Diana Bold, $0.99, ISBN 979-8201906351
Historical Romance, 2020
Diana Bold’s Queen of May Day is a twist on the whole Cyrano de Bergerac trope, only this time the lovelorn letter writer Daisy Weatherby doesn’t have a honking nose or any other physical endowments that can make it hard for anyone other than her mother to love her.
Instead, our heroine just happens to consider herself plain and bookish because her sister Violet is so much hotter so… yes, this story ends up being a silly merry-go-round involving vapid creatures without any hint of actual poignancy to make the whole nonsense tolerable and even moving.
Daphne has loved Flynn Hollister ever since she was a blastula in her mother’s womb, and she knows that he is the one for him.
Why did he have to be so handsome? He was tall and broad-shouldered, his features so beautifully carved that he looked like a Roman statue come to life. His eyes reminded her of the sky at dusk, a deep azure she could stare into forever if given a chance. But it wasn’t his masculine beauty that had drawn her to him.
Oh, of course. I’ve an open mind, I won’t immediately peg the brown cow as a shallow and superficial floozy. I know as much in my heart of hearts that she would love him just as much if he had been her male counterpart: plain-faced and bookish, and not some hot and handsome soldier.
Alas, Violet sneaks off with Flynn to do who knows what, which makes Daphne aghast and dismayed because this is not right. He is supposed to instinctively know that she is desperately horny in love with him and come up to her to declare that she can now grasp her true love of him and squeeze it hard until his passion pours forth in a virtuous eruption of splendorous purity.
She’d known that she never truly had a chance of earning his love. She was too young, too plain with her dull brown hair and thin shapeless body. But she’d still hoped that in a few years, when she hopefully blossomed into a woman, he would finally see her, not just as the neighbor girl but as someone he could love.
Yes, she definitely loves him for what’s inside his pants his heart.
Anyway, our hero goes off to kill foreigners abroad as part of being a manly soldier, and Daphne takes this opportunity to steal his letters, meant for Violet, and composes her replies while pretending to be Violet. This doesn’t appear pathological at all, of course.
Then Flynn comes back, now ready to grasp his love for Violet and plunge himself to the hilt in her innermost virtue… only to learn that Violet is married and she’s like, uh, new number, who is he again.
He understandably feels betrayed, and Daphne feels bad because her antics has hurt him. Before she can do anything, he falls ill and she has the chance to flex her desires to a man that is no state or shape to flee from her in terror.
You’d think that Flynn will realize that ugly pug-nosed hag Daphne is beautiful inside and hence worthy of love, but no, he realizes that she is actually hot to trot, so yay, she is now worthy of her sister’s sloppy seconds.
Daphne is like, yay, she still thinks of herself as a plain hag but she has the hottest guy in town waiting to be ridden hard in the honeymoon suite, so she has triumphed over her sister, and that’s all that matters.
The author could have come up with a story about how beauty is within as well as without, but no, she decides to instead serve up a tale of two superficial dingbats that won’t give the other person a second look had the other person been as genuinely ugly as Daphne insists that she is. Are these kinds of shallow creatures fun to read about?
Maybe I’m just too old and jaded to indulge these vapid characters as they make disingenuous efforts in pretending to be deep and open-minded, but this story is as deep as a puddle and I have very little patience or sympathy for these losers.
