Mills & Boon, £4.99, ISBN 978-0-263-93259-1
Historical Romance, 2017
There’s nothing disgraceful in Catherine Tinley’s The Captain’s Disgraced Lady, unless I count the heroine Juliana Milford being a wrecking ball of cray cray and rudeness.
Juliana arrives in England from Brussels, stepping foot on English soil for the first time in her life. She is going to visit her friend Charlotte, yay! Her sickly mother insists on coming along because should she stay behind, there will be no drama for the author to pad the second half of the story with.
Drama erupts the moment Captain Harry Fanton and his BFF stop by the inn where Juliana is at, wet from the storm and weary, and step into the room that our heroine and her mom have made theirs, despite the fact that it’s a parlour open to the public. Without any ado, our heroine scream and shriek at the hero to GTFO, although she doesn’t use that F word out loud, to the point that even her mother castigates her for being a rude dustbin of a person.
Later on, Harry notes that Mrs Milford is too ill to make the long journey to Juliana’s destination without stopping, only to get another loud and screechy railing from Juliana for not keeping his nose out of her business.
What is her problem?
Therein lies the problem: the freaking heroine. She is what she is at the surface: a befuddling example of a walking boiling kettle that goes off the rails at the slightest provocation to the point that she comes off as unhinged. Juliana darling also never stops to think, as whenever she gets an idea, for better or worse she is going ahead with it like a berserk rhinoceros determined to go head to head at a charging bullet train.
Of course, she is also always wrong and has to be bailed out most of the time by the hero or her friends.
Given that Harry and Juliana keep bumping into one another from their first meet, this story gives Juliana ample opportunity to go berserk, so I hope people reading this thing have a high tolerance level for this kind of heroine.
Oh, and shocker: Juliana is a hypocrite. An example is how she wants to rage and scream at a butcher for, as she claims, cheating her mother early in the story, but she is horrified by another woman later on accusing a maid for a similar crime. Rules for thee, but not for her, I guess. Our heroine also lusts after the hero despite calling him the rudest POS she has ever seen—mostly because he is a gallant gentleman that dares to contradict her when she wants to be an idiot—but at the same time, she is virulently judgmental when it’s middle- or working-class people, especially women, being just like her in the fellowship of shrill and manner-less twatwaffles.
Amusingly, she gets along well with Harry’s buddy, who humors her and never disagrees with her, but in the end, it’s Harry whose sausage she wants to stuff between her buns.
Sometimes, the author has Harry, Juliana’s mom, or other characters gently dress down Juliana, making me think that maybe the author has some degree of awareness about her heroine being such an unlikable termagant. At the same time, she also has Harry making excuses for the heroine, going as far as to tell me that he finds that shrew adorable because she is “outspoken” like his fellow soldiers. Wait, is he a soldier or a daycare staff member?
The second half of the story introduces many side stories as Juliana tries to figure out whom her daddy really is, which only allows the heroine to be even more… ugh. She actually makes me feel sorry for any bloke that has to claim her as his daughter.
I suppose some amusement can be had from seeing how the heroine is proven wrong again and again, and how her head threatens to do a 360, The Exorcist-style, each time that happens. Still, it’s hard to be that amused when the heroine never learns from her mistakes and continues to charge at and smash her head against the wall over and over, all the while screaming and shrieking about how everything is the hero’s fault, never hers.
Perhaps if I get super inebriated… but I love my liver more than Juliana, so whatever, just get that thing out of my sight.
