don’t see Adeline’s death as anything more than a tragic accident, and I don’t see the story as rehabilitating an abuser or making him heroic. It was one action that contributed to a fatal accident, not part of a larger pattern, and it’s pretty clear that Marcel felt terrible guilt and remorse. Even his libertine tendencies apparently were carried out in such a way that his partners weren’t hurt (at least the text suggests that). He absented himself from his children’s lives and hurt them by doing so, but for reasons that made sense to him given his self-hatred. I also think the fact that his extremely judgmental sister- and brother-in-law did not raise his children to suspect or fear him suggests that his shove was not seen by them as a manifestation of his true self.
I agree that knowing what was coming made my reading of the novel different, but I honestly don’t think it would have shocked me had I come upon it unawares, because it basically functioned as a plot point to me (when I read Kaetrin’s review and the spoiler I was surprised but not shocked). There are certainly other novels (including romance, I think?) in which terrible accidents happen where a main character is a partial cause. This fell into that category for me. It created a real conflict between the MCs and required Marcel to go on his own emotional journey, separate from Viola, over the course of the book. This is something I think Balogh does very well.
It occurred to me that part of the reason some readers have trouble with Marcel may be because neither he nor the text spends the book asking the reader to understand and forgive him for that action or for his more general behavior. He’s a fairly closed person, even in his interior monologues, and his humor is dry and self-deprecating. If you don’t take to him, he doesn’t really care. I happened to like him a lot, but then I like this kind of hero; still, I can see how he can come across as cold and almost off-putting. His asides to himself give you insights into how he feels, but he’s a very low-key tortured hero.
I totally bought the romance. In many of Balogh’s pairings you have one cool, buttoned-up, or previously traumatized person paired with someone more emotionally open and risk-taking. Here they are both from the first category, and maybe that’s what made the Big Mis work for me. Neither reached out to the other for quite a while. The fact that Marcel made the necessary moves made sense to me because he had further to go, both in terms of himself and in terms of righting the wrongs he’d committed to his children and extended family.
You have to understand , with the exception of Amanda Quick , I have not read and have no interest in reading m/f historical romance. Actually , no I am lying. I have read a few of Lisa Kleypas’ recently on friend’s recommendation. I am only at sixteen percent but so far I am loving this book. Both hero and heroine are working so well for me . Sunita so glad you liked :).
Sorry I meant to say have not read for many years – I have read a lot of Judith Mcnot in the past.
@Sunita:
I agree on the premise of the series.
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Thanks for posting your thoughts on the book. I actually had a little bit of an issue with the sister-in-law and brother-in-law’s acceptance of Marcel and of what had happened, because it seemed like no one but Marcel (well, maybe Bernard briefly in one scene) spoke up for Adeline. I guess they sensed how guilty he felt and didn’t want to pile on, which makes some sense. But I would have liked for there to be someone who’d loved and missed Adeline in the story. It seemed like her function was to be a bit immature and self-centered and then to die. I would have liked a signal that we should mourn her death in the novel, but the underlying message seemed to be that we should mostly mourn for Marcel as a result of what happened.
That’s interesting that you don’t think it would have suprised you. Yes, there are a few romances with this theme, but it is really unusual for it not be revealed until so late in the book. It’s not a theme that appeals to me because I think self-forgiveness is almost impossible in such a circumstance. We had a recent discussion of it on Jennie’s review of Seize the Fire, so I’m going to try not to regurgitate all that I said there in this thread, but I pointed to a recent New Yorker article about the struggles of people who have accidentally caused a death.
I don’t know about other readers but I liked Marcel and didn’t have a big problem with him. My problem was with the authorial choices. It was more of a philosphical divergence than an emotional one.
@Sirius: Glad you are enjoying it. Balogh is one of my favorite authors in m/f historical romance because even when her books don’t fully work for me, I find them interesting to think about and discuss. And when they do work for me, they’re absolutely wonderful. This one was somewhere in the middle or maybe even a little higher than that.
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I actually was very interested in Balogh’s choice here. There are a host of heroes out there with dead wives, who feel they are guilty, or who are thought to be guilty when they really aren’t at all. Marcel really was at fault.
I’m not entirely happy with the characterization of this as an accident though. This is manslaughter to my mind and he damn well should feel guilty, but I would have liked to see him do something a little more substantive with that guilt and understanding. On the other hand, telling his children and Viola is a good start.
@Janine: I agree with you that Adeline’s memory could have been mourned more fully, especially given this is a genre romance, where there can be a tendency to give the heroine’s predecessors short shrift. I think the elapse of time made a difference (it was 17 years since her death), but the text could have offered a deeper characterization than it did, especially via her sister’s character.
The reason I don’t think I would have been surprised is that the reader is told early on that Marcel killed his wife, and while I agree that an unambiguously culpable hero is highly unlikely in a romance, Balogh has written enough difficult-to-like and unpleasantly behaving men that I kept in my mind that there was something there. The first time I saw reference to it was in Kaetrin’s spoiler and it made sense to me given Balogh’s backlist.
I understand that you think self-forgiveness is almost impossible, and the New Yorker article certainly emphasizes people who feel that way. But there *are* people who come to terms or at least learn to live with their guilt. If the text didn’t convince you of that, then it didn’t. But I come to a story like this believing that it is possible, if not to forgive yourself, to at least learn to allow yourself happiness in spite of that, so I was not as resistant to the idea and I thought that the way Balogh explored it was effective.
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@Lynn C: Can’t it be both an accident and manslaughter? Car accidents that kill are sometime ruled to be manslaughter, aren’t they? I saw it as manslaughter but also as an accident. I thought he meant to shove her, but not to kill her, so maybe not entirely an accident, but largely an accident, and manslaughter, too.
I agree that Marcel has a reason to feel guilty and should. If nothing else, guilt here is an indicator of conscience, and conscience is a good trait to have. I wouldn’t like to see him do away with his. As for Marcel doing something more substantive with his guilt, this is part of why I find it hard to believe he’d be able to let go of it–because it’s not clear what he can do to expiate his guilt. Adeline is gone, so it’s not like he can find a way to make it up to her, or to anyone who loved her.
@Sunita: Adeline’s superficial (and somewhat negative) characterization is another reason for my discomfort with her death. Her putting her desire for sex above her children’s need for sleep, in contrast with Marcel, read like a signal (whether intentional or not) that Marcel was the one whose well-being we should priortize.
Yeah, Marcel could allow himself some happiness–I find that more credible in his case than in Olympia’s in Seize the Fire, partly because in Olympia’s case the deaths are fresh and partly because she has a more idealistic personality. But even though he’d allow himself happiness, I think for anyone with a conscience, which Marcel clearly did have, it would come up on a regular basis, like a cloud covering the sun. Maybe the reason I think so is that the notion of Marcel living a life of perfect happiness while Adeline is dead and buried isn’t one I’m comfortable with, either.
@Janine: For me, I guess I’m not convinced that some kind of expiation is necessary for self-forgiveness. I agree that it’s difficult to see what Marcel could do (although I believe he though absenting himself from his children’s lives was at least partly about that – it was also due to self-hatred and, there is some textual support that he was frightened he might hurt the children – although I never thought that was a serious risk myself). But people do move on. When we were talking back and forth about this book by email I mentioned to you a local lady who had her child in a jogging pram near a river. She turned away to take a phone call and didn’t put the brake on the pram and it went into the river. She initially thought someone had stolen the pram and the baby and didn’t realise the child went into the water. The child drowned. She was of course devastated. The tragedy was in the local papers and I think every parent I know had a “there but for the grace of God go I” moment and the public was very sympathetic. She and her husband stayed married. A few years later, they were in the paper again when they had had another baby and this time the story was celebratory. She talked about how it had been hard to move on from what had happened but she had managed to make peace with it and had found her way back to happiness.
Of course, the situation in the book was very different and it’s not possible to compare “apples with apples” – apart from anything else, one is fictional and one is not – but the mother above did blame herself. Most of the rest of us, as far as I can tell, thought it was a tragic accident but she blamed herself. Her husband found a way to move on. She did too. While I can also see that many marriages would break under that strain, it obviously didn’t happen to them. I haven’t read the New Yorker article but I expect there is some selection bias at play there. It may well be rare but I think it can happen that people can forgive themselves and move on and find happiness again. So that’s what I think of when I think of Marcel and I put him in that category. It may well be that the text didn’t convince you of that and that’s fair enough.
The other thing is that I fully expect that anyone with that kind of history will feel grief and loss every now and then. I think anyone who has experienced any kind of grief will feel that way occasionally. Grief has a way of kicking one in the teeth when one least expects it as well as when one does. So I don’t see Marcel and Viola’s HEA as being perfect, at least not all the time.
As for Adeline’s character, I thought she came across as young and vibrant and perhaps a little foolish/impetuous. I expect, had she lived, she would have matured, just as Marcel did. There have been a few books in between Someone to Care and now but my memory of the book is that Marcel talked about himself and Adeline in much the same way – young and a bit silly and perhaps at the volatile end of vivacious. I agree she wasn’t deeply characterised but FWIW I didn’t think she was demonised either.
@Kaetrin:
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I see forgetting to put a brake on a pram as less blameworthy than shoving someone in the middle of an argument, but of course, the results are guilt-inducing all the same. It is good she was able to forgive herself.
W/r/t Adeline, I think what bothers me is that there was empathy in the story for everyone else affected by the tragedy. Marcel expresses empathy for the nurse, who felt ill and had two screaming babies to deal with, and he feels empathy for Charles and Jane, who had to set aside their lives to parent his children. Bernard expresses empathy for himself and Estelle, for growing up without either parent, and Viola feels a great deal of empathy for Marcel and all the guilt he carries. There is empathy for everyone, except Adeline, who lost her life.
Guess I’m in the minority, but the real problem for me about this book was how BORING it was. How it bordered on Women’s Fiction instead of romance–for me anyway. How it was soooo much “telling” and not “showing.” How it stayed in this “he/she got tired of me before I was ready, but I’m hurt anyway, but I knew it would happen, so I just need to move on, but it’s hard, but …” loop for endless pages. (I’m not a fan of the “Big Misunderstanding” trope, which we have a variation of here.) Normally, I love that Balogh is an author who gives us a view into her characters’ minds. But in this case, there was too much repeated internal dialogue.
The tragedy with Marcel and his wife–I agree with the posters who said Marcel and Adeline were young and insanely tired (it was dawn right?) and young and I believe the author intended it to be a one-time event, not a pattern of abuse.
As a baby boomer, I was initially thrilled that Ms. Balogh was giving us an older heroine. And I had hopes for the novel, though it started a bit slowly. (Though that’s fairly common for the author’s novels–they progress at a rather “sedate” rate.) But man, this story let me down big time.
@Dallas: When I first started reading Balogh, I felt that way about most of her books, that they had too much repetition of the same internal thoughts. It took me reading five or so of her books for her voice to click with me–and since then, I haven’t had that issue.
Re. Balogh and older heroines. I was actually really worried about this one because her other book with an older heroine, A Promise of Spring, didn’t work for me at all, partly because the heroine kept dwelling on how old she was. I was so grateful that Viola didn’t do that. But if you want to read a very different Balogh with a heroine in her mid to late thirties, it comes in a 2-in-1 with The Temporary Wife, a book that I can highly recommend.
Janine–I have the 2-in-1, and while I read The Temporary Wife (which I agree was good), I never read the other story because of the overwhelmingly negative reviews!
@Dallas: I can’t plug it myself since I wasn’t keen on it, but I do have friends who really liked it.
I find myself in the camp that this was a tragic accident, but it’s something that a person would carry with them for life. I don’t think you forgive yourself as much as you learn to live with it. Adeline’s actions carried possible danger, too. What if Adeline had dropped Bertrand when she grabbed him from Marcel’s arms and the baby was severely harmed? She wouldn’t have anticipated the consequences, but the baby would still have been hurt. I think Marcel’s actions were a momentary lapse in judgment with terrible consequences. I think if Marcel had an anger problem, it would have come out when he dealt with the dower house issue. He didn’t want all those relatives under his roof, but he was unable to confront them. He actually kept going out of his way to avoid any conflict. That doesn’t mean that anger and fatigue didn’t cause Adeline’s death, it just means it wasn’t a psychological pathology.
Janine mentions she didn’t like the authorial choices here, but I think Mary Balogh took a big risk that not many authors do. As was noted, so many historical heroes blame themselves for their wives deaths, but here we have a plot where the blame is justified. It’s different and thought-provoking.
There is something that I really liked in this book that no one has mentioned. In the beginning, I thought we were getting a story where Adeline’s sister, Jane, was a bad caregiver of the children and possibly doing it to enhance her circumstances. She was described as humorless and rather strict, but as I continued to read, she actually loved the children. Jane thought Marcel was a thoughtless parent and he caused her sister’s fall, but she didn’t raise the children to hate him. Marcel actually did choose a good guardian for the twins.
@Kim: Very well put, Kim. I agree that it’s something you carry for life and have to learn to live with, but can’t exactly forgive. And you are also right that Balogh took a big risk.
With regard to Jane, I didn’t have the same expectation you did, but I discussed the book with a friend recently and she said she thought less of Marcel for leaving his children with such humorless guardians. I said that I thought it was precisely because Charles and Jane were repressed that Marcel felt safer leaving the twins in their care–that he didn’t think they were the types to react impulsively and shove someone the way that he had.
Yes, it was not a lifelong pathology, but most domestic disputes that end in death are–that’s part of what bothered me. But I have been rethinking my reaction to this book some. There was certainly a lot of beautiful writing there.
Janine: “. . . I discussed the book with a friend recently and she said she thought less of Marcel for leaving his children with such humorless guardians.”
That’s an interesting take, but I look at how well the twins turned out. They were scarred by their father’s abandonment and mother’s death, but they developed into thoughtful teenagers. That had to be due in large part to Jane and her husband’s influence. Now contrast their upbringing with Camille’s. She had a very loving mother, yet Camille was prickly and could be unlikeable at times. This changed over the course of her story. I’m not sure if her personality traits can completely be blamed on her father’s bigamy. Perhaps the absence of paternal love was more scarring for Camille then Marcel’s benign neglect of the twins.
@Kim: With regard to the effect of Marcel’s parenting choices on Estelle and Bertrand vs. Humphrey’s effect on Camille, I think that has as much to do with the fact that Marcel was a hero and Humphrey a villain as anything, don’t you? Though in life, neglect, whether benign or otherwise, can result in scars as well, I think that if Balogh had written more problems for Marcel’s kids resulting from his neglect, it would have been piling on too much.
@Janine: I agree with you here. I think Marcel leaving the children with Jane and Charles was a very deliberate decision based on their more sedate/strict natures.
I also liked that there was acknowledgement in the book toward the end to the effect that Jane and Charles wanted to get back to their own lives and as much as they had done a good job and loved the twins, their care was also a burden to them that Marcel had imposed. I think Marcel always appreciated their efforts to look after his children but he was also… not uncaring but perhaps ignorant (perhaps willfully so) of the sacrifices Jane and Charles had made on his behalf. By the end of the book he was cognizant of those things. I appreciated very much that Jane and Charles weren’t made villains.
@Kaetrin: Yes, that was a nice touch. Marcel should have been cognizant of it earlier on, but I think he was so wrapped up in his guilt and his fear of harming the twins that he deliberately didn’t want to see the burden he was imposing. I never really expected Charles and Jane to be made villains, did you?
@Janine: I don’t think I expected it exactly, but I did wonder, especially with all the infighting that was going on that Marcel wanted to avoid. I’m glad it didn’t go there.