Avon, $7.99, ISBN 978-0-06-237194-2
Historical Romance, 2020
There are some things in this universe that are immutable. When I walk into a McDonald’s outlet, for example, I will know that I will be getting mass-produced, rather tasteless burgers. When I visit the Amazon Kindle store, I will find nearly every product page has its purchase button inactivated.
Then, when I read something by Lisa Kleypas these days, I know I will get conflict-free, disingenuous stories of powerful noblemen wearing “working class” skin suits and heroines roiling in their privileged existence while claiming that they will give all that up for love.
Not that anyone will make these heroines walk the talk, of course, because subjecting these imbeciles to reality is tantamount to clubbing dim-witted puppies to death with a spiked bat. That’s cruel and heartless, no matter how much one believes that hastening them to their deaths is actually an act of mercy.
So, Chasing Cassandra. It’s part of the series called The Ravenels, and if you would throw a pop quiz asking me about the previous books in the series, I regret to say that I will fail that quiz miserably because I can’t remember one darned thing about them.
In fact, I had to check the review archives to confirm that, yes, I have read and reviewed those things in the past. I blame this on my three-year long cabin fever, but don’t feel too sorry for me. I have this sneaky suspicion that this one is exactly like those previous stories in terms of the character archetypes and the dynamics of their relationship. Immutable forces, remember.
Okay, this one features the last of the three wealthy males as the hero. To call Tom Severin a working class bloke is like calling Elon Musk a businessman—at only 31, Tom is already a railway tycoon with more money than the Bible has verses.
He has his eyes on Cassandra Ravenel, who spends a lot of her time aching for love and trembling sadly as she is a victim of a terrible form oppression: she is body shamed because she is a land whale. Oh, sorry, forget that land whale part, as there are even limits as to how much a heroine can expand horizontally before she is deemed unworthy of love.
I wouldn’t mind marrying down, if I were in love, Cassandra thought.
Who is the author trying to kid? The most counter-culture our heroine has ever been is that she eats one or two more pieces of cakes than other ladies during a ball. I’d love to see her being a coal miner’s wife or something, but we all know that will never happen. She’s marrying a man wealthier than King Midas, so in the end, this fatty can talk all she wants about how she doesn’t care about wealth, et cetera, and it’s all just hot air.
That’s basically it. Tom doesn’t believe in love, et cetera, and naturally, his heart melts because Cassandra is so special that she eats away (sorry, I can’t resist) at the ice in his heart.
However, the author seems to have completely given up on any actual conflict in her story these days, and this one is no different. Occasionally, a meanie shows up to call Cassandra fatty fat fat, or try to sneak some moves on her, but Tom and his friends are all so powerfully connected and alpha that they only have to twitch their stern noses at the meanie and the whole thing is resolved in the space of a few eye blinks.
Along the way, I am subjected to these characters doing dull things to show off how awesome they are, like Tom taking in a ward—wait, didn’t a recent hero also do this?—and our heroine generally being the nicest, blandest fake fatty ever.
Is this thing readable? Yes it is. It is very readable, but in a spectacularly bland and unmemorable way. In fact, this one feels like all the past elements of the author’s stories thrown together and stirred to become this edible but rather flavorless stew.
This thing may be called Chasing Cassandra, but I spend far more time chasing after something, anything memorable about it that I can bring up in this review. This is the ultimate comfort read for fans of this author—they know what they will get here, because there is absolutely nothing here that will take them out of the comfort zone.
If they somehow overlooked this, hey, it doesn’t matter. I have a strong feeling that the next story will offer exactly the same thing.
