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.

Kate Wexford is “assistant head of ER” at a respected hospital, a woman who describes her work as a physician as “not just a job; it’s who I am.” She finds herself embarrassingly enraptured by a portrait of an 18th century Scottish Highland Clan leader, a man she fantasizes about as if he was real and who unexpectedly becomes real when Kate gets a helpful hand into the museum portrait and into the world of the 1744 Scottish Highlands and the bed of Darach MacTavish.  Luckily for the two surprised leads, Darach’s close friend Hamish turns out to be a time traveler himself who lives simultaneously in Kate and Darach’s temporal planes and who informs Darach and Kate that they called out to each other through time (I didn’t even bother trying to parse through all the rules here, because it only got me frustrated when I tried it during The Time Traveler’s Wife).  Their fates are entwined, Hamish informs them, connected through Darach’s impending death at the bloody Battle of Culloden (although the real battle took place in 1746, LaBrecque has it as 1745), which will also put an end to the MacTavish line.  The romance and the story unfold from there, as Kate and Darach travel back to Kate’s home in 2006 Atlanta in pursuit of information and a strategy to alter Darach’s apparent fate.

What worked best for me in Highland Fling was the interaction between Kate and Darach.  Both characters are ostensibly leaders, and Darach especially is portrayed with a nice balance of cocksure confidence and circumspect concern for the welfare of his Clan.  For the most part I felt that Darach escaped the irritating quasi-alpha fate of having his protectiveness morph into patronizing domination.  It was easy for me to see how his growing passion for Kate was intertwined with his sense of responsibility to his people and not an abandonment of something that supposedly defined him. Kate was a little more difficult for me, because for all her assertions that medicine is her life and her identity, she became quickly and wholly consumed by Darach’s plight and her growing feelings for him.  Several critical decisions Kate made late in the book were particularly troublesome for me, because they seemed to undermine a key element of her character and were made with absolutely no articulated contemplation of their real implications and likely impact on her identity and fate. I love strong and independent women in Romance, but professionally passionate women aren’t necessarily personally wanting and emotionally deprived (it’s often quite the opposite, in fact, at least in real life), and I wish we could move away from this stereotype in contemporary Romance.  While I think I understand what LaBrecque was trying to do with this “healer of men and their souls,” Kate felt relatively shallow to me.  So while I understood how two people from very different temporal moments could find a deep recognition and understanding of each other, my experience of Kate and Darach’s relationship was not very emotionally intense for me.  While I enjoyed their story, I didn’t find enough dimension in the protagonists to really bring their drama to life in my mind or heart. 

The greatest pleasure of Highland Fling for me was the banter between Darach and Kate, as she teases him for his Highland bravado and he teases her for her liberated sass, generating relationship stereotypes and skewering them at the same time:

Darach:  “I love you you daft, crazy, lusty wench.”
Kate:  “I traveled over two-hundred years to find you.  You’re everything I never wanted in a man – arrogant, bossy, too sexy for your own good, and gone in less than a week.”

There was a clever scene involving a condom that LaBrecque used to very good effect, an interesting and amusing common-sense solution to sexually involving two characters early without the promise of everlasting love, and while some of the pseudo-Scottish speak felt over the top and inauthentic (worst line in the book:  “Ah, Katie-love, you have a bonnie set of tits”), it wasn’t so overdone as to be intrusively obnoxious.  There were a few unbelievable moments, most of which related to the ease with which Darach adapted to 21st century life and technology, and frankly I felt that two people with Darach’s and Kate’s intelligence could have arrived much more quickly at the solution to Darach’s dilemma, but the writing and the relationship held a certain good-natured cheekiness that made my reading experience more pleasant than I expected based on the premise of the book.  I haven’t read Outlander and have no idea how that would have influenced my response to this book, but even I recognized some significant superficial similarities that made me hope Highland Fling was written in homage and not duplication.  All in all, I found Highland Fling amiable if not memorably substantial.

Before I wrote this review I visited Harlequin’s writing guidelines for Blaze and was struck by the following:  “The series features sensuous, highly romantic, innovative stories that are sexy in premise and execution . . . and [w]riters can push the boundaries in terms of characterization, plot, and explicitness.” I thought a lot about those two concepts – innovation and boundary pushing – trying to decide whether I should measure them differently for series fiction than I would for single title books. Fair or not, I realized that my expectations for series fiction are somewhat different.  For example, while I noted quite a few clichés in the writing of Highland Fling (i.e. he “kissed her with a need bordering on pain,” “the fire of want . . . licked at them with flames of desire”), I didn’t count them against the book so much, and while I found numerous copyediting errors (i.e. the confusion of lie/lay, borne/born, misplaced modifying clauses, misspellings, and subject-verb disagreements), I was annoyed but not fatally so.  There were things that niggled at me, like the mistaken date of the central historical event in the story, which then made it difficult for me to settle into the historical aspect of the story.  I found myself more actively questioning things along the way, like the image I had of Darach wearing only his great kilt with no long shirt or short coat, as well as some of the language choices (i.e. Darach’s liberal use of “bluidy”/bloody, which I thought was a pretty profane oath in the 18th century, especially to a Jacobite).  None of these things ruined my enjoyment of the story, but they did get me thinking about how the finer details of craftsmanship play a part in distinguishing a merely pleasant book from a memorably compelling one.  Highland Fling was a pleasant C+ read.

At the invitation of one of her clients, Milagro attends a book party for a former classmate and flame, Sebatian Beckett Witherspoon, who broke her heart and went on to pretentious literary success. She hated his book, but goes to the party anyway, and finds that he’s beyond furious to see her there, even though he was the one who dumped her for another girl who was more his social equal. Seems you can put the Latina in the Ivy League, but that doesn’t mean the other students won’t recognize the divide in culture and class. Milagro, because she has a backbone of steel from having grown up with a monstrous mother, seems to be aware of but largely immune to such snubs.

While at the party, she flirts with waiters, mingles a bit, and meets Oswaldo Krakatoa, with whom she has an incendiary attraction, and she follows him to his hotel room, where they make out in pre-booty-shaking fashion, which causes them to fall down, and somehow in the twister he ends up biting her. Then some funky crap begins.

Seems Milagro wakes up feeling sick as hell, and hides out at a friend’s house until she can get herself home. Then she’s kidnapped by Beckett Witherspoon, who turns out to be a member of a murderous and completely insane organization called CACA, but then rescued by a friendly waiter from the book party, who turns out to be Oswaldo’s brother.

She’s hidden away at Oswaldo’s family home so her recovery can be watched by the family, and where just about everything can be filed under “Is Not What It Seems.” First, the dude’s name is Oswald, but why he choses to tweak his identity, I couldn’t say. And why is she there? And are they actually vampires or just victims of a strange blood disorder, as they profess that they are? Then, there’s the crusty, cranky, bitchy matriarch of the family, Edna, who takes an instant dislike to Milagro. Does she belong with Oswald’s very wealthy and very elegant family? Should she leave? Should she stay? And is she now a vampire?

Obviously, I’m not giving all the answers, so if you’re looking for Miss Harriet, you know not to look here. A good number of the reviews published so far dwell on the point that this isn’t a romance; that’s fine, it’s not. It doesn’t have the structure of a romance and while there’s some great attraction between Oswald and Milagro, the challenges placed in their way serve to discredit his integrity and could easily make him seem like a disingenuous buttnoid if the reader expects noble, perfect hero.

Milagro, however, is a damn hell fascinating character. She speaks directly to the reader through asides and commentary within each situation, which was jarring at first, but then became one of the quirks of her character, like a Shakespeare character addressing the audience. Not every character does, so those that do are significant. At the beginning of the book, her manner of addressing the story and the reader can make her seem an unreliable narrator, but ultimately I recognized her written style as indicative of the fact that as a Latina trodding in the world of WASPS and the very flaky top of the upper crust, she herself did not feel entirely welcome in any situation she was in. Because she wasn’t sure if she was an observer or a participant, she steps back and forth into and out of the story.

By the end of the book, I found myself questioning whether Milagro did change, and if she grew or developed as an individual. She certainly changes, but then seems, on the surface, to change back. On one hand, she stops pushing herself to act on, and think, and write what she thinks will impress other people, and starts living solely to make herself happy. It’s as if, due to the dreadful childhood she experienced, she feels that all she deserves is to live on the fringes of security, happiness, and wealth, and that her near-bottom-dwelling apartment existence is all to which she should feel entitled. While it’s not said outright, Milagro learns to accept the possibility of her own acceptance.

Oswald, however, is a very curious hero, and his behavior is one reason you cannot read this novel expecting it to be a straight-up romance, neat with a twist. He’s not always honest, though he is charming and very self-assured, and, like Beckett Witherspoon, has a very difficult time avoiding his desire for Milagro. His redemption is questionable and his worthiness of Milagro is equally so, but at the same time, it’s difficult not to root for her happy ending with Oswald.

My problems with the story came from not being able to clearly discern what was real. Was the disease real, or was vampirism real? Was the villain real, or was it a puppet show with good looking, empty-headed people it’s front, believing that there was more support behind them than there actually was? What actually happened to Milagro’s health by the end of the book? The reason I want to call this story a fable, or perhaps an allegory, is that there seems to be a moral, or a metaphorical representation pointing to a larger subtext, but even with some serious time pondering the story, I can’t gain access to what it might be.

Further, while Acosta’s writing itself is crisp, funny, clever, and very, very sticky, in that you can’t very easily put the damn book down once you’ve started it, the story veers off the road a few times, leading me to question whether secondary characters are more important or less so than I thought, and adding to the sense of disorientation with the final and potentially greater implications of the ending. Something could be going on here, I’m not sure I get it, and I hate not getting it. Makes me feel stoopud.

Aside from the possibilities of subtext, and the questions surrounding the resolution to the story, Happy Hour at Casa Dracula is a marvelously fun book to read, and is published at just the right time. Expect to see it in a beachbag near you.

“The Countess’s Pleasure” by Emma Holly
Set in the same steampunk universe as The Demon’s Daughter, Georgianna DuBarry, formerly possessed of a Thoroughly Useless Cock (now more useless than ever ‘cause it’s, well, dead), goes to a stripshow in in Bhamjran, develops a case of the hots for the demon stripper, then hires him to pop her cherry. Along the way, we learn all sorts of nifty things, like how demon spray-on prophylactics work, and are treated to some truly superficial observations of the consequences of inter-species love in a highly-stratified society.

The shaggery in this story, it is hot, but GOOD GOD, people, did we really need yet another fucking (well, non-fucking, actually) virgin widow? To see a rule-breaker like Holly use a hoary cliché like that is exasperating. The love story itself is somewhat unconvincing, which may be an unavoidable consequence of an erotic romance novella. Most romance short stories have a hard time building a convincing relationship between the two protagonists, and in an erotic romance, where quite a bit of the real estate is taken up by fizznucking, the space for building a convincing emotional connection is even more limited. However, the story is fun despite its flaws, the sex is well-written and hot, and the characters, while giving the impression of being perfunctory sketches, are at least likable. I can honestly say, “At no point did I feel the urge to stab any of the protagonists in the face.” Sometimes, that’s about all you can ask for. This is high praise indeed when you read what I have to say about the next novella. Grade: B-

“The Breed Next Door” by Lora Leigh
Where do I start with this mess? The heroine, perhaps, who isn’t just painfully feisty, but pointlessly so. Or the hero, whose obsession with the heroine borders on creepy, and whose motivations in general seem just...ARGH. And the writing style. Egad. It’s not so much awkward as magnificently lurchy. And the sex? Hilarious, but much in the unintentional, over-the-top way MST3K movies tend to be.

What? You want a story synopsis, you say? OK, fine: genetically-engineered freak, Tarek (part lion, part man, possessor of a barbed cock) moves next door to Lyra, pain-in-the-ass extraordinaire. Excruciating attempts at romantic comedy ensue, before it segues into excruciating attempts at romantic suspense. To add insult to injury, the heroine is that marvel of modern romance novel engineering: a spunky, horny modern woman in her 20s who’s in possession of both her own house and her virginity, with no convincing reasons, moral, religious, or otherwise, given as to why she’s still hanging on to her cherry.

If this short story were a little old lady, I’d push it into oncoming traffic. Misses the Cassie Edwards Barrier (by which all F books are asessed) by an asshair. Grade: D-

“Falling for Anthony” by Meljean Brook
Caveat: I’ve met Meljean in real life, and I proof-read this short story during the latter stages of its publication process. Make of my comments and this grade what you will.

Set in Regency England, doctor and all-round nice boy Anthony Ramsdell deflowers his best friend’s younger sister, Emily Ames-Beaumont, shortly before departing for service in the army and amidst some angst. We shall not dwell on the reasons for this deflowering, for yea, they are indeed silly and spoiler-iffic. Suffice it to say: Could have been more convincing.

After a battle in Spain, Anthony is attacked by a thoroughly nasty piece of work known as a nosferatu, but before he dies dies, is given a choice to become a Guardian and help the forces of good beat back the night. Meanwhile, as Anthony learns to be a bad-ass warrior with wings, Emily is facing some interesting problems of her own back in Merry England: her brother seems to be falling ill and developing a rather interesting psychosis--one involving an unquenchable thirst for blood.

The world-building in this story is some of the best I’ve seen in Romancelandia. Unfortunately, this means that the love story took a backseat. In terms of characterization, Anthony is thoroughly likeable, but Emily needed to be smacked around with a choice bit of haddock a time or two. Plot-wise, this story blows all the others out of the water, and the horror elements are excellent; I shivered a little during some of the ooky bits, and I have a pretty strong stomach when it comes to this sort of thing. I just wish Brook had more space to develop the characters and romantic tension; this, plus some debut author clunkiness in the expository parts, make this story a C+.

“The Blood Kiss” by Shiloh Walker
This story isn’t bad, just kind of boring. It’s one of those “King of Werewolves marries Queen of Vampires” sorts of tales, and those who can’t get enough werewolves and vampires--well, here’s your chance to enjoy both in spades.

Roman Montgomery, wolf king of Wolfclan Montgomery, has to rescue one of his dumbass younger brothers from the House of Capiet, a powerful vampire clan that’s on the wane. During the rescue attempt, he meets and promptly falls in lust with Julianna, the daughter of the leader of the House of Capiet. Oh noes, can love doomed by all that “a plague o’ both your houses” baggage ever succeed? Bitch, please, this is romance novel, so you know that the answer isn’t just a “yes,” but a resounding “yes.” A somewhat bland story that offers few surprises. Grade: C-

Jamie Riley, a young man from York, arrives on the doorstep of the Earl of St. Joseph, ready to assume his post as tutor to the young heirs to the earldom. But he arrives to find a severely attitudinous butler, and beyond him, a single man who says he’s the earl. Jamie had been hired by the current earl’s older brother, who perished with his family in a boat accident. Jamie is heartbroken to learn of the deaths of the family he was eager to work for, and horrified to learn there is no similar post available to him for the current earl, as he has no children to tutor. Jamie, to put it mildly, is flat broke and needed the position to survive.

Stephen St. Clair is the somewhat newly-minted Earl of St. Joseph, and is dealing with his overwhelming feelings of loss by spending whatever of his allowance he can get his hands on, nearly bankrupting his household in the procees. No one in the household has approached the earl about this problem, but they are all aware that they haven’t been paid, and that they probably won’t be come the next pay quarter. Stephen’s friend and valet, an astute man named Charles, figures out quickly from the initial introduction that Jamie is too valuable to be allowed to leave, and presses Stephen to hire him on as a personal secretary under the guise of correcting Stephen’s social calendar.

In his new position, Jamie soon finds that the earl’s library, the household finances, the staff responsibilities and the earl himself are in need of fixing as well. Stephan’s house staff are a collection of misfits, from card-playing valet-cum-friend to the earl, the cook who is far too good looking to be safe from the roaming hands of a master and the jealousy of a mistress in any other household, to the stablemaster who is a tactiturn but brilliant woman, and her gangly 10-year-old son.

In the beginning, this book reads as a clever, well-plotted Regency romance, and if you didn’t know from THE COVER that this was a gay Regency, you’d be waiting for the heroine to show up in her pelisse or riding sidesaddle in a stylish new riding habit with a jaunty feather in her hat. But no, Stephen, he is Teh Gay, and is quite open about it. Almost shockingly so. Everyone in the household is aware that Stephen is gay, as is Charles, and in some cases, Stephen’s homosexuality is what keeps them safe in their current positions. Stephen has no interest in Rebecca, the cook, and if people are going to gossip about him, it won’t be because his stablemaster is a woman. As a result of their safe haven in his home, his servants are delightfully loyal, and one of the most interesting features of this story is the seamlessness between the upstairs and the belowstairs communities, and how they end up blending together as a family of sorts. 

Jamie slowly begins to feel as if he is part of the household of misfits, and finds that he has plenty to keep him busy, particularly if he himself wants to be paid. By far the biggest problem to Stephen’s finances is his contractual relationship with Julian Jeffries, an actor and self-important wastrel who imagines himself the center of the universe. Julian is ever eager to spend as much of the earl’s money as he can, and when he realizes that the earl has noticed and is becoming attracted to his new personal secretary, Julian has to go through great lengths to restore himself as the sun around which the earl and his wallet should orbit. Enter seriously flaming obstacle to the happily ever after to the growing relationship between Stephan and Julian.

What was fascinating about this book was the honesty Pearson used to approach difficult subjects. Pearson does not shy away from or easily dismiss situations that would deeply affect the characters. For example, the death of the earl’s brother, his wife, and two small boys was a source of a great deal of pain for everyone in the household, particularly the earl, and Pearson didn’t allow there to be a happy resolution that easily dismissed the significance of the loss. Instead, Stephen’s grief was used to illustrate the differences between Julian and Jamie and used to make the members of the St. Joseph household real and multi-dimensional characters in their own right.

Further, there are real social consequences for being openly gay in the ton depicted in his novel, and Stephen’s admission of feelings for another man lead to a real and, I am led to believe, historically accurate social penalty. Even though there is a happily ever after, the reader receives that HEA while knowing there will be real difficulties ahead for the protagonists.

What stopped this book from receiving a higher grade was more of what I felt were shortcomings of the character development.

First, much of the story is told from Jamie’s perspective, and the reader knows he is quite innocent, especially in the sense that he’s not had any sexual experience with either gender, despite recognizing his own feelings of attraction for men in his past. He’s lived with his mother, been tutored by a vicar, and emerged an amateur historian of sorts, only to find difficulty making his own way once his mother dies. He makes himself inestimably useful in the St. Joseph estate, creating budgets, streamlining expenses, and assisting the earl in figuring out how to rid himself of Julian’s expensive contract to serve as his escort and lover. But Jamie is completely lost when it comes to dealing with his growing feelings of attraction for the earl, and while Stephen is the more experienced of the two, I would have liked to know more about how Jamie dealt with (a) realizing he was attracted to a man who was attracted to him in return, and (b) the idea of what had been socially and emotionally unattainable suddenly becoming available and possible. I mean, the very idea of being able to live in the same house and openly kiss another man, let alone have that other man explicitly attempt to seduce him, must have rocked Jamie’s little world - I would have liked to have known how he came to terms with this discovery.

Further, social levels being what they were at the time, a relationship between two social strata would have been a challenge for a man and a woman; adding homosexuality to that social inequality still does not change the fact that Jamie is a secretary and Stephen is a titled earl. But what troubled me more than the social inequality was the emotional inequality of the characters. Jamie is relentlessly noble, trying as hard as he can to stay in good spirits and to do the best he can with dogged commitment to being of use and value to the household. Stephen, on the other hand, starts the book as a wastrel, deep in mourning for his brother but unable to deal with the emotional pain of his loss. He attaches himself to showpiece playboys, contractually guaranteeing him sexual services, while neglecting the financial security of the people who depend on him. I wasn’t entirely sure his turnaround in attitude was sufficiently explored for Stephen or for the reader to seem genuine and meaningful.

But the character I had the biggest problem with was Julian: with creative characters all over the place, Julian was a one note, vain, completely conscienceless villain, whose motives aren’t fully explained, and who was at core unsympathetic. The reader understands why he wants to protect his contract with Stephen, but why and how he is willing to go to such depths of behavior to the point of risking lives isn’t explored. The reader is told he is cold, unfeeling, abusive to his servants, and generally a pompous egomaniac, but there isn’t really much development beyond that, leaving Julian a very one-note character. And his comeuppance leaves no satisfaction that he really is paying for his actions - there is a hint that he might, but for his crimes, this reader wanted confirmation of a reservation at the Hotel Asswhuppin’.

Pearson’s strengths, however, are certainly in the prose, the historical settings, and the secondary characters in the story. The writer’s voice is unique, and the story itself is rather groundbreaking - Regency gay romance? Who’d a thunk it? And by virtue of being a gay romance, it forces the reader to reconsider the preconceptions one may have about protagonist relationships, male and female roles, and the like. While at times it seemed the plot veered sharply toward camp, especially the Scooby-gang-like activities of the belowstairs staff, Pearson’s exploration of gay themes was both straightforward and gentle. While the cover may hit you over the head with the fact that This Is a Gay Romance Check Out Those TESTICLES, the writing within repeatedly lulls you into forgetting that there is something dramatically different about this Regency. That in and of itself is quite an accomplishment, because the reader is then able to acknowledge, through experiencing romance in a different manner, that love between two people doesn’t necessarily have rules that rest on gender.