Mills & Boon, £4.99, ISBN 978-0-263-92620-0
Historical Romance, 2017
The romance genre is never short of imbecile romance heroines, and historical romance has a near-locked monopoly of such heroines.
That’s right, Laura Martin’s An Unlikely Debutante is another one with a plot that is super-powered by heroine Lina Lock’s spectacular inability to make any halfway advantageous decision. Far from it, really, as Lina darling has the remarkable ability to sabotage any efforts by others to improve her situation—no doubt a skill taught at the Mills & Boon charm school for romance heroines too dumb to even climb onboard the short bus.
This one wants to be a take on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, but because portraying a romance between two people from very different classes is hard, here, the sole issue of Lina being a gypsy boils down to simply the heroine challenging hero Lord Alexander Whitemore’s prejudiced opinion of her kind being thieving, harlot types… by sleeping with him out of wedlock and doing her best to ensure that she would be seen by everyone as a petty, lying thief. How stunning and brave!
So, “bet” is the word of the day here. Alex is challenged to polish some nobody woman into the perfect debutante, and should he lose the bet, he’d have to seriously look into getting a wife. He isn’t keen on romance because his ex turned out a promiscuous ho, which puts a damper on him even wanting to slip it into his favorite promiscuous hos—hey, purity tests only apply to women in this genre, alright?—but he can’t just lose a bet like that!
He turns his mind to that alluring gypsy that read his fortune…
Meanwhile, Lina needs £10 by the end of the week. You see, she lost a wager and now Uncle Tom wants his money back. Of course, he is a meanie, because only meanies hold romance heroines accountable for their actions.
She can’t ask for help this once, because she is always getting into trouble and she feels that she’s dragged her brother into cleaning her mess too often already. Naturally, when Alex offers a deal with her—she be his statue of Pygmalion and he’d give her nice things—she runs straight to Uncle Tom and explains in full detail her deal with Alex.
Is anyone shocked that he ups her debt by insisting that she gives him some, uh, useful important about the lay of Alex’s place, security details, etc on top of her having to give him everything that Alex promises to offer her?
So now our heroine is stuck.
Of course, one thing she can do to get herself out of the mess is to just simply use her pickpocket skills to get her some £10. No, she can’t do that! She refuses to compromise on her morals.
Okay, maybe she can just offer her rear end to Uncle Tom. No, she is a moral person! Besides, her rear end is already designated as a free no-strings-attached gift to Alex anyway.
Fine, fine, how about she just do a good job and get Alex to win the bet, and then vamoose after pawning the stuff he gives her? Oh please, do you think that she’s a harlot, ho, or whatever? She has scruples, unlike you people!
Okay, so maybe she can get Alex to win the bet and then see what happens? No, she has to be petulant, put up a show of spoiled brat realness each time Alex tries to tutor her on societal norms and etiquette. Apparently this is because she views herself morally superior to the Ton, which is a laugh considering that this is a hussy that can’t pay back £10 and is on her way to crushing the hearts and hopes of all the people around her that have taken her in as a BFF and what not.
Ugh. Perhaps she can, after putting out to Alex, wrap him around her finger and use his highbrow status in Society as a protective buffer against Uncle Tom? Oh please, she is a woman of virtue; she is unworthy of Alex and can only accept being his mistress, okay.
Guess what happens? That’s right, our heroine does absolutely nothing to clean up her mess. She just leaps into a big hole that is her life with a shovel and keeps digging and digging until she can’t get out. Then she starts wailing and weeping, and our author then has the hero in the end swoop in to throw her the lifeline to pull her out of her hole.
As for Alex, he’s the standard romance hero of this sort, but whatever shortcomings he may have are completely negated by the gaping black hole that is the heroine’s spectacular lack of brainpower that overwhelms the entire story. Everything else about this story fades into the background to make way for Lina’s one-woman show of hot mess ass.
I dimly recall liking some of the secondary characters and being slightly irked by how easy it is for Alex to marry Lina, but on the whole, my singular reaction to this story is constantly having to repress a pained shudder as I turn the pages and our heroine just keeps doing one dumb thing after another.
