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shadowkatI 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. The heroine, Venetia, has an overwhelmingly beautiful face. So beautiful that when the hero, Christian, first glimpses her from afar he is "overcome" and each time he sees her, again from afar, he becomes more and more obsessed. Then he hears a malicious rumor about her from her husband, Townsend, - that her beauty is only skin deep, and how horrible she is. (It's not true - her husband was a jealous, insecure man and horrid to her. And never saw beneath the surface.) The hero doesn't believe it at first - that is until he reads about her husband's death, and how the husband was driven bankrupt buying her jewels. Then he reads even more malicious gossip about her remarriage, and the subsequent death of her second husband, Mr. Easterbrook, who died when she was allegedly having an affair with his best friend. (Turns out that she was actually just his "beard" or it was a marriage blanc. He was much older, and an very good friend. Who offered to save her from the poor house that he previous husband had left her in, in return for a cover. He was in love with another man - and if it came out, he would be ruined in society. This was late 1800s or Victorian Period.) So the hero concludes, based on the malicious gossip and his own frustration, that she's a beast and dismisses her beauty as nothing more than a lure.
The hero is a naturalist - and is giving a lecture on naturalism at Harvard, which the heroine decides to attend with her sister and sister-inlaw - in the hopes of setting her sister up with him. During the lecture - he is asked a question about whether "beauty" is an inherited trait and its effects on evolution. For his response, he provides an example of how feminine beauty can be the downfall of most men, and how beautiful women are often "beastly" and shallow. The example he uses is the heroine, leaving her name out of it of course, but providing enough information - that she recognizes who he is talking about and is deeply wounded.
Her sister, Helena, suggests that when the opportunity arises the heroine should seek vengeance against him. Make the hero fall for her, then cut him. It does, the heroine wears a veiled hat...and takes on the identity of a German Baroness...he is not permitted to see her face. He falls in love with her, but never sees her face, and she with him. The only problem is that she is lying to him about who she is. And when he finds out - he will think the worst of her. Which of course he does. The conflict is that the hero has to get past his own prejudices and the heroine past her pride, so that they can be honest with each other.
See the gender flip? Thomas not only grabs the concept from Ivory, she flips it. And instead of doing yet another take on the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale, Thomas sort of references the Greek myth - Cupid and Psyche, except the woman is cupid, and the male is psyche. Rather clever that.
My only quibble - which is why this is three stars and not four - is it took too long for the hero to come to his senses. By the time he did, I was ready to throttle him. This is a problem that I've had with a lot of Thomas' novels, the hero (sometimes its the heroine) becomes after a certain point not likable and it detracts from the romance - ie. I stop rooting quite so hard for them to end up together and just want to see the hero (sometimes the heroine) get a swift kick in the rumpus. The angst takes up most of the book. Also, as if the hero/heroine angst wasn't enough - we have to add in two other relationships, which are clearly being set up for the next two books in the series. But unfortunately, and unlike Courtney Milan's novels, don't quite sync with the main story as well. They distracted from the main plot and often felt quite jarring. I'd have edited them out.
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. The heroine, Venetia, has an overwhelmingly beautiful face. So beautiful that when the hero, Christian, first glimpses her from afar he is "overcome" and each time he sees her, again from afar, he becomes more and more obsessed. Then he hears a malicious rumor about her from her husband, Townsend, - that her beauty is only skin deep, and how horrible she is. (It's not true - her husband was a jealous, insecure man and horrid to her. And never saw beneath the surface.) The hero doesn't believe it at first - that is until he reads about her husband's death, and how the husband was driven bankrupt buying her jewels. Then he reads even more malicious gossip about her remarriage, and the subsequent death of her second husband, Mr. Easterbrook, who died when she was allegedly having an affair with his best friend. (Turns out that she was actually just his "beard" or it was a marriage blanc. He was much older, and an very good friend. Who offered to save her from the poor house that he previous husband had left her in, in return for a cover. He was in love with another man - and if it came out, he would be ruined in society. This was late 1800s or Victorian Period.) So the hero concludes, based on the malicious gossip and his own frustration, that she's a beast and dismisses her beauty as nothing more than a lure.
The hero is a naturalist - and is giving a lecture on naturalism at Harvard, which the heroine decides to attend with her sister and sister-inlaw - in the hopes of setting her sister up with him. During the lecture - he is asked a question about whether "beauty" is an inherited trait and its effects on evolution. For his response, he provides an example of how feminine beauty can be the downfall of most men, and how beautiful women are often "beastly" and shallow. The example he uses is the heroine, leaving her name out of it of course, but providing enough information - that she recognizes who he is talking about and is deeply wounded.
Her sister, Helena, suggests that when the opportunity arises the heroine should seek vengeance against him. Make the hero fall for her, then cut him. It does, the heroine wears a veiled hat...and takes on the identity of a German Baroness...he is not permitted to see her face. He falls in love with her, but never sees her face, and she with him. The only problem is that she is lying to him about who she is. And when he finds out - he will think the worst of her. Which of course he does. The conflict is that the hero has to get past his own prejudices and the heroine past her pride, so that they can be honest with each other.
See the gender flip? Thomas not only grabs the concept from Ivory, she flips it. And instead of doing yet another take on the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale, Thomas sort of references the Greek myth - Cupid and Psyche, except the woman is cupid, and the male is psyche. Rather clever that.
My only quibble - which is why this is three stars and not four - is it took too long for the hero to come to his senses. By the time he did, I was ready to throttle him. This is a problem that I've had with a lot of Thomas' novels, the hero (sometimes its the heroine) becomes after a certain point not likable and it detracts from the romance - ie. I stop rooting quite so hard for them to end up together and just want to see the hero (sometimes the heroine) get a swift kick in the rumpus. The angst takes up most of the book. Also, as if the hero/heroine angst wasn't enough - we have to add in two other relationships, which are clearly being set up for the next two books in the series. But unfortunately, and unlike Courtney Milan's novels, don't quite sync with the main story as well. They distracted from the main plot and often felt quite jarring. I'd have edited them out.
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.![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Re: Cont'd Summary of "Tempting the Bride"
Date: 2014-02-18 12:21 am (UTC)Andrew was a complete nincompoop. Absolutely everyone but Helena (including Andrew's own wife and in-laws!) recognized that Andrew was a spineless, shiftless nincompoop.
I've never been all that curious about Fitz's and Millie's story because 8 years of marriage of convenience sounds like a bore, but I did read the novella of the first love that Fitz was so obsessed with during his and Millie's marriage. Having read her (brief) story, I am just a tiny bit curious how she comes off in Fitz and Millie's story.
In her own story, (I cannot remember her name because I read it a while ago), she was sympathetic. Fitz had married Millie for her inheiritance, so the childhood sweetheart sucked it up and married someone else after he married Millie... and she was actually happy with her husband. Unlike Fitz (it seemed) she was realistic and wasn't going to waste her life on what she couldn't have. So she and her husband moved to India, had two children, and were happy together. Unfortunately both she and her husband came down with some influenza-like illness. She survived and her husband did not. Heartbroken by her husband's death she returned to England and was tempted by memories of Fitz and first love and desperately wanted him (but you get the feeling that it was less about him than her simply been so full of grief). This was around the time Fitz realized he loved Millie, so he turned the childhood sweetheart away. She desperately wanted Fitz to come back to her and for a moment convinced herself that he had when a guy who looked a great deal like him came to her rented cottage.
With her children at her sisters, and in a bout of grief, she got hella drunk and came onto the guy who looked a lot like Fitz. This guy was actually a sweetie, though. He recognized how much pain she was in and didn't take advantage. He too was a widower, having lost his beloved wife a few years earlier. And when the heroine explained her story, he felt for her. They commiserated over their lost loves, how it hurt to lose a loving spouse and a future that you had planned together. Then they started up an ongoing letter correspondence with one another when she re-joined her family. This quickly evolved into falling in love via mail until he arranged to 'run into her' again in public when she wrote a letter to him saying she was visiting the Lake District.
Obstacle became her family having a suspicion that the reason she'd fallen for this was because he looked rather like Fitz. That couldn't be healthy, could it? Even the new guy briefly thought that might be the case when he finally caught sight of Fitz and realized that they did look rather similar. But then he&she realized that what had drawn them together was that they understood each other. That they had both been through grief and loss. They both had lost loved spouses and had felt the rekindling of hope when they met each other. That had nothing to do with Fitz, and it would be pretty damn stupid to let the fact that he vaguely resembled her childhood sweetheart get in the way their possible happiness.
Happily Ever After.
It being a novella it's really basically a short story, but she was a sympathetic character at least in her own story. I shudder to think of her as coming off as stupid in Fitz's story as Andrew does in Tempting.
Re: Cont'd Summary of "Tempting the Bride"
Date: 2014-02-18 01:13 am (UTC)I agree on the Fitz story - an 8 year marriage of convenience tale where the hero is pining for the woman he couldn't marry...while slowly developing a friendship with his wife, until he discovers wait, I love my wife, will most likely bore and frustrate the heck out of me. The reviews seemed to indicate that for the most part. Apparently the writer is playing with that particular trope? And apparently the childhood love trope...showing how it doesn't quite last or work?
The long lost love who moved to India, had two children, and a happy marriage and now wants to reconnect with Fitz, who is married and hasn't had any kids yet...I think I might have issues with. Although I liked the ending of her story - which you related.
Connie Brockaway also played with the long-lost love bit in All Through the Night. In that one, the widow's dead husband had married her over his childhood sweetheart who remained utterly devoted to him. What I liked about that one - was both her dead husband and his childhood sweetheart came across as ninnies. The dead husband had to be adored by people, but couldn't deal with sexual affection, unless he was bestowing it. Basically he saw love as being "worshipped", physical love was too messy. It was a nice deconstruction of romantic love.
Hmmm...I'm thinking Luckiest Lady sounds much more interesting and far more complex. I might go that route instead of Tempting the Bride. Although after The Proposition - I've decided to read the Milan trilogy that you rec'd. I like Milan better than Thomas...or rather, I like her characters better.
Re: Cont'd Summary of "Tempting the Bride"
Date: 2014-02-18 03:12 pm (UTC)I could see where she was confused by his situation because, realistically, who wouldn't be? It would have a way of not looking like a 'real marriage' (and yeah she was aware that it wasn't consumated so either Fitz or Millie must have told her.)
Re: Cont'd Summary of "Tempting the Bride"
Date: 2014-02-18 11:17 pm (UTC)The reviewers stated that Isabelle (Fitz's long lost love) comes across as a self-centered, whiny, nasty piece of work. (They really hated her in that novel.) So yes, a ninny. Apparently Fitz wants to use Minnie's money - which he acquired through marriage to take care of Isabelle and her kids? And Fitz has had several mistresses during his marriage to Millie...until Isabelle becomes a widow, and now he wants to be celibate for Isabelle...or that's what they said in the reviews.
This is a controversial little book. It's apparently not that long. But it's ratings on Good Reads...sort of give you the finger (as smartbitches would say.)
The reviewers either really really hate Fitz and Isabelle (and her dead husband aka the dormouse), and feel sorry for Millie (who they call the doormat). Or they adore the novel's depiction of friendship turning to love over time, and the discovery that the first love was little more than a romanticized crush.
Apparently Thomas got the idea from a Georgette Heyer novel entitled A Civil Contract. Where the hero does more or less the same thing. Except he doesn't fall in love with the heroine so much as grows accustomed to her and develops a friendship. Heyer's novels tended towards realism and satire.
At any rate - one of the reviewers, on Amazon and Good Reads, had issues with the book jumping back and forth in time, with all the flashbacks. She also had this tendency to call the hero (H) and the heroine (h) - to the point that I found her review unreadable. (That's my pet peeve. The H/h thing.)
I'm admittedly curious about it now - in part because of the Margaret Atwood novel (The Blind Assassin) that I'm reading at night - which has a nasty marriage of convenience in it. (The protagonist' father basically sells her in marriage to an associate who is in his 30s, while she's just 18. And the guy on their wedding night - is pleased that she finds the sexual act unpleasant and painful, because that way she won't go hunting for it elsewhere...she actually states that in the first person narrative.) So I'm curious to see another take - one
which shows how two people who aren't sleeping together and marry far too young make a marriage work. But can't tell from the reviews if it will annoy the heck out of me.
The problem with Sherry Thomas, and one reviewer stated it's definitely an issue in this novel as well, is she rushes her endings. So lots of angst, quick happy wrap-up. Reader frustrated.
Re: Cont'd Summary of "Tempting the Bride"
Date: 2014-02-18 11:29 pm (UTC)Re: Cont'd Summary of "Tempting the Bride"
Date: 2014-02-19 12:04 am (UTC)The reviewer really hated Isabella in that book. And wanted her to be miserable. Which does not bode well for her portrayal in the novel - which most likely is from Minnie's pov.
Re: Cont'd Summary of "Tempting the Bride"
Date: 2014-02-19 02:51 pm (UTC)