Mills & Boon, £4.99, ISBN 978-0-263-91679-9
Historical Romance, 2016
There’s a newcomer to the quiet little corner of Raigne. Actually, James Winterley was born here, and he has ties with the toffs in the neighborhood, of course, as heaven forbid we have an actual middle class hero, how gauche. He’s handsome, dashing, and well connected, so of course people are talking about him.
Not Rowena Westhope, our heroine. Sure, he’s hot and makes her all warm and moist with womanly desire, but our widowed heroine is content to never put herself under the control of a man, any man, ever again. She’s happy being alone.
There, I have summed up the “plot” of the hero and the heroine in the first two-third of Elizabeth Beacon’s Redemption of the Rake. The rest of this part of the story is best described as a “talk-nado”.
Indeed, the first two-third of this thing is one long exposition delivered via characters narrating the other person’s life story to that person when they are not sharing some other person’s life story with one another.
There’s a lot to talk, because this is the final book in some trilogy, I guess, but this is also the first book by the author that I have ever bought, so I’m lost for the most part. There’s something about our hero being one of the heroes in the trilogy coming back to claim some great-aunt’s inheritance, I think?
Sure, some will argue that it’s my fault for not putting down this one to hunt down and read the previous books in the series first, but I beg to differ. If the author were to do a standalone story even in a series, that story should do its best to be a standalone story then. Otherwise, market it clearly as part of a series. Place some logo on the cover saying it is book three of whatever the series name is, for example.
This is a problem for me because the author has a narrative style that is tad old school—there are many long running sentences here—and she keeps introducing character after character without any preliminaries. As a result, I find myself rereading parts of a page frequently to figure out the large cast, to that point that I sometimes forget the name of the heroine because there are so many female names running around in my head.
If these people do anything else, it’s to physically move themselves from one person to another so that they can keep talking.
I question why I am working so hard to figure out things at this point, because there’s no story at this early two-third or so, just exposition of who has done what, who is related to whom, various secondary characters’ lives after already having had their happy endings in previous books, discussions of these secondary characters’ past… really, what’s the point?
It is only in the final third of the story that things become a more recognizable romance story, when James romantically declare that he has enemies—he was a spy in the past—and people will talk about how she is his paramour after they have been seen together quite a bit in public, so she must marry him so that he can keep her safe. I’m not sure why he didn’t stay away earlier but hey, if he did that the author would have to make the entire story all about exposition so maybe he’s just doing an act of kindness here.
Rowena refuses because she will never live under the thumb of a man again, et cetera, but then he kisses her and our heroine finally enters puberty and starts wanting to do the dirty like her endocrine system finally kicks into action after a long period of genre-induced lobotomy. Propriety? That’s for non-horny heroines. Pop-my-bitty, more like!
Even then, when the story finally focuses on the main characters, these characters turn out to be bland and dull.
James feels guilty wah wah wah, so he will never love again. Because of this, while he must marry Rowena, she must never love him! Wait, what.
At one point, he tells her that she can’t love him because he is all alone in this world. She points out that he has his brother and the rest of the his family, so he tells her that, oh no, those people don’t depend on him, so he’s still alone in this world.
Wait, so to be happy, he needs many people to rely on him? Why don’t he just go get himself a few dogs then? Dogs are cute and very smart at making their human toys believe that they are in charge of the dogs.
Rowena on the other hand is the standard “proper lady turns into a horny peen-hungry hippo” heroine of this genre, and sadly for her, I’ve read far better heroines of this sort in other stories. In many ways, she’s like some half-baked creature that tries very hard to be an old school Amanda Quick heroine, but she’s just so generic and bland.
The weird kind of irony here is that had the author devoted the first two-third of this story into just Rowena and James, these characters could have been more well-drawn sorts and I may end up appreciating their story better.
As it is, this one is like a half-baked and rather typical historical romance compressed into one-third of a full-length novel, with the early two-third being… whatever that is. Ugh.
