Coffee Time Reads, $0.99, ISBN 978-1005699604
Historical Romance, 2020
A major spoiler is revealed in this review, because I can’t explain what a douchebag the hero is without referencing that spoiler. You’ve been warned! If you don’t want to be spoiled, stop reading!
Foxglove Hall is a traditional regency, which means there is no rumpy-pumpy action. However, the heroine Amelia Lionheart, called a “harlot” complete with inverted commas in the plot summary, was alleged to be a mistress to some nobleman in the past. I said “alleged”, because, sadly, the inverted commas are there for a reason.
Given Amelia’s history, I’m not sure why she is on the haughty Lady Caroline Barrington’s guest list, but the lady is dismayed when her son Charles becomes enamored of Amelia. Lord Barrington is engaged to a most proper lady, so it will not do for him to call off that engagement to hook up with… with…
Okay, I’ll be blunt. I give this thing an extra oogie because the author is well aware of how horrid the hero of her story is. I feel that this self-awareness is not enough, however, because Lord Barrington’s behavior is really beyond the pale.
The problem here is this: the author has the fiancée shunted off stage for the most part, so I don’t get to see first hand how bad this person is. Hence, when our hero calls Dorothea all kinds of name, from how she is a “pig” to how repulsive he finds her, this fellow comes off like a horrid little thing instead.
He keeps whining that he doesn’t want to be engaged to that repulsive pig—then break the engagement off then, my god! No, he just badmouths her and mocks her to everyone in their circle, all the while openly chasing after a lady with a reputation of being a harlot. Jesus, and he’s the hero who gets a happy ending here.
Then, Dorothea gets injured—bad gash in the forehead. Nobody cares. The so-called hero doesn’t care, Amelia doesn’t (she’s far more concerned about nabbing Lord Barrington as a husband and insisting that she is not a harlot), and neither does Lady Caroline. I find myself wondering why the author thinks it is a great idea to populate her story with such a cast of unlikable, narcissistic douchebags.
Then, the badly-treated and constantly neglected Dorothea kills herself. Lord Barrington shrugs and says, what, it’s not his fault that odious thing committed suicide. Yay, he’s now free to hook up with Amelia.
This “hero” has a single-paragraph declaration of how he has wronged Dorothea late in the story, and that’s to Amelia who has already decided to marry him anyway, so the whole so-called epiphany of his rings hollow. Even if he’s sincere, it’s way too low key to give me a sense that somehow, these are the good guys now. No, these people are still odious and disgusting, and I don’t want to see them happy!
It’s kind of darkly ironic that the author prefaces the story by talking about the social inequalities of the time that this story is set in, when her characters embody the very stereotypical examples of hateful privileged twats that waste their lives by being amoral cretins while the rest of the country starve away.
Oh, and to add insult to the injury, Amelia isn’t a genuine harlot. I can’t even get that as a consolation prize for having endured this tale of odious people somehow getting a happy ending, thanks to the suicide of a poor girl driven to that extreme by her callous monster of a fiancé.
People, just stay away from Foxglove Hall.
