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I really need to stop reading the page-turner romance novels before bed - stayed up way too late reading Sherry Thomas' Beguiling the Beauty.
Beguiling the Beauty appears to be Thomas' twist on Judith Ivory's Beast story. Or at least according to the reviews and blurbs that I've read. Ivory's Beast is a retelling of Beauty and the Beast - with a beautiful young girl's notoriously ugly but roguish fiancee - deciding to seduce her unawares on a cruise ship before she meets him. They don't see each others faces. But it back-fires on him, he falls in love with her - and she falls for well, the alias or the person he is on the cruise ship. Thomas does something similar, except it's the heroine who fools the hero, and instead ugliness being her curse, it's her stunning beauty.
What Thomas does, and I haven't seen this done before, is play with the beautiful heroine trope. ( Read more... )
I think after two years worth of intermittent romance novel binge reading...I've managed to find a handful of consistently good authors, who step outside of the established tropes or at the very least play around with them, deconstruct them or subvert them.
They are: Sherry Thomas, Courtney Milan, Connie Brockaway, Eloisa James, Loretta Chase and now - I'm trying Judith Ivory. All are decent writers.
I've learned to stay away from contemporary and best-selling romance novelists...who tend to stick far too closely to well-established tropes - to the point that you sort of want to throttle them. Also, the New Adult and chick-lit romance novels really do not work for me. I suspect I may be too old to appreciate the wet-behind-the-ears 20something falling for the oh-so-experienced, dogmatic, controlling, and domineering, yet sexy as heck...30 something.
Half-way through, I have this overwhelming desire to smack both characters upside the head.
Currently reading Judith Ivory's The Proposition - based on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shipperx's rec. Actually every book that she's rec'd, I've liked. Same with flake_sake who rec'd Ellen Kushner's novels, and the people who rec'd The Captive Prince, as well as greenmai who rec'd The Fault in Our Stars. I'm finding live journal book, film and television rec's to be far more helpful and far closer to my eclectic tastes than either Good Reads or Amazon.
Beguiling the Beauty appears to be Thomas' twist on Judith Ivory's Beast story. Or at least according to the reviews and blurbs that I've read. Ivory's Beast is a retelling of Beauty and the Beast - with a beautiful young girl's notoriously ugly but roguish fiancee - deciding to seduce her unawares on a cruise ship before she meets him. They don't see each others faces. But it back-fires on him, he falls in love with her - and she falls for well, the alias or the person he is on the cruise ship. Thomas does something similar, except it's the heroine who fools the hero, and instead ugliness being her curse, it's her stunning beauty.
What Thomas does, and I haven't seen this done before, is play with the beautiful heroine trope. ( Read more... )
I think after two years worth of intermittent romance novel binge reading...I've managed to find a handful of consistently good authors, who step outside of the established tropes or at the very least play around with them, deconstruct them or subvert them.
They are: Sherry Thomas, Courtney Milan, Connie Brockaway, Eloisa James, Loretta Chase and now - I'm trying Judith Ivory. All are decent writers.
I've learned to stay away from contemporary and best-selling romance novelists...who tend to stick far too closely to well-established tropes - to the point that you sort of want to throttle them. Also, the New Adult and chick-lit romance novels really do not work for me. I suspect I may be too old to appreciate the wet-behind-the-ears 20something falling for the oh-so-experienced, dogmatic, controlling, and domineering, yet sexy as heck...30 something.
Half-way through, I have this overwhelming desire to smack both characters upside the head.
Currently reading Judith Ivory's The Proposition - based on
shipperx's rec. Actually every book that she's rec'd, I've liked. Same with flake_sake who rec'd Ellen Kushner's novels, and the people who rec'd The Captive Prince, as well as greenmai who rec'd The Fault in Our Stars. I'm finding live journal book, film and television rec's to be far more helpful and far closer to my eclectic tastes than either Good Reads or Amazon.