RogueBelle

Taming an Impossible Rogue, by Suzanne Enoch

Rating: 2.5 stars

I still enjoyed dipping into the world of the Tantalus Club, but this one just didn’t do it for me. I found the heroine lackluster and the hero hard to like, and that impeded my enjoyment.

The basic outline of the story isn’t bad: Camille Pryce ran away from her wedding a year ago on the sudden realisation that she did not want to spend her life with the groom. Not hard to believe, considering that the marriage was arranged when she was three days old, and yet the groom, the Marquis of Fenton, never saw fit to so much as introduce himself to her at any point in the past twenty-one years. Turned away by both friends and relatives, Camille eventually ended up at the Tantalus Club, a scandalous gentlemen’s club owned by a woman and exclusively staffed by women (see Scandalous Brides #1, A Beginner’s Guide to Rakes). It takes Fenton a year to decide he would still like to marry Camille after all … but he can’t get into the Tantalus Club to see her, as Camille has had him barred. Fenton decides to send his cousin, Keating Blackwood, … who is charming and therefore that will lure Camille out or… something?

… It doesn’t help matters that Keating, apart from being a notorious rake, is also a sot and a murderer. Yes, you read that right. Six years ago, he had an affair with a married woman, her husband found out, pursued him back to his house, and Keating shot him in self-defence — but definitely killed him, and has been skulking outside of polite society ever since, apparently at the bottom of a vodka bottle. It’s hugely unattractive. … Now, don’t let anyone think I’m saying that alcoholics can’t change or aren’t deserving of love — but none of that is ever addressed, except that he just magically stops drinking once he starts falling in love with Camille. The entire problem — and at the beginning of the book, it’s a huge problem — is glossed over.

… The “twist” ending is something I saw coming two hundred pages away, and the climax is a hastily thrown together jumble. Overall, Taming is skippable.

View Post

shared via WordPress.com

A Beginner’s Guide to Rakes, by Suzanne Enoch

A Beginner’s Guide to Rakes is the first book in Suzanne Enoch’s latest series, Scandalous Brides. Though, having glanced at the back covers of the other two, I suspect it would be better named the Tantalus Club series, since that seems to be the common thread yoking them all together. What is the Tantalus Club? Precisely the question that Diane Benchley wants you asking. The lovely widow has just returned from abroad, where her bankrupt husband died, leaving her with a mountain of debts to settle. She managed to do it by selling off almost all of his unentailed property except one location, a home in London. That, she gets into her own hands with a bit of clever forgery — illegal, but deserved, she feels, since her husband ignored her and then left her with nothing. She intends to transform the house into an upscale gaming hall, staffed entirely by women — but she needs some cash to get the enterprise started. So she approaches one of the wealthiest men she knows — Oliver Warren, Marquis of Haybury, who also happens to be her ex-lover. She and Oliver met in Vienna just after her husband’s death. They entered into a torrid affair, but after two weeks, he fled back to England, leaving her heartbroken. Why go to him? Because she has a sworn statement from another man labeling him as a cheat, an accusation which could ruin him. Oliver agrees to loan Diane the money — but with some hesitations and stipulations. … 

View Post

shared via WordPress.com

Review: The Bride and the Beast, by Teresa Medeiros

I know I liked this book once.

It was the first Medeiros I ever picked up, and I certainly liked it well enough to become a regular reader of her novels. But this really may just be one of those places where age and awareness have ruined something for me. … What’s really spoiled it for me now is the entire attitude of the heroine. She’s just so Special Snowflake because she reads and has held onto her virginity, and the amount of slut-shaming she heaps upon every other woman in the village, including her sisters, is actually just disgusting. It’s no wonder, really, that they were willing to feed her to the dragon, since she so clearly goes through life actively disdaining everyone around her. Apparently we’re meant to forgive her for this since she feels insecure about her weight and because she likes reading. I can tell, through the way she narrates her feelings about those traits, that she’s clearly meant to be a Reader Avatar, which is perhaps why this book appealed to me when I was a self-absorbed teenager who was convinced the entire world was out to get her because I was so ~tragically misunderstood~. Reading it again as a well-adjusted adult, though, the heroine just comes off as snotty and self-righteous.

Add to that the fact that Medeiros throws every Scottish stereotype in existence at this book, including thorough abuse of accented spelling, and it’s just gotten to be a rather painful read. These are all things I either didn’t notice or that didn’t bother me when I was younger. I hadn’t returned to this book in several years, and I don’t believe I’ll be returning to it in the future.

View Post

shared via WordPress.com

Kristina Deffenbacher, Professor of English at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/159709-lesser-shades-of-jane/#.UCHs_6LE1jI.facebook

(via cmtilney)

What 19th century romance novelists were doing, which most modern ones are not, is very carefully examining, discussing and criticising the world around them in a conversation that was almost entirely held between women. Novelists during this period, especially romance novelists, were almost exclusively women, as were their readers. Men were still expected to read and write poetry if they were going to read and write any kind of art, because poetry was the higher art form, and also accessible only through the classical education that was denied to most women at the time. So women wrote (and read) novels, which were derided as ‘low’ forms of entertainment until men like Walter Scott and Charles Dickens came along and legitimised the medium by writing the first ‘historical’ and ‘state of the nation’ novels. 

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is probably one of the subtlest and smartest critiques of the way women like Elizabeth Bennett - self-possessed, opinionated, well-read, passionate - were portrayed in the media in the late 18th and early 19th century. A young, ‘over’-educated woman with opinions of her own was probably the most derided figure in the medium, soundly mocked as utterly self-deluded, ugly, undesirable, raised by fools and liked only by fools; at best she’d end up eventually repenting all her previous opinions and meekly settling down to spinsterhood, at worst she’d end up dying tragically by the end of the novel whilst its real heroine, a stereotypical feminine angel, married happily having surrendered herself entirely to her husband. Pride and Prejudice turned this formula on its head, making Elizabeth the desirable heroine because of her opinions, her education, her self-possession, and fiercely criticising the idea that a woman who gives up her entire self to (the idea of) a man/a marriage, can ever be truly happy (see, Mrs Bennett, and Charlotte, even Lydia). 

In essence, the original, great romance novelists of the late 18th and early 19th century, were doing their best to engage with and subvert the problems they saw for women in particular in the world around them, especially in the ‘pop culture’ of the age, commentating in the only medium available to them. The current generation are interested only in pandering to popular culture, not taking it apart and shaking it up and calling out its bullshit - and therein lies the problem. 

(via gnimaerd)

eh, i’m not sure i buy it.

we remember books by Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte because they’re pretty fucking quality and have parts that remain relate-able across generations. however, if you look at 19th century literature, I can guaran-fucking-tee you that you will find extremely popular works of fiction that did marginalize women and generally uphold the status quo. We don’t hear about them because these things fade over time, leaving us with the false impression that earlier eras were somehow more creative and quality than our present generation. 

I mean, yes, Twilight and 50 Shades of Gray are popular right now (and I sort of wonder if 50 Shades’ influence has been exagerrated but I got no data to back up this hunch :P). But so are books like the Hunger Games (*coughs over how much money its movie made*) which, for all its flaws- and it has many- has an active, complex heroine. it has a thinly veiled critique of American imperialism and wars. and people are eating that shit up, and lauding Katniss for her strength. It’s not a book, but Homeland- which has a woman at the heart of the show- just won a freaking Emmy and is a critical and commercial success. And it also engages with calling out all kinds of societal bullshit.

If you deride this generation as universally shallow, you’re not being accurate.

(via gaius-cassius-longinus)

And two corollary points:

1) Men had been writing and reading narrative prose for a couple hundred years already. John Lyly, Thomas Elyot, Thomas Malory, Daniel Defoe, Miguel Cervantes, Goethe, Voltaire, Jonathan Swift — men had a few hundred years dominating the literary market, as so many other things. They were generally pointedly philosophical or satirical, not as straightforward narrative as we think of novels being, but they were the first few centuries of the form. And there were other ladies writing as well, long before Jane Austen and the Brontes — Aphra Behn was writing epistolary novels as well as plays during the late 17th century, for example.

2) You really, really, really mustn’t judge modern romance novels by Twilight and 50 Shades. Particularly in the last 15 years or so, at least among historical romance novels, the “bodice-ripper” has given way to books far more in the Pride and Prejudice mold. The heroines are frequently in the tomboy or bluestocking mien and are clearly meant to be the audience avatars — particularly for girls and women who want to be seen as special, as something different. In that respect, they occasionally have entirely different issues of sexism wrapped around them (slut-shaming and femininity-shaming), but they are certainly not of the “marriage or bust” stereotype. Bella Swan and Anastasia Steele are really not illustrative of all female heroines in romance (thank mercy).

(via taeko-yasuhiros)

Review: Sinful in Satin, by Madeline Hunter

I almost never fail to finish a book. And I did finish this one, eventually — but it took over a year. I lost interest on the first attempt last summer, then picked it back up and had to revisit the first half before I could go into the rest. I can’t quite put my finger, though, on why I had trouble getting into this book. It started slow, may have been the problem. The first hundred pages are an awful lot of the hero and heroine encountering each other in hallways and having awkward, abortive conversations, and the pace doesn’t pick up a whole lot from there.

View Post

shared via WordPress.com

Incurable Bluestocking Review: A Night Like This, by Julia Quinn

Overall, I quite enjoyed A Night Like This. It’s a perfectly solid Regency romance, and if it doesn’t have the laugh-out-loud humour of Just Like Heaven or the early Bridgerton books, it has instead a quieter sort of charm. And it does have its moments of JQ’s trademark snapping wit, My favourite:

Harriet let out a delighted gasp. “Maybe she has formed a tendre for one of the stableboys!”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Elizabeth scoffed. “One of the stableboys? Really.”
“Well, you must admit, it would be very exciting if she had.”
“For whom? Not for her. I don’t think any of them even know how to read.”
“Love is blind,” Harriet quipped.
“But not illiterate,” Elizabeth retorted.

There’s also a fair deal of romping while the Pleinsworths are in the country, when young Harriet, an aspiring authoress, writes a multi-act play featuring evil queens, dashing heroes, and wild boars. As ever, JQ does a great job with family-building, and the Pleinsworths are an entertaining bunch. The climax of the book felt a little rushed and a little, well, too adventurous, in comparison to the rest of the book which had not really had that sort of tone to it. This is definitely a book where you can believe in the Happy-Ever-After, though, because Anne and Daniel complement each other so well, and that’s quite heart-warming. While not among JQ’s best (it’s going to take an awful lot to ever challenge Bridgertons #1-4 for that honour, after all), this is still a very strong book and well worth the read. There are ways in which JQ is starting to deal with more mature themes in her books, and mature in a way that has nothing to do with erotica and everything to do with people — with psychological troubles, old wounds, recovering from past betrayals, and the damage that society can do to a person — and I find that very interesting.

Full review at the Incurable Bluestocking

Incurable Bluestocking Review: Lady Sophia’s Lover, by Lisa Kleypas

I remember being seventeen years old and recommending this book to a friend because “it has lots of different kinds of sex in it”. This is probably something of an odd trait to tout, and yet, it’s a lot of what sticks with me out of Lady Sophia’s Lover. That’s not to say that the plot and characters aren’t engaging — they are — but Kleypas somewhat pushes the norm for eroticism in historical romances here, and I say, bless her for it.

[…] This is a solid historical romance. If the circumstances of Sophia and Ross’s situation are improbable, the emotions are portrayed quite believably, and the sex sizzles. As always, I appreciate Kleypas’s willingness to step outside the usual class boundaries for historical romance. Lady Sophia’s Lover isn’t an all-time favourite, but it’s a book I always enjoy coming back to.

Full review on The Incurable Bluestocking

Incurable Bluestocking Review: Everything and the Moon, by Julia Quinn

This is my favourite romance novel of all time. And, I’ll freely confess, not for any really good reason. It has some of the flaws typical of Quinn’s earliest books (mostly down to historical vagueness or just plain inaccuracy), the plot occasionally bounces around a little inexplicably, the writing isn’t always spectacular, but… it’s still just plain my favourite. […]

So what is it I love about this book? Well, for one thing, Quinn’s sense of humour is in fine form here. When Robert, particularly, is on an upswing, he’s warm and witty and a little bit random, which is really entertaining. There are little nuggets of delight sprinkled throughout the entire book, and that makes it, on one level, a joy to read. But this is also a book about recovering from pain. It’s about regaining trust, and the bravery that takes. Victoria expresses the pain of loss, of finding out you put your faith in someone unworthy:

“You gave me the moon, Robert.  No, you did more than that.  You picked me up and put me right on it.”  There was a long, painful pause.  “And then I fell.  And it hurt so much when I landed.  I don’t want that again.”

[…] He paled. “I never knew you could be so vindictive.”

“I’m not being vindictive, I’m being honest.  And I didn’t just fall off that time.  You pushed me.”

[…] There’s also a lot of negotiation that has to happen in this book. Victoria actually enacts a lot more agency than your typical Regency heroine. She discovers that she likes working and likes the freedom that it gives her, and so she and Robert actually talk through that, and talk about how she’ll be able to still have that usefulness, that source of pride, and that liberty as a Countess. She forces him to see her as a person with her own needs and desires, not just as the object of his love, and Robert proves himself worthy by coming to understand that.

So, on top of Quinn’s typical quality writing, I enjoy that she addresses some tough issues in this book. The drama is entirely inside the characters, not because of a melodramatic plot, and that makes it very real and easy to relate to. She upends a lot of the stereotypes of love at first sight, and she shows how much work love can be. I appreciate the emotional honesty.

Full review at The Incurable Bluestocking.

This is one of my all-time favourite romance novels, and not for any really good reason. The book has some very definite flaws (the embarrassing cover being only one of them), and yet — I flipping love it. […] The book has some elements that stretch even the credulity of a romance novel. Actually, the entire conceit of the novel doesn’t make that much sense — both in the “lesson-giving” idea and in Georgie’s becoming the aunts’ companion when she’s still clearly on the Marriage Mart, hardly a retired spinster. There’s not a lot of logic there. And the book’s eventual resolution makes even less sense in some ways. But I forgive the book all of that because the characters are just so much fun. Just like Beatrice and Benedick, Georgie and Tristan “never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit between them”. Georgie’s also fond of treading on Tristan’s toes and breaking fans on him. Their conversations crackle with lightning wit and sexual desire, the constant parry, thrust, and feint of two people who know just how to hurt each other but don’t always want to. Enoch clearly conveys their familiarity with each other and the extremely tangled emotions involved in their situation. […]

The Rake is a delightful read, despite the somewhat bizarre conceits of the plot. Skate on through those, and you have a book populated with wonderful, witty characters, unbridled and effervescent. Not the deepest of reads, perhaps, but a thoroughly enjoyable one.

This is one that doesn’t stick with me quite as well as the other Wallflowers books, and I’m not sure why. We’re back at the Westcliff manor to marry off the last of the Wallflowers, Lillian’s impish sister Daisy. The story starts off with her getting pretty brutalised emotionally by her father, who calls her a parasite and dares her to explain how the world has benefited from her existence. Ouch. He informs her that she has till the end of the season to find an English aristocrat to marry (the reason they hopped the pond in the first place), or he’s taking her back to New York to marry Matthew Swift, his protegee. Daisy revolts at the idea; Matthew as she remembers him is scrawny, dull, and overbearing, with all of her father’s worst business faults wrapped up in an unattractive package.

Well, imagine her surprise when the man himself turns up at the manor, filled out and handsome and doing charming things like making wishes in the well and freeing geese from snares.