Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Phyllida begins with Andrew Carrington awaking in his home with “no memory of the previous night” and a young male prostitute named Kit in his bedchamber. He’s horrified that he’s once again gone so far down the path of debauchery that he’s blank on the last few hours and seems to have brought his evening’s entertainment into his own home, something he’d never do. Andrew is, however, cordial but guarded with Kit, and is very frank that he’s not a member of the peerage but is “a sodomite, just like you.”

The scene changes to Andrew in the back parlour of his club, the Brotherhood of Philander, where he announces that he’s decided to marry. The members of the Brotherhood are all sodomites, and the club was founded to give them a safe place to socialize and also...socialize. The brotherhood members are appalled at the idea that a dedicated gay man would risk alienating and lying to a woman for an entire marriage just to secure an heir. Andrew does have several points in his favor regarding his ideal marriage, however: he wants to be honest with his wife so he can live his preference without, as he put it, becoming a fugitive in his own country. More importantly, he stands to inherit an earldom upon the death of his uncle, which gives him a larger choice of women, since some families would tolerate just about anything so long as the title and accompanying wealth were guaranteed.

While some of the members of the Brotherhood think that the line might be drawn a few yards away from permitting a sodomite husband, Andrew is not concerned. He doesn’t want a peeress, or even an heiress. He wants an attractive, sophisticated virgin who was brought up to be a lady. His friend Verney has a suggestion: a young woman in the country, the eldest of three daughters of a woman of somewhat questionable reputation.

Phyllida is a wise young woman who immediately suspects the letter Verney sends her mother detailing Andrew’s offer of marriage: if it seems too good to be true, it is. But when she receives Andrew in person in her parlor, fully aware that he’s gay, she finds herself attracted to him anyway. And he is captivated by Phyllida, by her honesty and her bluntness.

The girl nodded. “I see,” she said, smiling as if she had heard good news. “And so you would rather purchase a wife with whom you can live honestly.”
Andrew raised an eyebrow. “This amuses you?”
“It is more of a relief,” she said. “I worried that if you were traveling so far out of your way to find a wife, there must be a sinister reason.”
“And the truth does not worry you?”
“No. I had rather have a marriage based on honesty.”

At first I was very surprised at Phyllida’s ability to accept Andrew’s open preference for men, something that to any other young gentrified lady would be news so shocking she’d pass out cold. I wasn’t sure why she was so open-minded, though perhaps it is attributable to the questionable reputation of her mother.

But Phyllida has some surprising secrets of her own: she’s a gothic novelist, writing under an assumed name. In fact, Phyllida is so proud and protective of her career that she almost refuses to marry Andrew and accept an astonishing windfall of marital wealth if he will not stipulate in the prenup that he will permit his wife to continue her secret career.

Phyllida and Andrew are married almost immediately, and author Herendeen is as brave as Phyllida: she goes right to the part that any reader would be curious about. How will Andrew fare in the bedroom? Will he be able to consummate his marriage with Phyllida with any degree of success, since he is already attracted to her?

I won’t spoil that which for this reader was some very clever writing. But I will say that the scene where Andrew seeks advice from his brother, who is equally a rake but after a different gender, had me practically in hysterics.

The conflict in the story doesn’t actually come directly from Andrew’s relationship with Phyllida; the intricacies of that relationship are only one of the forces acting against their happy ending. There’s also a much-talked-about bet placed at White’s against the success of their marriage, plus Andrew’s deep attraction to another man, the involvement of the Brotherhood in all of their lives, an individual who has intentions of blackmail, allegations of treason and spying, and of course the everyday danger of living in a society where any number of sexual sins are tolerated so long as those sins are heterosexual in nature. To live one’s life as an admitted sodomite, and to frequent clubs and brothels full of men, was to risk just about everything in terms of social status - hence the founding of the Brotherhood.

All these different problems required solutions, and by the end of the book I felt like there was one resolution after another, to the point where the story felt like a miniseries gone three episodes too long. Moreover, some of the resolutions were Big Misunderstandings, and some were very very clever, and the inconsistencies were glaring.

However, there was a great lot to like about this novel, beginning with the writing style. Herendeen has a writing voice that matches the tone and restraint of the Regency, and her descriptions and dialogue are fantastic. Furthermore, the plot was fast paced, but each character had a degree of depth such that no one character was wooden or stock.

Phyllida in particular was an interesting character. I alternated between liking her a lot and wanting to bash her over the head with a hardback for her stubbornness. As a writer who publishes in secret, she has a great deal of courage and belief in herself and in her talent, and thus she is very frank and honest - a perfect match for Andrew. While reading the book I noted in a margin, “Phyllida has balls in all senses except the one that would matter most to Andrew.”

And speaking of balls, there is a third almost-protagonist to this love story: Matthew Thornby. Matthew is the son of a rich merchant-made-baronet, and he and Andrew are immediately attracted to each other. While this is a bisexual Regency, and Andrew is as much a member of a couple with Phyllida as he is with Matthew, Matthew’s entrance into the story and role from then until the final chapter is almost secondary to the much more intricate and clever relationship Andrew shares with Phyllida. But as the title states, this is Phyllida’s story as much as it is Andrew’s.

My problems with the book came at the end, though a solution for how to view those issues came at the end, too. Herendeen has said she was writing a book she always wanted to read, and in the post script notes, “as a romance, it is also a form of fantasy fiction. However, since ‘Phyllida’ is set in a real place and time, certain elements of the story are necessarily based on fact” (529).

I usually skip the Author’s Note at the back of a novel, but I’m glad I read this one because it made a difference that the author acknowledged her own inclusion of fantasy. Against the backdrop of very real and very severe penalties for sodomy in Regency England, certain modern elements in the story were jarring, and could only be accommodated in my mind by this admission of fantasy. Andrew’s position on abortion, for example, and the final scene that creates a happy ending for Phyllida, Andrew, and Matthew were as off-putting to me as Phyllida’s initial comfort with the idea of marrying a sodomite.

However, due to the elegant writing, the otherwise detailed historical accuracy and the likeable Phyllida and Andrew, I enjoyed Phyllida and the Brotherhood of the Philander. There were several, “Oh, come ON, now” moments, but overall, I looked forward to reading more of this novel every time I pulled it out of my bag.

Sienna, Virgin Extraordinaire and Ingenue-at-Large, is working for a temp agency in London as a freelance secretary when she’s assigned to an OMGHUNK of a Greek billionaire, Alex Stefanides. The usual chestnuts apply: she sees him and the world stands still; his hand brushes against hers casually, and she feels as if he’s just given her a tonguebath naked, ad nauseam. But she’s but a mere secretary. There’s no way Alex could be interested in her, right?

But to her surprise, Alex does display an untoward interest in her, and in no time flat succeeds in teaching her how to play Hide the Schmeckie.

Then, just when he has the tender young miss in his grasp, OMG HUGE REVELATION TIME: apparently Sienna’s older brother had done Alex’s sister wrong at some point in the past, and the shaggenating and the seducerating was all a big old revenge ploy.

To Jordan’s credit, this bit of silliness is resolved soon enough, as Alex finds out through his sister that he’s full of shit. I perked up a little, but alas, my hopes were dashed most cruelly--almost as cruelly as little Sienna’s head against the fender of a car.

Oh yes. During an overwrought conversation with Alex, Sienna runs outside, right into the rain and the bumper of a London taxicab and loses her memory. At this point, it would’ve been kinder to us readers and a whole lot more interesting overall if she’d just been killed outright and then have Alex embark on a hot homosexual affair with Sienna’s brother (COCK PARTY AHOY!), but no such luck. Instead, Alex marries Sienna in a fit of remorse, even though she can’t remember who she is, though she seems to remember she likes the cock well enough.

Yes, mouseketeers, you read right. This isn’t just a revenge ploy book. It’s a revenge ploy book with an amnesiac bride. What an awesome surprise. It’s like going to the free clinic to get your chlamydia treated, only to find out you have tertiary-stage syphilis. (Retrograde amnesia plots: It’s the tertiary syphilis of romance novels! Authors please take note.)

What will happen to our intrepid young lovers? Will Sienna regain her memory? Will the truth behind the circumstances of her marriage ever be revealed? Will any of this be explained with any semblance of believability? Will Sienna realize that a dickhead who would seduce and dump a girl solely to avenge an imagined wrong and then marry said girl without her consent is probably in-fucking-sane and she should run away as fast as her wee amnesiac feet will allow her to? Will the Chicago Cubs ever win the World Series again?

The only thing that saved this book from an F was the novelty of the format. This book is one of the Harlequin Ginger Blossom series of manga comics published in conjunction with Dark Horse. The artwork is pretty, and the purple ink provided the whole enterprise with just enough kitsch value so I ended up laughing incredulously instead of chucking the book against the wall, and really, throwing things is NOT a solution, because what if I’d accidentally hit one of my cats? Then I’d have a pissed-off cat AND a shitty book that’s no less shitty for having hit the wall. It is kind of bizarre to come across manga conventions like the little sweat-drops of consternation and the chibi eyes in the context of a Harlequin romance, but overall, the incongruity distracted from the awfulness of the book.

Oh, I was also disappointed that the sex scenes were very, very discreetly rendered. I’ve read a few Penny Jordan novels in my time, and they’re usually pretty spicy. Does my disappointment make me a perv? (Like I don’t know the answer to that without asking the question, ha!)

I honestly can’t imagine why anyone would read this book, because it’s neither fish nor fowl nor meat--though tofurkey might serve as an apt comparison. Diehard Penny Jordan fans would probably enjoy the full-length novel better, and manga fans who’ve never made forays into Harlequin novels would probably be puzzled or bored by the soap opera lite feeling of this book. If Dark Horse started translating books that were actually GOOD into this format, like some of the old Anne Stuart category romances, or even something by Vicki Lewis Thompson, this line would have the potential to be a lot of fun. As it is, I can only parrot what I said earlier: Bleurgh!

So: Does It Happened One Autumn break new ground with the romance novel, in terms of plot or subject matter? Nope, not really.

Is the story rather clunky in spots? Oh, definitely. A pretty good joke about Sisyphus ended up being just a tad overwritten and falls flat as a result, for example, and that business about the magic perfume, which came out of nowhere and pretty much went nowhere, could’ve been cut out without hurting the story one whit.

All that doesn’t matter, because ultimately, the book was a whole lot of fun, and Kleypas bludgeoned some new life into some tired old romance standards, i.e. Chaos Personified meets Mr. Anal Retentive. And while Marcus and Lillian bicker and clash quite a bit in the first half of the book, the arguments are rarely acrimonious. Kleypas does a great job of showing us how they’re having a whole lot of fun while they’re sparring, even if they’d rather be hung, drawn and quartered before admitting how much they enjoy each other’s company.

The two main characters are handled with a deft touch. Lillian is stubborn and outspoken and the stereotypical gauche American girl in just the right way. In fact, she reminds me quite a bit of Lily, the heroine of Then Came You, whom I also really liked. (Actually, given that the two of them are slim, dark-haired firecrackers with remarkably similar names, I can’t help but wonder if the resemblance was intentional or completely unconscious.)

Marcus has been featured in quite a few of Kleypas’s books, starting with Worth Any Price (a.k.a. That One Historical in Which the Characters Sweat a Lot), continuing with Again the Magic and Secrets of a Summer Night. I liked how he was different from the typical romance novel hero in appearance: short, stocky and not particularly attractive. I also like how he’s not hyper-sexual—read: “will hump anything with a pulse"—the way many romance novel heroes are, and it makes his constant horniness around Lillian that much more endearing at the same time it makes it less convincing. Because while experience and the logical bits of my brain say “Eh, a dude with a moderate to low sex drive will always have a moderate to low sex drive,” the dreamer in me says “But it’s DIFFERENT! He’s in LOVE! He was waiting for the right sexy vixen to unleash the ravening beast of lust within his breast!” Which is cheesy as all hell, but a powerful fantasy when tapped into the right way. God knows romances have used this particular trope this over and over again with the frigid, tightly-controlled, asexual heroine—not to say that Marcus is any of these things, it’s just that he seems a lot less humpy than the average romance novel hero until he meets Lillian, then BANG FIZZ POW hey babe let’s totally get to third base in the secluded butterfly garden wooooo.

But by far my favorite part of the book is the scene in which Lillian gets crazy stinkin’ drunk on pear brandy in the library. That scene? Charming and sweet as all hell, and I’m a big sucker for charming. Yeah, some of the innuendo involving Lillian trying to extract the pear from the brandy bottle was obvious, it still made me giggle. I’ve already re-read that part several times, and it’s a real stand-out in the book. I’ve read some reader reactions that indicate this scene squicked them out because Lillian was drunk and Marcus was sober; however, personally, I thought it was funny and revealing.

But the character I liked the most in this book is also the character I liked the most in the prequel, Secrets of a Summer Night. I’m talking about Daisy, Lillian’s younger sister. She’s sensible, minimally angsty, funny, mischievous, good-natured and yet not sickeningly sweet—in short, someone I don’t find very often in Romancelandia. I can’t wait to read her story. It looks like it’s going to be the last book in the series, though, because the sequel, The Devil in Winter, is going to be Evie Jenner’s story.

It Happened One Autumn is akin to home-made mashed potatoes: the flavors aren’t particularly complex, but they’re still pleasing and comforting. And just like when I’m confronted with a plate of home-made mashed potatoes, I gulped the book down in record speed. It’s not Kleypas’s best, but it’s definitely one of her better efforts.

This book is an unabashed homage to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It’s partly an epistolary novel, and it also uses the “I heard this story from this guy who was given the story from this guy who heard it from the guy who actually experienced the events” narrative device. Yes, there’s probably a name for that narrative device. No, I don’t know what it is, and I can’t be arsed to look it up. No, I don’t know what my English degree is good for. I mean, look, I’m ending a sentence in a preposition!

So: About 2/3 of the story is told via incredibly long-winded letters that no person in their right mind would write, with a big chunk of the rest being a story passed on second- and third-hand to the narrator, a device beloved to nineteenth-century authors to impart a cosy sort of feel yet provide a sheen of faux authority to their tall tales. The rest is the narrator telling her merry little tale, plus bits and pieces of ancient manuscripts.

I get what the author is trying to do. I can even pinpoint what this book reminds me of, from Pamela, which is the prototype for the “nothing much happens and the letter-writer is annoying and I wish she’d just get good and raped already but dear God I can’t stop reading gaaaaah” novel, to The Castle of Otranto, to Dracula itself.

The problem is, right around page 350, I suddenly realized: this is it. The most exciting bits of the book have already happened. Regardless, I couldn’t help but slog on anyway because I hoped there would a Stupendous! Resolution! To! This! Big! Old! Mess!

I was, as Garth Algar might say, denied. The ending is… but I get ahead of myself.

The narrator, a historian herself, says in the prologue that she wants to recount some Very Odd Events that happened when she was a teenager for posterity or a reasonable facsimile thereof. The story starts in 1972, when she finds some mysterious letters and an even more mysterious book in her dad’s documents. The book is Ominous: very old, odd-smelling, with completely blank pages except for a woodcut print of a big old bad-ass dragon in the center, accompanied by the word “DRAKULYA.”

She asks her dad—I almost said “badgers,” but the narrator is far too limp to do something that energetic—about the mysterious book. Dad turns pale, stammers, puts her off, but eventually starts unraveling a long, long, long story that took place while he was still in grad school.

Seems that you don’t find the book, the book finds you. After discovering the book in his library carrel while researching his thesis on Renaissance-era Dutch merchants (this sounds incredibly boring, but trust me, compared to this book, I bet that thesis would’ve provided pulse-pounding excitement), daddy-o brings the book to his thesis advisor and renowned historian, a right smart chappie named Bartholomew Rossi.

Rossi, in turn, turns pale, stammers, and then launches into his own story about how he found a very similar book under similar circumstances, and how his investigations have led him to the conclusion that Dracula is alive and well and living in Hell—or somewhere in Eastern Europe, at any rate. Before his investigations can go on much further, though, some Nasty Shit happens that turns Rossi away from the trail. Dracula, it seems, will not brook any trespasses, which makes no sense when you get to the ending--but more on that below.

Right after imparting part of his story to the narrator’s father, however, Rossi disappears from his office, with a puddle of blood on his desk and another sanguineous smear high up on the wall being the only clues. Thus begins the Hunt for Red Rossi. OK, Rossi’s not a commie, but as the narrator’s father finds out, he’s definitely been spirited beyond the Iron Curtain.

So: Story within story within story. All of them mostly boring, peppered with just enough “Oooh, creepy!” to keep me reading.

Later in the book, the narrator’s father vanishes, haring off to seek the narrator’s mother. The problem? She allegedly died when the narrator was but a wee bairn. However, daddy darling leaves reams and reams of letters behind, which the narrator reads over the course of a night—a feat I have much respect for, because that part of the book? Took me two weeks to work through. Seriously, I kept falling asleep every 15 pages or so.

The book is mostly daddy darling’s tale. He traipses all over the European continent, from Istanbul (hearing that name always makes me think of that They Might Be Giants song) to Hungary in his search for Rossi, and in the meanwhile meets and falls in Lurve with a feisty Romanian hottie. Peripherally, we have the narrator pursuing her dad after he vanishes, though conveniently enough, he leaves her all sorts of clues and the aforementioned stuporously detailed series of letters.

Besides the slow, slow, slowwwww pace, two other things bothered me quite a bit about the tale.

One of them is a peeve I’ve had since I was a child. You know how frustrated you were as a kid when you read a Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys book and you figure out shit wayyyyy faster than the allegedly smart, sassy investigators, leading you to wonder if they’d been hit on the head one too many times by nefarious kidnappers who don’t want them to figure the Secret of the Haunted Barbie Doll? Or when they ignore the easy, obvious solution in favor of doing something completely fucking retarded? The characters in The Historian do the same sort of thing several times. And I’m not just talking about the good guys—the bad guys do it, too.

My favorite instance of this sort of obtuseness revolves around a completely unremarkable copy of Dracula belonging to the narrator’s father’s university library. A creepy undead librarian attempts to remove its entry from the card catalog, Hot Young Romanian thing has checked it out, and everyone acts like it’s the only possible copy to have and OMG IT’S SUCH A DANGEROUS BOOK TO READ.

Dude. It’s Dracula. I doubt that book has been out of print since its first publication. While they’re making a fuss over the one copy, I’m wondering why the narrator’s father couldn’t have walked into the nearest bookstore and just bought himself a cheap paperback edition, and why the creepy undead librarian hadn’t torched all the bookstores in town carrying copies of this book if keeping people from reading this book was so stinkin’ important.

In the meanwhile, this intrepid reader contemplated taking a razor to the wrists—not hers, but the characters’; I thought maybe fresh blood would lure Dracula out and they’d solve the mystery that much faster, but alas, I couldn’t.

The other thing that bothered me is going to entail quite a bit of spoilerage. Please, for the love of tacos, don’t read this any further if you don’t want to know the resolution of the book, because HOLY SHIT it’s stupid.

OK, ready?

Dracula wants a librarian.

Oh yeah, that’s right. Dracula himself hand-makes all these creepy little blank books with nothing but a woodcut of a dragon and his own fucking name right in the center. He hands these out like candy to bright young academicians, though why he picked this batch, I will never figure out because a lot of the time they seemed about as sharp as a sack of wet hair. Oh, sure, he occasionally scares off the dilettantes with random acts of cruelty and mayhem, but ultimately, this is all a big, perverse test because he wants to pick the most persistent chump to help him catalogue his supah-secret subterranean library.

Sorry for the overuse of sarcastic italics, but: Dracula is going through all this trouble for a fucking librarian. What, the classifieds weren’t good enough any more? Let me tell you, if the Internet and Craigslist had been around in the 50s, we would’ve been spared this sorry story. Out of all the many “What the FUCK?” endings the author could’ve chosen, this is probably right up there with Dracula seeking a colon hydrotherapist for fun times and love a la Kenny Loggins.

(Actually, if somebody wrote an erotic parody of The Historian called The Colon Hydrotherapist, that would be so. fucking. awesome.)

And after all the stupendous build-up and the ominous atmosphere, the vanquishing of the bad guy happened so fast, I would’ve missed it if I’d blinked. In one of the few parts of the story that could’ve used more detail and drama instead of less, it was all “Wham, bam, thank you ma’am” and “Oh hey, bad guy’s dead.”

Yet, despite all its flaws and its uncanny ability to mimic Ambien, I still found the book readable. Initially, the slow pace built up the suspense and I raced through the book, eager to find out more; it’s really too bad that the pace actually slowed down and the suspense went nowhere. And no matter how saggy and baggy and slow it got, it says something about the author’s skill that I still slogged on, determined to find out the ending no matter how much I had to pay in library fines. The concept overall was pretty cool, and it provided reams of historical detail whose accuracy I cannot vouch for but which sounded pretty damn cool. And the quietly creepy parts were very, very creepy.

If this book were a piece of meat, it’d be in need of a really, really skilled butcher, one who really knew how to trim the shit out of that shit. As it was, it was a big, bloody hunk of meat with all the gristle and fat and tendons and icky crap attached to it, and I had to chew my way through all that. My teeth are stronger, I guess, and it didn’t taste all that bad, especially because I’m the kind of freak who generally enjoys the extraneous, icky crap, but I’m still kind of pissed off, especially since this is being touted as the most tender of filets.

(Yeah, I know, but hey, I warned you about the meat metaphor.)

But with an influx of criminals comes, well, an influx of crime. The problem is somewhat complicated by a few things:

1. Demons are stronger, faster and smarter than the average bear.

2. Demons are capable of draining a human’s etheric force, and prostitution based on energy vampirism becomes a thriving underground concern in Avvar.

Enter Inspector Adrian Phillips to help deal with these problems. A few years ago, he consented to having special implants inserted in his wrist which, when activated, give him demon-like strength and speed. This comes at a cost: many humans view these implants as abominations, and Adrian finds himself neither fish nor fowl nor meat. In fact, his wife divorces him because of these implants; she fears that he’ll grow a forked tongue and tail as a result of the demon technology.

Because of these enhancements, Adrian is given the task of policing demon-demon and demon-human disputes. However, despite the advantage the implants give Adrian, he finds himself at the losing end of a knife fight one night while looking for a missing boy. Dizzy from loss of blood and exhausted from the aftereffects of activating the implants, he collapses in a garden.

The garden belongs to Roxanne MacAllister, the bastard child of a famous singer and stage performer. Sarah is right on one score: Roxanne is quite the tiresome paragon. She’s an artist who specializes in painting nekkid people and goes around wearing trousers because she’s so radical and different, see, but she also adopts street urchins and rescues grubby, bleeding, unconscious men whom she finds in her garden, in the pouring rain.

Roxanne and Adrian develop the instant hots for each other. And I do mean instant. Erections and gushing moistness abound within minutes of them seeing each other, and lemme tell you, Adrian is able to sport a most impressive woody despite losing God knows how much blood and being only semi-conscious for much of the initial canoodling.

Roxanne is practically vibrating with glee at the idea of finally losing her virginity, but then disaster strikes: she finds out that her father is actually Lord Herrington, the Yamish ambassador to Avvar. Angst ensues. Oh nos! She’s half-demon! And what if she accidentally drinks somebody’s energy? Woe woe woe. But hey, it explains her funny-colored eyes, her amazing strength (bitch single-handedly carried Adrian into her house and she NEVER questioned where her amazing strength came from) and her propensity for mathematics (hey, is she part Chinese too?). Roxanne’s father’s is determined to become better acquainted with his daughter, but she’s not quite as enthusiastic about the idea.

At any rate, Adrian boinks her to a fare-thee-well, even after finding out about her demon father. Additional complications arise when Adrian goes back to work and is warned by his superintendent that associating with dodgy types like Roxanne won’t help with his police career. Adrian tries to stay away, but Roxanne’s supah-sexiness and her all-round awesomeness means he eventually tells the superintendent to fuck off and helps Roxanne out with a sticky situation—with predictable results.

There’s also a side-plot involving a fiendish demon known as The Dragon who’s performing wacky experiments on humans and demons, but unlike previous Emma Holly suspense side-plots, this one didn’t annoy me too much.

OK, so those of you who read Sarah’s F review are probably dying to know: why the drastically different grade?

Frankly, I think it boils down to the fact that I liked Adrian quite a bit better than Sarah did. One of the biggest stumbling blocks for her was how Adrian tried to break up with Roxanne despite how patently awesome she was. Personally, I understood why Adrian tried to do so. Keep in mind that a lot of the mores in Avvar were supposed to be similar to the mores of Victorian England. Two big reasons why I found Adrian’s attempt to break up with Roxanne sympathetic, not obnoxious:

1. He’s middle-class, but his family came from blue-collar working-class roots. Oftentimes, the people most rabid about social position and respectability weren’t the aristocracy; if one was rich enough and powerful enough, one could do whatever the fuck one wanted and other people just had to suck up the consequences. (Think about what royalty got away with, for example.) For the middle class, though, the stakes tied to one’s reputation were much, much higher on a personal scale. Adrian not being comfortable with the idea of dating, much less marrying a) a half-demon bastard of b) a notoriously slutty singer who c) lives in a bad neighborhood and furthermore d) has engaged in what amounts to pornography in e) an era amazingly restrictive and repressed about class, sex and illegitimacy makes perfect sense for me. In fact, I’d be puzzled if he’d had no reservations at all about associating with her. It wouldn’t have been convincing for someone from his era, background and values.

2. He’s really, truly dedicated to his job and wants to get ahead. Part of this entails marrying and associating with the right people. I’ve bitched hard before about how unconvincing I find it when a hard-nosed spy/businessman/cop whose work is his life abruptly tosses everything over for True Lurve without any apparent qualms. That Adrian thought of his job first and foremost made sense to me; after all, at that point all he knew from spending one week with Roxanne was that he liked her and that they’d had amazing nookie. So again, Adrian in this instance acted convincingly for somebody in his situation. I mean, hell, he loved his ex-wife and he got the implants in his wrist to get ahead, even though he knew they would likely freak her out; attempting to break things off with Roxanne before they got too serious made sense to me. In fact, I would’ve been puzzled if he’d been willing to defy his boss and ruin his career for the sake of a woman he’d known only one week.

And then, of course, about 20 pages after Sarah stopped reading, Adrian did the right thing, which cost him dearly. The fact that he came to this decision after a lot of struggle makes the sacrifice a hell of a lot more meaningful, and I’ll admit I teared up a little and sighed a bit.

The world-building in this book is quite excellent—better than just about any paranormal romance I’ve read, actually. Sarah thought it was pretty confusing (and some of our readers agreed with her), but I loved it and didn’t have any problems following along. I have only two complaints with it:

1. I wanted more. The little hints about demon culture and their highly stratified society were delicious, but I wanted more detail.

2. This is a nitpick that is by no means limited to Holly, but: what the hell is up with the dumb-ass names, man? Avvar for a London analogue? Why didn’t she pick something that sounded British, at least? And some of the names of foreign countries just sound far too similar to each other to denote distinct cultures and geographic spaces. Fantasy authors do this all the time, though, with Robert Jordan being one of the worst offenders. But then not everyone can build worlds like Tolkien—my reservations about Lord of the Rings aside, the man was a genius when it came to giving each region distinct, realistic names, languages and cultures.

Side note: Was anyone else as distracted as I was with the use of the word “daimyo” to denote upper-class demons? ‘Cause every time I read that word, I couldn’t help but picture this:

I don’t know if Holly’s use of this word was deliberate because she wanted in some ways to emulate the rigid hierarchies of feudal Japan, or whether she made up a word that just coincidentally meant something in Japanese.

Those are petty nitpicks, though. My biggest reservations with the book had to do with the overall tone and the erotic elements.

First, the tone: Holly has a very American writing voice. This is something I’ve learned to ignore with most romances set in England, and as long as no egregious errors are made (such as having eighteenth-century English aristocrats say “OK") I’m usually fine. In this case, if the voice had been consistent throughout, the story was good enough that I would’ve been able to ignore it much of the time. However, the extremely American tone was occasionally interrupted by attempts to sound British, which jarred me.

The erotic elements were similarly jarring. Roxanne and Adrian’s instant lust for each other was ludicrous, not sexy. The dude was stabbed, for crying out loud. Couldn’t he rest for a couple of days before sporting blue-steel boners that would’ve made John Holmes envious? The sex became more convincing later in the book and the relationship between Roxanne and Adrian developed, but those early encounters made me laugh instead of turning me on. One graphic description of Roxanne’s camel-toe (a result of her tight pants) had me howling so loudly that my husband looked up from playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to ask me what the hell was going on.

Overall, I’d recommend this book to people who enjoy steampunk, and to those who are willing to overlook some very silly sex and a hero who acts like a bit of an asshead for part of the book. It’s a fun, sexy read, and I really hope that Holly sets more books in this world; if nothing else, I’m very curious about what happens to Charles, one of the street urchins Roxanne adopted and a former child prostitute.