by SB Sarah • Tuesday, November 04, 2008 at 12:46 PM
Our Grade:
Title: The Unmasking of Lady Loveless
Author: Nicola Cornick
Publication Info: Harlequin Nov. 2008, ISBN: 9781426826016
Genre: Historical: European
Part four of my liveblogging an Historical Undone.
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV
Chapter Four: The Night before Christmas
Bliss is the word for it: they’ve “gotten to know” each other now that the hot sex has cleared the air, and it’s time for a merry Christmas and a merrier denouement and conclusion.
Lord Alex WALON has even offered to help with the chores.
HOLY CRAP.
But oh, noes! Melicent has discovered pages of Lady Loveless’ deathless prose, and is horrified - a blueprint for her seduction! He must have written it! No, he says, you did!
“You think that I wrote this filth?” Melicent demanded.
“It isn’t filth.” Alex felt moved to protest. “It is very well written and extremely erotic.”
HOLY CRAP.
So who is the author of this erotic, sensual prose that’s filled to the brimming tip with gossip and scandal? Who really wrote Lady Loveless’ erotic novels? Was it Melicent? Alex? The mutton?
I won’t tell - but I will say this: given the extreme brevity of the format, the leaps of emotional dedication and the combining-to-the-point-of-conflating sexual attraction with emotional ardor are elements to this story that the reader will have to forgive. But in four chapters, there’s a narrative worth pursuing, even if the protagonists are a little emo and prone to emotional outbursts and confessions, and the ancillary characters are flimsy and overly simplistic. Is it possible to embed a great deal of nuance to a character in four chapters? I don’t know. But it is possible to enjoy a morsel of romance over lunch.
Yum!
by SB Sarah • Tuesday, November 04, 2008 at 12:36 PM
Part three of my liveblogging of my reading of this Historical Undone.
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV
Chapter three: Melicent tries to concentrate on her mutton, but her hot husband is distracting her, to say nothing of her wastrel brother, the Feckless Aloysius, and her tyrant harpy of a mother.
Her stomach squirmed with sensuous longing. She wondered what on earth was happening to her....
Better check the mutton, ma’am.
Melicent ruminates upon her crush, which, since this is a historical is called a tendre, which I pronounce with as much nasal pretension as the name of that chick on 90210, Original Recipe, who was played by an actress in her 30’s. You know, Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhnnnndrea. So: taaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhndre is now the word of the moment in my brain.
...for although she had conceived a schoolgirl tendre for her husband on sight, she had never felt this immodest, wanton and reckless lust for him. He caught her eye. His firm lips curved into a smile that promised to fulfill every one of those wanton thoughts.
Whoa! So in chapter 1 she was cold, indifferent to his sexual attentions, and shy. Now she’s a twitching sexpot in an out of date ballgown, squirming over her mutton. Woo damn! Behold the power of writing!
Oh,but Melicent’s trip down the lustful corridor of memory lane has hit a cold moment:
She was no longer the starry-eyed innocent he had married four years before. She had worshipped him when first they were wed, and his cold preference for spending time on the Beaumont estates rather than on her had broken her heart.
On the estates rather than on her? No wonder she turned to erotic writing.
But given the heated glances they’re sharing, they’ll be on each other like a four year old political sticker on a hot car bumper, and sex will smooth the way to repairing their differences. Mark my words.
Wait, was I not supposed to reveal the ending? Oh. Sorry. Maybe it’ll end unhappily! Who knows?!
But soft! What misunderstanding through yonder plotline breaks? It is a conversation with double meaning, and she does not understand the “stimulating writing” to which he refers. Suddenly he’s kissing her ferociously, thinking she’s using an elderly neighbor for help with her writing, and she’s thinking he’s all hot and bothered by architectural manuals. Whoa!
she opened the door of her bedchamber and he kicked it shut behind them. Only then did he let her go, spinning her around, ripping the buttons from her bodice and the neck of her chemise with it.
Does that qualify as bodice ripping? Because if so, HA!
But soft again! What twist on standard operating cliche breaks upon this tender story? The honesty of her response, the heights of erotic fulfillment, the multiple - and I do mean multiple- orgasms, they point to an honesty of character, and he couldn’t believe that she’d possibly been unfaithful.
She was simply a very candid and giving person.
Of course. Who has very candid and giving orgasms, possibly in the double digits by the time the tally is done. But of course, sex clears away the interference that blocks communication, and instead of making things more complicated, makes them clearer and easier to resolve. Hell, given the heights of passion and the depths of the plunging thrusts, I can believe they’d clear the air to get a little more of that action. Lord Alex WALON is quite the accomplished bed partner. Lucky Melicent.
by SB Sarah • Tuesday, November 04, 2008 at 12:15 PM
Part two of my liveblogging of my reading of this Historical Undone.
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV
Ok, their estate in Yorkshire? Peacock Oak. Poor Alex WALON, I hope that’s not an endorsement of his endowment, or the sexual preferences of his brother.
Melicent’s mother apparently feels “sick as cushion,” whatever that means, and is a pain in the ass. Melicent is hiding downstairs writing. Writing the scandalous gossip? Nope. Architectural guides. Seems she’s also a technical writer. What a woman of excellent depth of talent!
And of course she doesn’t recognize her husband when he arrives, partially because it makes for a moment of tension, and partially because she was expecting the doctor for her hypochondriac pain in the ass mother. Yet again - characters are either the height of awful or noble and emo. But not so emo that I want to kill them.
Melicent is intimidated by her husband, his polish and style contrasting with her cold cottage, histrionic mother, and embarrassed financial straits. Although why she’s in such financial straits I’m not sure I get. She nurses a crush on her husband (awwwww, I love that) and a bucket of hurt feelings over his indifference and callous dismissal of her, but a sense of relief that within moments, he’s kissed her cheek, looked at her with an interest thick with intentions, and tossed her drunk brother, the feckless Aloysius, into a fountain.
“One way and another, Alex’s arrival in their household had set the cat amongst the pigeons.”
There’s going to be eating? In a Harlequin Morsel of Historical Romance? WORD UP.
So where was Melicent’s monthly allowance? Why was she managing a drunken feckless Aloysius, and a hypochondriac tyrant mother? And why was Melicent leaving Lord Alex WALON alone in her sitting room, the manuscript pages of her latest fiesty novel available for his prurient eyes?
Because it makes for some hot reading, yo. Word up to Lady Melicent.
Of course, the lust is coded as love within the text, despite his indifference to her earlier and his anger at her after that:
“Melicent stood in the doorway, dressed in an unfashionable evening gown. He found that he wanted to rip it off her and make love to her on the carpet.”
Was it “make love,” or fuck her silly? There’s a difference, but when you’re reading a Harlequin Morsel, the emotional connection must immediately be entwined with the sexual attraction. I mean, we’re working with a limited timeline here.
That said, Alex is so taken with his lustful thoughts, the new prose he’s stumbled across in her desk, and her lush pink lips that he kisses her with passion because he can’t help himself.
They broke apart as the dinner gong sounded. Melicent was panting, her hair ruffled, lips soft and damp, eyes wide and dark with desire. Alex felt another spear of lust go through him.
OW!
And with that violent thought, here endeth chapter two. Chapter three: they head into the dining room to eat mutton. HOT HOT HOT!
by SB Sarah • Tuesday, November 04, 2008 at 11:26 AM
I’m attempting to liveblog my reading of this Historical Undone. It remains to be seen whether I’ll be able to read and annotate by the end of the day, but I shall give it a shot.
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV
Lord Alexander whatever a lot of names Beaumont entered White’s, found no one would look at or speak to him, and challenged his friend Wheeler to inform him what was going on. Seems Lord Alexander whatever a lot of names Beaumont (no mention of his actual title, which seems odd considering the normal manner in which a peer would be referred to by his friends, no?) has a wife who resides in Yorkshire. Lady Melicent, the wife, according to Lord Alex WALON Beaumont’s friends, is writing sultry books about sexual escapades of the ton, barely disguising names and thus costing the humperating males their very rich fiancees when said fiancees read the spicy writing.
“Lady Loveless’s sources are impeccable. Which is why she has to be stopped.”
DUN DUN DUNNNNNNN.
Cue trip for Lord Alex WALON Beaumont UP to the WILD COLD WILDS of WILD YORKSHIRE!
*traveling music here*
Ah! In the course of ruminating on how very very angry Lord Alex WALON Beaumont is, we learn that he was forced into marriage to Lady Melicent by his father, Duke of Beaumont. Same surname as title - how Windsorian! But wouldn’t he have a courtesy title, and not his own surname? Unless he’s not the heir.
Ok, time to stop nit picking. Dammit Kalen Hughes, all that historical instruction is rubbing in. Damn You!
Oh ho! I am right! Lord Alex WALON Beaumont is a younger son, and his father pushed him into marriage by threatening to remove his rights to run the estates if he didn’t marry because his older brother, Henry, has a “preference for men” and wouldn’t ever marry. Yeah. Because being gay precludes him from running the estate? And there were no beard wives in the Regency? Paging Phyllida, Brotherhood of Philander, Party of three...Lady Phyllida, your table is ready.
So their marriage is unsatisfactory to Lord Alex WALON Beaumont, and he didn’t like it. Rage, he has it.
But he’s noble because he loves the land and the people on it and is the only one in the family who does. I suppose it’s a mark of the brevity of the format that the characters, even ones not formally introduced, are cast in such black and white terms. And he’s pissed off even more at the thought that someone - not him - introduced his wife to the ways of the fleshy flesh sword, because judging from the three lines he read, she’s got an intimate knowledge of the intimacy that couldn’t have emerged from their cold, lifeless coupling.
The plot! It thickens!
Melicent, it seems, is also a creature of innate nobility and dedication to family. She’d gone to Yorkshire to care for her mother after her father’s death, because, AND I QUOTE, “Melicent’s feckless young brother Aloysius was running wild.”
Oh noes! Feckless Aloysius is running wild! Raise the portcullis!
And Lord Alex WALON Beaumont is peeved because Melicent defied his wishes and left for for Yorkshire. Girlfriend stood up for herself, left his house, and now writes ferociously erotic fiction that thinly hides the true identity of its participants. Somehow, Lady Melicent has an impossibly accurate source of gossip that transmits the news from town to her frozen abode in Yorkshire, where she writes up the humpity hump hump humpity hump hump (Look at Frosty Go!) and sends it to be printed with such haste that the gossip in print is read by those who shouldn’t know of it, and lives… are changed… for… ever. Holy shit. She’s a blogger.
Behold Lord Alex WALON Beaumont, who now plans to “go to Yorkshire and seduce his errant wife according to the style laid down by Lady Loveless. He would expose her for the wanton she must surely be.”
And therein lies the end of chapter 1. Aside from that last part where he jumps to a bit of a conclusion and decides to go seduce his wife because she knows all about sex, based on the evidence presented by a bunch of uncomfortable men in a club who are mad that this writer has exposed them for the profligate sluts there are, these are some of my very favorite plot constructions:
1. Heroine with hidden talents, especially one who can skewer those what need skewering, and also one who hides those talents behind shyness, so that she is often underestimated.
2. Hero who must reevaluate his impressions of his wife.
3. Having the hero and heroine fall for one another already within the boundaries of marriage. I’m sort of a sucker for the ‘I thought I knew you but WHOA’ plotline - this may be a byproduct of my love for the first romance I ever read, Midsummer Magic.
So even though I’m picking the nits like damn and whoa, I’m having a good old time over here.
by SB Sarah • Tuesday, October 28, 2008 at 01:18 AM
Our Grade:
Title: Unleashed
Author: Lori Borrill
Publication Info: Harlequin Blaze November 2008, ISBN: 0373794347
Genre: Contemporary Romance
It’s rare that I read a category romance that doesn’t come from Jane, who is the source for all categorical recommendations. But it’s even more rare that she recommends a category to me AFTER I’ve read it and can then reply and say, “OMG. LOVE.”
Whee!
So I don’t make the mistake of forgetting the plot summary, here you go: California purse designer Jessica Beane is on the cusp of major design fame when she picks up Rick Marshall, a hot cop with murky depths of emotional pain, for a one night stand. Their morning after turns into a road trip from San Francisco to Reno then to Texas, during which she learns to depend on people and trust someone to take care of her, and he learns that moving on to find happiness and joy doesn’t equal betrayal. Plus they have frequent hot sex. Like damn.
In order to appreciate what I enjoyed most about this book, I invite you to eavesdrop on my inner monologue, which is absurdly active when I am reading.
Sarah’s inner monologue: Oh, no. The heroines creepy ass ex-con ex-husband is outside. On a cell phone. Stalking her after he followed her home from the bar at which she totally picked up the hero for a hot one night stand and .... great. She’s going to act like an idiot and not do anything to help herself despite said one-night-stand being a cop. He’s a cop! He’s right there! Go wake him up! Nooooooooo.
Lori Borrill: HA! I thwart your assumption that my heroine is TSTL!
Rick Marshall: (after heroine has explained everything that happened after she ran out of his apartment while he was still sleeping, including creepy-ass ex)
“So let me make sure I understand this.” Rick’s voice was slow and deliberate as he stopped pacing and stood ominously before her. “Your husband—”
“Ex-husband.”
“—is released from jail, crosses three state lines in violation of his parole, threatens and harasses you while standing out on the street—” Then he paused and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “And not once did you consider waking up the police officer sleeping in the room next to you?”
Sarah’s inner monologue: He calls her on it! He totally calls her on it! Go Hero Dude!
Lori Borrill: But wait… there’s more!
The anger in his voice squeezed her insides.
She swallowed, trying to decide how far back in her lifetime she needed to go to convey the fact that not once had anyone besides her grandmother ever come to her rescue. That no matter how many times her knee-jerk reaction was to believe someone might defend her, her good senses always won over, reminding her that in her life, Jessica Beane could only fully count on Jessica Beane.
Oh sure, her mother had stood up for her on occasion, which usually spurred some sort of fight at home. But whenever a choice had to be made between her daughter and her new husband, Jessie always drew the short straw. The trend started at home and spanned throughout practically every relationship she’d had. So assuming things would be different with a man she’d only just met was too much of a stretch even for her optimistic nature.
Sarah’s inner monologue: Wait, she totally has a valid reason for doing something that was kind of dumb? And it fits with her character, and isn’t some spastic effort to make the character more quirky? It’s… understandable? Sympathetic?
Jesus Flapjack. I can’t handle this kind of blatant stomping on my expectations. They make the book all good and hard to put down and shit.
Sarah to her inner monologue: Shut up and read.
Lori Borrill: Yeah.
Not only was the plot twisty and active and full of unexpected turns, but it kept a level of humor and joy to it, even when the characters were dealing with some painful shit. It could have been maudlin, but the heroine’s “Get up and get over it” attitude paired with the hero’s determination to help people professionally and personally combined with the plot made for a road-trip based romance that was fun, but packed an emotional wallop.
The other part I truly enjoyed was the heroine’s frankness, not only about her own history and the true lows she sank to personally at the hands of shitful people in her life, but about her sexuality and her enjoyment of sex. She likes sex, she’s attracted to Rick, and she has no shame about that. She’s terribly realistic, both as a character and in the way she views her own life: she knows what hard rock bottom is like, and since she’s been there already, facing it again means she knows how to build back herself up again.
But that rock bottom is part of why I can’t give the book an A. Jessica suffers because of the behavior of some people who really ought to have been looking out for her and not their own best interests, and in the end, I didn’t think they’d truly received any kind of come-uppance. Not satisfactorily enough. Yes, I just finished saying that she as a character was very realistic, and certainly there’s only so much she herself can do to these people aside from moving as far away from them as possible, but in the epilogue, it seemed that she’d forgiven or at the least still spoke with one person in particular who had behaved so horribly I was astounded Jessica, as ballsy as she was, would put up with having that person in her life for one more minute.
Of course, that causes me to question what I expect from a happy ending - not only do I want the hero and heroine to have a marvelous ending, but I want the bad guy to get it and get it good. I want people who behave abominably to get handed back to them the full effect of their behavior, or at least a good 60% of it. That might be the true fantasy of romance for me - I fully believe that happiness and romance and healing and hot sex happen to people now, in the past, in the future, on distant planets, in carriages, in cold lakes, for God’s sake, and anywhere in between. I totally buy that and pay retail. But the true fantasy of a romance for me as a reader is the restoration of order and the conclusion of the morality play within the romance narrative, where the good guy gets an orgasm (and the girl too, obviously) and the bad guy gets gloom, despair, agony, pain, and really fiery hemorrhoids.
I of course question whether my expectations - and my inner monologue - are placing unfair demands on the story. After all, Jessica is fabulously real, ballsy, courageous, and unbelievably strong. Should be plenty to be happy about, right? But her apparent continued relationship with relatives who caused her a whole bucket of hurt out of pure selfishness and arrogance causes me to question the overall happiness of her future, which is a shame because Jessica and Rick are a marvelous couple to read about and road trip with. My minor quibble about the ending aside, this book is great big heaping piles of sexy, 75 mph fun.
