Lisa Torquay, $4.00, ISBN 978-1005643355
Historical Romance, 2022

Percy Williams is in a perpetual bad mood. The woman he had intended to marry chose another, so now not only he is a new man—a rude boorish one that likes to walk around without a shirt—he’s also decided that the rich people around him, especially the titled ones, are hypocrites whose works of charity are just superficial back pats even as these hypocrites continue to perpetuate the social injustices that make this charity necessary in the first place.

Oh my god, you may be screaming, is Lisa Torquay’s The Jilted Gentleman one of those filthy, disgusting romance stories with a poor hero?

Don’t worry, Percy is super wealthy and he owns the biggest mill in Manchester. He tells poor people begging him to take their kids as an apprentice to go make themselves extinct, because he’s lost a woman to someone else so how dare they intrude upon his tormented existence? What, they can’t afford to feed their kids? Hello, he has lost some woman he wanted to marry, so who are these wretches to bug with their trivial issues like poverty and starvation?

So yes, back to the topic of wealthy hypocrites…

Our heroine is Lady Elvina Dankworth. She spots whom she considers to be a shirtless groom and she immediately enters puberty. The fact that he is so rude to her apparently only increases her fancy. The more they argue and bicker like children, the hotter she is for him, and… well, I’m sure we all know how things will be between these two.

Okay, if I were the author, I would do this: I would take away the hero’s sulky attitude and whiny angst, as well as his hypocritical judgmental attitude about his peers while doing absolutely nothing on his own part to improve conditions.

This is because, just like how a typical romance heroine starts out claiming to be a rebel bluestocking out to challenge the establishment only to marry into the establishment in the end anyway, Percy starts out strong only to forget about what hypocrites rich people are once he has the taste of rich woman honey. That makes him a hypocrite at best, which means he’s not looking his best all things considered.

Also, his surly and super rude personality evaporates more with the increasing number of bases he goes past with Elvina, so it also casts the poor dear as a crank that can only be pacified by the woman he wants putting out to him. Again, this doesn’t endear him much to me.

In this one, the heroine’s honey pot is like some eldritch gateway to some woo-woo world, as the hero’s bratty personality seems to have been sucked out of his pee-pee into the woo-woo world completely via the gateway, only to have a completely different personality inhabit his body.

Mind you, I find this new Percy far more agreeable to read about, but the personality change feels way too abrupt to believable.

While this is one of those rare historical romances with a heroine that is more tolerable and even smarter than the hero, that’s mostly because Percy acts like the immature brat for way too long of the story and makes Elvina looks so much better in comparison. Still, the heroine’s alright. It’s just a shame that I spend way more time cringing at the hero’s antics than appreciating her horny lusting after the guy.

I feel that had this been a happy romance from the very beginning, with Percy being a happy-go-lucky guy that falls for Elvina without all the childish snapping and boorish rudeness that comes with the current version of him, this one would have been a far more entertaining story. If the author had also stuck with Percy going all the way as a reformist, or just ditching that angle, then the hero also won’t come off as a hypocrite.

Oh well, the things that could have been.