Ruth Ann Nordin, $2.99
Historical Romance, 2012
Nathaniel Buford, the Earl of Roderick, needs a wife so he heads on down to Rendell Hall to find one, wrap her up, and take her back to his place for the whole heir-begetting business. Gee, is it any wonder that he had recently been dumped by a young lady who found the notion of marrying a duke more to her liking? Alas, things don’t go as planned. Instead of the shallow, talkative ninny he has decided would do as his brood more, he ends up trying to escort what seems like an ill lady on her own in the garden back into the ballroom. Our heroine, Claire Howell, is all hello, she doesn’t need any man telling her what to do, and he’s all, uh no, he’s going to take her hand and make her go back in, and she trips and rolls on the grass, and then her parents come across them, so yes, Nate’s really getting married after all. For some reason, he’s not too happy about it, hmm.
Well, Ruth Ann Nordin’s The Earl’s Inconvenient Wife is not about some asshole bent on punishing the poor wife for putting him in a position that he was more than happy to be in when the story opened. However, this story would work better as a character drama, and the author instead does all she can to keep the main characters from interacting with one another in meaningful ways.
Claire, especially, is a weakly drawn character because the only times when she does anything on her own, she’s being petulant in that tedious “You’re not the boss of me!” way, which doesn’t work because she’s always wrong or being daft. A combination of petulance and dingbattery in a heroine rarely takes me to anywhere nice. Most of the time, though, Claire is just reacting to various situations and various characters, often in dour or distressed manner that makes her come off like a wet rag most of the time. I can never get a pulse on her character, if she even has one. She’s just jumping from one situation to another, trying to second guess people without talking to them first and feeling distressed because she believes that she is not measuring up to these people’s expectations of her. How can someone so eager to make people happy can also be petulant and insistent on things going her way now and then? Claire’s antics can be contradictory, and all in all, she comes off more like some plot device whose actions, emotions, and motivations can change depending on plot necessities.
As for Nate, he’s a control freak type and that’s all there is to it. Someone like him needs a character who can stand up to him and challenge him, but Claire is barely even a character here, so Nate just comes off as vaguely obnoxious and somewhat robotic from start to end.
The author tackles this one more like a traditional regency romance than a mainstream historical romance, although some readers may still find the occasional kisses here too steamy for their starchy frilly white pantaloons sensibilities. There’s nothing wrong with this, usually, only here the author chooses to introduce some brat that gets Claire into more conflict with Nate instead of actually exploring our main characters’ supposedly developing affections for one another. There are some issues here that could have been the foundation for some engaging emotional drama, such as Claire’s possible pregnancy, but the author opts to treat these issues in superficial, even clichéd ways that end up making the main characters resemble human beings even less.
Yes, the narrative is clean and the whole thing is readable, but the lack of believable emotions or compelling drama makes it a hard sell for me.
