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rushthatspeaksWell that was better than I thought it would be.
The previous Eloisa James I read was a frothy confection of a thing, airy comedy of no particular time period with a penchant for slapstick. This one is quite firmly set in a Regency that is more historically accurate than most romance versions, and provides more depth than I was expecting.
For one thing, this may be the romance novel most focused on its side cast I have seen. And they're interesting. The heroine has come from the country and imposed herself on a distant cousin because she saw a man at a ball and fell in love with him; the cousin's brother is in love with her. All very usual. However, we get a lot of time devoted to the marital feud between the cousin and her husband, which is both funny and genuinely nasty (I assume they get a book of their own later). The hero has a young illegitimate son he is raising, and does not tell the heroine who the mother is. At all. For the entire book. By which I include the ending. As in, we do not find out because it is not relevant and the heroine does not particularly care. I kind of wanted to applaud.
It was perhaps cruel of James to steal the heroine's father's bad poetry from Christopher Smart-- after all poor Smart was both a genuine madman and a genuine poet, and as Johnson said I had as lief pray with him as any man-- but she does admit to it right up front, and that the lines are much, much better when not taken out of context. If people were quoting Kit Smart to me out of context every single day at breakfast for twenty years, I might also depart precipitously at the first hint of better things in life; it is certainly one of the more convincing reasons for a heroine not to want to go home that I can recall.
So, except for a couple of scenes that touched my embarrassment squick, and maybe two moments where the hero lapsed into the sort of annoying alpha-male aggravation that I sometimes suspect is contractually required because it reads as so tacked-on-afterward, this was a well-rounded comedy of manners afraid neither to let its characters play jokes on themselves nor to make them complicated. I'll take it.
The previous Eloisa James I read was a frothy confection of a thing, airy comedy of no particular time period with a penchant for slapstick. This one is quite firmly set in a Regency that is more historically accurate than most romance versions, and provides more depth than I was expecting.
For one thing, this may be the romance novel most focused on its side cast I have seen. And they're interesting. The heroine has come from the country and imposed herself on a distant cousin because she saw a man at a ball and fell in love with him; the cousin's brother is in love with her. All very usual. However, we get a lot of time devoted to the marital feud between the cousin and her husband, which is both funny and genuinely nasty (I assume they get a book of their own later). The hero has a young illegitimate son he is raising, and does not tell the heroine who the mother is. At all. For the entire book. By which I include the ending. As in, we do not find out because it is not relevant and the heroine does not particularly care. I kind of wanted to applaud.
It was perhaps cruel of James to steal the heroine's father's bad poetry from Christopher Smart-- after all poor Smart was both a genuine madman and a genuine poet, and as Johnson said I had as lief pray with him as any man-- but she does admit to it right up front, and that the lines are much, much better when not taken out of context. If people were quoting Kit Smart to me out of context every single day at breakfast for twenty years, I might also depart precipitously at the first hint of better things in life; it is certainly one of the more convincing reasons for a heroine not to want to go home that I can recall.
So, except for a couple of scenes that touched my embarrassment squick, and maybe two moments where the hero lapsed into the sort of annoying alpha-male aggravation that I sometimes suspect is contractually required because it reads as so tacked-on-afterward, this was a well-rounded comedy of manners afraid neither to let its characters play jokes on themselves nor to make them complicated. I'll take it.
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no subject
Date: 2011-06-07 05:33 pm (UTC)Anyway, I'm glad you enjoyed it.