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

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.

The Demon’s Daughter is set in a parallel universe to Victorian England. By “Victorian” I mean that Victoria is the queen, but there are demons living alongside the humans, everyone is aware of this fact, and life proceeds as one might expect, with, as expected in Victorian society, a very strict and curious balance of power. Seems there are outcast demons who are crapful and take advantage of the human’s energy so as to fuel and better themselves, and certainly there are humans who are willing to pay for the privilege of a demon’s protection. Very similar to a vampire/voluntary donor relationship.

Then there are the daimyo demons, who are upper crust, and look down on the low class demon outcasts. Add to that the strata of rank at work in the Victorian human society, and you have one very confused Sarah. The only thing I could get straight about this universe is that there were more than the normal social levels of peers and undesirables to be dealt with.

I have not had much experience with Holly’s efforts at world building, but I have read several fantasy books and series wherein an entire universe was created that I could access and explore easily. But I could not for the life of me figure out some of the key elements of tension in this book.

First, there’s Adrian Phillips, a policeman who has been physically “enhanced” by the demons, who put implants in his wrists to give him a short period of superhuman strength with which to fight the demons. His decision to accept these implants put him on some kind of universal shit-list, since the demons look down on him as a mere human, and the humans think he sold his own humanity for his ambition. I think he wanted a fair fight, but what do I know? He’s uninteresting to me because he bemoans his exiled status, but then never really wants human contact anyway, diagreeing with the social restrictions standing between him and the heroine, yet never really indicating that at any time prior he gave much of a shit about what people thought of him anyway. He got those implants, he’s dismissed as less-than-human (or more-than-human) and he doesn’t much care, so why should social acceptabilty give him pause? No clue.

His partner in this confusing erotic romance is Roxanne McAllister, daughter of a departed and rather promiscuous opera singer. Roxanne has peculair strength and a gifted talent with painting. They meet because Adrian gets in a fight, gets the crap kicked out of him, and collapses in her backyard unconscious. She brings him into her home - literally lifts him basket-catch-style from the ground and walks into her house with him - to have him stitched up and nursed back to health.

Roxanne, she’s a seriously annoying paragon of virtue. She takes in stray children, finds jobs for them (and of course they are also miraculously talented individuals as well!) and accepts easily that her lover, the man to whom she is effortlessly attracted, has demon technology strapped to his wrist tendons. Further, she finds out that her father is a very prominent upper-class Demon, and an ambassador to the city they live in. She’s conflicted about this information about herself, but she confesses her half-demon status to her new bouncing partner, and he’s like, “Well, ok, shall we go back to bed?”

Now, half-demon status is something that no one thinks is biologically possible, and given the fact that demons feast on the energy of humans, particularly humans in orgasm, one might think he would have more concern over her ability to drain him to the point of needing a few day’s sleep. Certainly she is a little cautious and afraid of how she might inadvertently use him for his energy. Adrian? He’s all, “Please, ma’am, may I have some more of that splendid boinking?”

There are several sources of tension that I’m not going to read any further to see how they are resolved. She’s unacceptable as a mate for him, as her class level is a detriment to his social standing and even his supervisor tells him not to be seen with her. He’s a half-human demon-altered mega cop who is shunned my most human society, though evidence of this shunning is hard to find in the beginning. Seems he just doesn’t like people and wants to hunt down additional criminals in his time off. So what’s the problem? Shouldn’t being an outcast serve him in that endeavor?

Meanwhile, she’s half demon, but rather uncurious about whether that means she can bench press her house, or whether she’s just the same as she ever was, except that she knows who her father is.

But what gets me is how poorly the sexual elements and the tension fit together. It’s so jarring, like the paranormal plot starts up and then Holly grabbed the crowbar to wedge some hot-n-heavy erotic moments in there. To me, they didn’t seem to fit and were too abrupt to be truly erotic. They seemed more like paint-by-numbers elements: “It has been 20 pages and now we must fuck like bunnies on cialis. Let us begin!”

Moreover, Roxanne is a virgin, yet she displays an astonishing amount of sexual knowledge and technique. How did she acquire such a sexual repitoire? She paints erotic portraits, and her mother was a ho, but what does she know about blow jobs? How does she know the perfect manner for giving a hand job? Is this a latent strand of ho-knowledge suddenly becoming wantonly active?

Further, the pacing is so confusing to me: drama drama, world building details guaranteed to confuse the hell out of me, drama drama, hello, let us make the beast with two backs! Let us do it like the madness!

Then, what’s worse, they separate for a time, and then, for some undeveloped reason he takes her to dinner, whereupon he tells her he can’t be seen with her. Her reaction: she’s going to order something deliciously expensive on his tab (I’m down with that) and… change the subject entirely to get him all turned on so he can’t resist her. She punctuates her effort by sticking her foot in his crotch and threatening to go under the table and hoover down his traitorous wang.

Sadly, a good number of the Amazon reviewers are unable to see past the erotica elements to evaluate the plot, so I couldn’t point to anyone else who agreed with me here. Anyone who posted a bad review said it was porn and porn is bad, so of course I give their opinion about as much weight as a cold fart. But the good reviews went on about the fantasy of this world of demons existing alongside humans and I could not get into it.

To be brutally honest, it reminded me of the movie “Underworld,” which Hubby and I call “Underwear.” Vampires hunting demons? Whoo! Hot interspecies love between undead death hunter and hot sexy man-wolf? Whoo! Actual movie? BLEU DONKEY KOCK. Oh, it was awful. It had such potential and was beyond boring. And the sexual tension between the protagonists was so underdeveloped and flat that when the time came for them to get their kissy kiss face on, the entire audience groaned. A hundred people collectively groaned, having realized that this movie sucked.

The Demon’s Daughter had the same amount of erotic tension between the protagonists - that is, none that I could discern. Further, the areas of exploration that I thought were obvious - what does it mean that she’s a demon’s daughter? What can she do with that? And what does it mean for him whether people think poorly of him for his implants and think worse of him for being seen with her? - were left in favor of plot developments I couldn’t bring myself to care about. There are all these alleged forces working against two people who already live on the fringe of acceptable society, and yet he cares desperately about his own reputation enough to insult her to her face about whether he can be seen with her, even while he himself is desperate to be with her. This man is not worthy of her, super human strength or not.

She’s a remarkable balance of fragility and strength, and I was intrigued by her character, but I was so bothered by the scene where he announces his inability to be associated with the likes of her that I closed the book.

And this, dear reader, is where I stopped reading. So this will be where my review ends as well. 

But of course, this is no ordinary man-ho; he is Jack Devlin, the hero of our story. And he’s not even a man-ho. He’s a cutthroat publisher man, owner of a large printing and bookselling empire that grows larger by the minute owing to his predilection of selling books in cheap serial publication so the poor plebians around him can read and enjoy book ownership as well as the rich. Jack is there to discuss a professional matter with Amanda, but quickly figures out she has a different sort of professional matter in mind. Despite her protests that she’s changed her mind and wants him to leave, he seduces her into mindless pleasure and leaves without taking his own (what a man!), wishing her a happy 30th birthday as he goes.

When they meet again, and she realizes he’s not at all a man-ho, but instead a wildly hot and wealthy businessman, one who has bought her first manuscript and is intent on publishing it with or without her approval, she is furious, but also intrigued. Did I mention, he’s hot? And a publisher? You see the attraction, then.

I read this book over the week prior to my own 30th birthday, and while I am married and pregnant and definitely not a virgin (the baby just kicked me as I wrote that - HA! says Baby Bitchlette) I can relate to 30 being a milestone that tends to shock one into evaluating the past 30, and the next 30. It is something of a gateway into true adulthood, that big “3” at the start of one’s age. So I can understand Amanda entertaining the idea that, as a spinster, she has nothing to lose by losing her virginity, as she sees no option to marry in her future. She spent her eligible age caring for two invalid parents, and she’s reached such a level of intellectual success with her novels that no man would want her, as she is both too old and smarter than they are.

I have to say, I enjoyed the idea of Amanda taking matters into her own hands and divesting herself of her virginity, giving herself the sexual experience she’d never had, and I love the misunderstanding that conspires to give her a night of memorable climax with a man who already appreciates her intellect and isn’t going to be intimidated by her sizable creative brain.

I liked Amanda, as well: she’s practical, clever, and very intelligent, and while she recognizes that she’s been dealt a short hand by being dismissed as the spinster aunt by her own siblings, and left to care for her parents without a bit of help from them, she also is very proud of herself and her accomplishments. She’s a shade of Jane Austen - a popular writer who examines the society around her and has plenty to say about it in the context of her fiction. I’m also a sucker for romance novels about writer heroines, as I find writers writing about writers to be a most interesting character challenge.

I somewhat liked Jack as well, in so much as he was a tortured hero with a horrible childhood, looking for a way to his own success, and making sure he brought his friends with him as he rose to his goals. He works hard, and he’s shrewd, clever, and knows exactly how to make good money with his publishing ventures. In short, as a hero goes, he’s good looking, smart, savvy, rich, and wants to make the heroine happy at any cost.

I bet you saw that “BUT” coming down the road three paragraphs ago. There is a very large and irratating “BUT” in this novel, and it’s something of a spoiler. However, I’m not sure I can discuss why this book left me with more of a sneer than a smile without discussing this plot and character decision in detail. So if you’re not interested, I’ll end here with the following: This book is a lively story with characters that I liked, though they didn’t have much to struggle against on the whole. Despite the one flaw that I found throughout the story, which some readers might not even notice, I did enjoy reading about Amanda and Jack, almost to the end of the book.

Now, let me deliver the straight dish:

The minor problems with this book are indeed minor, and slight quibbles. In the book, there was no major conflict for Amanda and Jack to struggle against, except that she thought he was too wild and unsavory a match, considering his ruthless reputation. Professionally speaking, they were perfectly successful at the start of the story, and there was no danger to either of their successes, except that they might, God forbid, have more. Their struggles were internal for the most part, and as such didn’t amount to much. Their disagreements were either resolved midway, or addressed and dismissed after a few pages. So I never got a good sense of what the big deal was as to why she and he resisted one another for 375 pages.

The biggest problem I had with this book, however, appeared over and over as I read, and towards the end, as I mentally tabulated what grade I’d give the novel, I kept having to knock the grade down as again and again this problem appeared. I’ve seen it in other novels, too, and it bugs the shit out of me:

Heroine: Oh! A real and honest problem! An emotional difficulty, a deception, a fear, a real problem!
Hero: Here! I shall make sweet love to you so that you will escape this worry through orgasm and not really deal with it!
Heroine: Oh! But we must FACE this problem! I am practical and pragmatic! We must address, discuss, and manage this problem that is giving me fits!
Hero: Come here! I shall play with your woman parts and you shall stop making this noise about problems!
Heroine: Oh! But… Oh Oh OH!

Yeah. Jack’s a big one in the sack and every time there’s a plot twist that gives Amanda a bit of worry, out pops Jack’s jack to pump her problems away. Avoidance much?

From the manful “claiming” of Amanda through sexing her up, with passionate variations of “Say my name,” which are in this novel centered around the “Who do you belong to?” variety (I kept thinking Jack was going to ask her next, “Who’s your daddy? WHO’S YOUR DADDY?!") to the steamrolling over her very real and valid anxieties over their relationship and subsequent marriage, Jack did little to perform as an equal partner in the relationship, except where sex was concerned. And that kind of control over her, where he used her sexual pleasure to secure her acquiesence, got old with me really fast. Jack even uses their sexual intimacy against her, threatening to publish news of their sexual adventures to the entire world should she try to leave him. Ugh, I say.

But the worst part was the very end: Amanda gets pregnant, causing more “big misunderstandings” and the screwing over of a very kind, respectable, and genuinely nice suitor, who of course she has no real passion with, and in the end, suffers a miscarriage. She withdraws from Jack, convinced that he only married her because of the pregnancy, and is devastated by the loss of the baby she did indeed want to have. Jack goes barmy trying to figure out ways to reach her, so of course he goes back to his old bag of tricks, bringing a tray of food and the jack-in-his-pants to woo the sorrow right out of her - three weeks after her miscarriage. He whips out his magic bag of sex and procedes to throw her legs over the arm of her chair and go down on her, despite her protests that she’s not ready. There’s even fruit involved in the kinky sex play, and really, the whole scene made me look at the book with an expression of horrified fury. The hero dismisses the heroine’s agony, and proceeds to override her desire for him to stop, and I’m unable to adequately express my horror and revulsion at the entire scene.

At the end of the book, prior to the Worst Oral Sex Scene Ever (TM Candy), Amanda says, “You’re a bully.” And Jack replies, “And I’m bigger than you.”

Wow. What a man. It was quite irritating really: I wanted to like so much of this book, from the way Amanda comes to the decision to live her own life in consideration of nothing and no one but her own desires and happiness, to the professional element of the story wherein she’s a writer and he’s a publisher, and they’re working on an updated edit of her first novel together. But Jack spent too much time seducing the real issues of their relationship out of the way, and while Amanda got all that hot monkey lovin’, I was left to read about it in cold disgust, and since Jack didn’t save any of that sexx0r for me, this book gets a much lower grade than I thought to give originally. 

The book starts off promisingly enough, then degenerates into a morass of misunderstandings that includes every one of the not-inconsiderable secondary cast of characters. The ending is also one of the most odd, drawn-out resolutions I’ve ever read; it’s almost like watching clowns pouring out of a car: just when you think “OK, the last clown is out, show over” another one hops out, does a soft-shoe then drags out yet another compatriot hidden in the trunk, who in turn reaches into the car and presents to us a midget hidden under the back seat.

Gina, Duchess of Girton was married to her childhood friend Camden when she was only 11 and he was only 18. Why exactly they had to be married remains a mystery to me. It’s all incredibly silly: Gina is illegitimate, the product of her father’s liaison with a hot French countess (gotta love those wacky, slutty French countesses). She was unceremoniously dumped at his household when only a few weeks old because the countess didn’t want to be burdened with a child. Her father and her stepmother decided to raise her as their own, and the secret is quite neatly kept until she’s 11, when a blackmailing letter arrives out of the blue threatening to out Gina’s bastardry.

So what do these seemingly rational adults do? Well, Gina’s stepmother’s brother—then the Duke of Girton—calls his son, Cam, down from Oxford to marry the 11-year-old he’s known as his first cousin all his life. How or why this averts scandal or foils the blackmailer completely escapes me, but for whatever reason it worked. Maybe the tactic was so outrageously silly that poor blackmailer was confused and reckoned he’d better stop demanding money from a bunch of lunatics.

Unfortunately, Cam is so outraged by the whole business that he literally leaps out the window after the ceremony (yes, this is indeed a silly book, and the more I have to recount the plot the sillier it seems) and runs away to Greece, where he is free to follow his heart’s desire: sculpt naked women out of marble.

Eleven years down the road, Gina falls in love with Sebastian, Marquess Bonnington, and writes to Cam requesting an annulment. Cam decides to be a good sport. He’s quite fond of Gina, after all, and has kept up a correspondence with her all these years; he just doesn’t want to be married to her. So he returns to England to file the papers. It seems simple enough—that is, until he meets Gina at a house party.

Oh my, the little girl has filled out. He finds himself attracted to the lively, somewhat dashing young woman Gina has become. Then he meets her fiancé, Sebastian. He very accurately classifies him as a prig, and he rapidly realizes that the two of them will be miserable together. Gina is coming to the same realization as well. Sounds good, right? But there are so many obstacles in their way…

Oh, wait. There aren’t. But this doesn’t stop them from manufacturing a few from thin air, of course.

And then there are the secondary romances. First of all, there’s Gina’s friend, Carola Perwinkle. She has been estranged for years from her husband, Tuppy. Why? Because losing her virginity hurt. Oh, and because Tuppy likes to fish and talk about fishing. No, I shit you not. Boiled down to its essence, these are the two reasons for the estrangement. Carola abandons Tuppy in a fit of hysterics mere days after wedding, then in a series of increasingly silly misunderstandings, pushes off the possibility of reconciliation further and further.

Their eventual reunion is sweet enough that it made me go “awwww,” but it also left me feeling incredibly depressed because I just absolutely KNOW Carola is going to pitch a shit-fit over something inconsequential a couple of days down the line and poor Tuppy will be too thickheaded to figure out anything and she’ll just end up moving out in a huff again and really, when I think about Carola all quivering and teary-eyed YET AGAIN I want to bawl out of sheer exasperation myself.

And then there’s Esme Rawlings. You know how in a group of fictional girlfriends there’s always the smart one, the stupid one, the tomboy and the slut? Heh. Anyway, Esme and her husband, Miles, have been estranged for years and years, though for much better reason than Carola and Tuppy: Miles is much older than Esme, and he meets and falls in love with a woman he’s much better suited to after he’s married. Esme has quite the reputation for being a heartbreaker and harlot du jour, though of course it’s quite exaggerated. So guess which completely inappropriate hunka burnin’ love she longs for. Just guess. To give James due credit, she gave plenty of clues but I still didn’t see it until it was right in front of me.

But man, the showdown between her and her light o’ love (I understand their love story becomes a running theme in the three books that follow Duchess in Love) towards of the end of the book just about takes the cake for Dumb Misunderstanding. Ah well, at least the author puts a fresh new spin to it, instead of resorting to conniving parents, cross-dressing and/or long-lost brothers with criminal tendencies.

Oh, wait, scratch the last one, because believe or not, there IS one of those in this book, though he doesn’t belong to Esme, and he doesn’t really cause any misunderstandings. Why exactly he’s in the book at all is a mystery, but then why anything is in this book tends to be pretty enigmatic on the whole, so why mess with a system like that?

The only reason why this book doesn’t dip right into the D range is because of the extremely engaging characters. Gina, Cam, Esme, Sebastian, and yes, even Carola and Tuppy are adorable and fun to read about. Just when I think that, say, Gina and Carola have shot right into the stratospheric heights of stupidity, never to return, they redeem themselves and figure shit out. Or at least Gina figures shit out; Carola just whimpers about how chubby she is and quivers like warm jelly, which, come to think of it, pretty damn well represents what’s sloshing around in her brain box.

So in short: a very entertaining book on the whole, though the plot is… frantic? Yes, frantic and somewhat incoherent. Again, not unlike Carola. Hmmm. I do have to give it this: I did keep turning the pages very briskly just to see what the hell else was going to happen. I just wish I didn’t get the sense that while writing the book, James had a huge wheel in her office labeled with every plot contrivance known to literature (and a few new ones she made up on the spot) and that every 55 pages or so she gave it a vigorous spin, just to keep us on our toeses.

The primary characters are Meredith “Merry” Vance and Nicolas Craven. The cock in question belongs to Nicolas, in case you were concerned that it was that kind of romantica. Merry is the daughter of a Duke with three older brothers, all merrily married (sorry couldn’t resist that one). Merry is older than she should be to be “on the market” and is a outspoken tomboy, with freckles, frizzy curly hair, and no delusions that she’s beautiful. She’s horse-mad and quite the competent stable master, but her family, particularly her mother, despair of seeing her married.

Merry has decided that she doesn’t want to be married at all. She inherits a small estate from a grandmother in ten years’ time, and is trying to hold out and remain a spinster so she can become a modestly wealthy spinster in the future.

Her mother, however, is being blackmailed into seeing her married off to her husband’s estate manager’s son, a shy, but kind and good-looking man named Ernest. Merry’s mother has gone to great and cruel lengths to keep her daughter from being pursued by other eligible men, and as a reader, you want to hate her. And that’s just fine because the mother is eminently hateable.

Nicolas Craven is a painter with a slowly-growing following among the ton. He’s just finished a portrait of Merry’s father, and he, and Merry, once she sees it hung, feel he’s captured the essence of the older aristocracy: haughty, but completely confused as to what the world is becoming, and powerless to stop it from changing.

Craven is popular as a portrait artist, but only among male members of society, as he is a known rake who frequently entertains loose women in his home. “No decent woman would sit for him,” Merry’s mother says. Oh, ho.

Merry’s mother has meanwhile employed similar blackmail techniques to persuade Merry to marry Ernest, and Merry finds herself in a position to lose those things she truly loves and cares about, including her maid and her stable of horses, in order to preserve her precious freedom.

And so Merry decides, after a deus ex machina encounter with Nicolas in the street, to run off to his house, and sit for him as a portrait subject, thereby ruining herself for marriage and getting her insistent parents off her back.

Merry does not tell Nicolas she is the Duke of Monmouth’s daughter and agrees to sit for a nude portrait of herself cast as Lady Godiva, while living in Nicolas’ house. Further, she agrees to learn the arts of the nouque. Nicolas does not allow Merry to think she is anything but another woman in a long series of conquests for him, even though he finds himself falling for her, and reminds her that her time with him lasts as long has he has any interest in her physically. His friends imply that there is no alternative ending to their story, even as Merry equivocates whether the erotic pleasures she experiences with Nicolas would feel half as good if she weren’t head over curls in love with his Craven self. He wants to hump her; she’s in love with him and therefore is able to enjoy the humping. Odd how I didn’t expect a emotional-attachment-precludes-sex element in a historical romantica, even if it is a Holly novel, where there is a happily ever after ending for at least two of the principal characters in most of her stories.

Nicolas gives Merry a thorough education in the erotic arts, but within the realm of his cock lies the first problem I have with this book. I know that the strict sensibilities of the Victorian era were marked with outrageous subtexts to express all that repressed sexuality. Flower language, for one - I once read a brief article about how one bouquet of the wrong flower -or the right one - could send some serious humpty dance messages. And it’s not like I’m talking about the giant sex flower, either.

Because I was expecting some subtlety in the erotica, or perhaps some acknowledgement of the societal suppression or their deliberate release from that repression, the erotic language of the book struck me as jarring. I can’t decide if it is truly fair to discredit the author for historical details that I was expecting, but I can demerit my rating of the book for the often-startling introduction of the naughty talk used by the characters, particularly the hero. At one point, they’re dancing around their feelings for each other, after the heroine has been ill to the point that the hero worried for her life, then the hero says he wants to “cram her full of every inch of [him] [she] can take.” Well, now. Just slap me over the head with your giant wang, why don’t you, and tell me what you really want to do?

My other problem with this book was the multiple lies the characters tell one another. I could see the big crisis of their relationship coming a mile away: Merry would be able to see past Nicolas’ deceptions and forgive him, but Nicolas would feel that Merry had deliberately made a fool of him, and lied about her true name and social standing to trap him. Aside from the ever-popular “I lied but your lie was much worse” device, how did this man not realize the woman posing for him was not at all a housemaid, and was in fact well-born and well-bred? I mean, he remarks upon her posture, her bearing, her manner of speech. She knows how to dress, and has excellent social skills, even with his friends, who are certainly of a lower class than both Nicolas and Merry. How did he not figure out who she really was?

Further, MINOR SPOILER, he never thought to wonder why a boy the exact age as his estranged and distant son has suddenly taken up a position in his house, exhibits no training or skills in the house-caring department, and wears a scarf over his head to hide his face. I couldn’t even tell you the number of times I thought to myself, “Oh, come on, dude.”

This almost became a novel wherein I could write in the review that the hero was indeed too stupid to live, except that he didn’t so much endanger his life blithely doing what he pleased; he just couldn’t get a clue if he danced naked in a field of horny clues wearing clue musk during clue mating season. 

Another odd piece about this book was that it couldn’t seem to decide whether it was a romantica with exceptional sexual activities featured within it, or if it was a historical romance with some hard-core sex talk thrown in. If it were anyone but Emma Holly, I’d say that the author didn’t really understand what romantica and erotica were. It’s not a romance with the word “cock” and “pussy” thrown in like icing on the cupcake. Having read other Holly books, I expected some elements of sexual exploration, not just explicit descriptions of his ranging wang and her endless orgasms.

There is some mention in reference to the hero’s backstory of ménage a trios with two of his friends who are a Victorian version of a swinger couple, though they seem to engage in affairs to inspire jealousy, but there’s no specific mention of sexual adventures on the part of the hero or heroine, aside from deflowering her and then having sex in untenable positions.

For example, at one page, the heroine mentions how she is petite when she stands in front of the hero. Then, two pages later, they have sex with her facing a door, with the hero behind her. Completely unrealistic – I’m 5’4” and Hubby is 5’8”, and there’s not any way we could have sex standing up. I mean, the height difference is impossible. Even in the few pornos I’ve seen, I’ve spotted a small bench or stool under the female so she can be propped up to the correct height. A nitpicky point, perhaps, but enough to yank me out of the story and dump me back into reality. Unfortunately, I was at that moment sitting next to a particularly stinky person on the train who didn’t cover his mouth when he coughed, and would have much preferred to stay in the story than experience the reality next to me.

To define specifically why I scored this book at the low grade that I did, I have to explain that the story itself was good. Twists and turns, adventures to other countries, and protagonists that I did indeed like, though they often got on my nerves, all made finishing the book a pleasure. But did this book need to be an erotic or romantica novel? No. Did the erotic elements add to the story? Were they elements of his or her character, and did they serve to develop or explore new facets to their personalities? No. It was a fairly done romance with erotic language thrown in. It wasn’t even a spice, like a saffron or a nutmeg taste to a fine sauce. It was like finding whole gherkin pickles in your consommé – jarring and not entirely enjoyable.

The shades of the hero’s backstory and sexual history were interesting, but there wasn’t enough specific interest to make it a valid or valuable part of the story. Further, if he really was that much of a sexual libertine, there was a lot more he could have done with the heroine than what all they did, particularly as a device to explore trust in another person even on a shaky unknown foundation to a relationship. She didn’t know all that much about him, and he didn’t know who she really was, but there were all kinds of soul-shattering orgasms going on. Sexual acts that require trust would have certainly added a spicy element to the development of their characters and to their relationship, and would have justified this being an “erotic historical.” As it was, it was a romance with a giant plastic cock glued on the front.