Elisa Braden, $4.99, ISBN 978-1310119217
Historical Romance, 2015
Elisa Braden’s The Madness of Viscount Atherbourne is the first entry in her Racing to Rescued from Ruin series. Yes, you can wag your finger at me and ask me what I am thinking, to read anything from a series with that name when I am deadly allergic to imbeciles.
This one opens with a young lady slashing her wrist and taking a nice long soak in the bath. Lovely.
The poor dear is our hero Lucien Wyatt’s sister. The current Viscount Atherbourne is fuming mad, understandably, because he believes that Marissa was seduced and then discarded by the brother of our heroine Victoria Lacey. Then, the brother, Harrison, shot dead Lucien’s brother in a duel, leaving Lucien with the title but minus a brother and a sister.
His plan is simple. He will seduce Victoria and steal her from Harrison, making sure that she has zero reputation by the time he is done. Fair’s fair, after all.
I wish I can muster some outrage on behalf of our heroine, but honestly, she makes it so easy for Lucien. Upon their first meeting, he openly mocks her, and she immediately gets the hots for him, I don’t know, maybe because she doesn’t love herself enough.
She is also bored with her life, and thinks it’s so exciting to risk her reputation by running off to go wild with Lucien. All because he’s tall and hot.
With Lord Stickley, her forehead came even with his nose. At one time, she had thought him the ideal height, not requiring the craning of her neck to look up at him. As an added benefit, they moved quite nicely together on the dance floor, his strides more closely matching her shorter ones. However, now she was less certain about how perfectly suited she and her fiancé were on a physical level. Something about this man’s height and larger, more muscular physique made her feel oddly safe.
Oh, that’s right, she’s engaged too.
“Has he not said that your skin glows with the purity of fresh cream?” He stroked one finger delicately along her cheek, his dark gaze holding hers rapt. “Or that your hair rivals the last glorious rays of the sun just before dusk?” His fingers sifted through the loose curls behind her ear. “Has he not even mentioned your lips, how they are as full and luscious as a ripe peach? Come, now. He must have done so at least a dozen times.”
Those are some of the most cloying and transparently fake compliments I’ve ever read, but that’s because I am a wise and mature person. Alas, Victoria isn’t nowhere as wise and mature… not even close. She is soon letting him molest her in ways that make her finally enter puberty, and then she’s having an orgasm…
I have to check again to see the CHAPTER TWO header mocking me back.
What’s it with all these young ladies? At least make him buy them dinner first, sheesh.
Surprise, they are discovered and Victoria wonders whether he has planned this all along.
At any rate, they have to get married, which is what Lucien wants all along. I have no idea why, since marrying her won’t cause any direct harm to her brother in any way, but hey, a plan’s a plan I suppose.
As expected, Victoria is an awful heroine for a story with this plot. She may be fine had she been plonked into a more typical plot that gives the heroine more room to be as vapid as she pleases, but here, there are many serious issues standing in the way of the happily ever after, and our heroine is completely ignorant of the true extent of the crimes her husband holds her brother accountable for, for the bulk of the story.
Consequently, on one side, we have Lucien dramatically brooding and feeling conflicted because he is falling for his wife. On the other side, we have Victoria wondering why her husband doesn’t like to eat kipper and asking him to hold some cats so that she can paint them. Oh, it’s not entirely her fault, as her husband for some reason doesn’t want to talk about her brother at all.
Actually, quite a number of things Lucien does here make little sense, but even if I were to take that into account, Victoria still manages to be come off as a self-absorbed wretch.
For example, she knows that her brother may have a hand in the death of her husband’s brother, but she still doesn’t understand why Lucien forbids her to see her brother. The fact that she can actually and repeatedly bring this up with a straight face has me wondering whether she had fallen down a large flight of stairs when she was a kid, and hit her head against every sharp edge on her way down.
When she finally realizes the true extent of the charges laid against her brother by her husband, she is aghast that he still dares to forbid her to see her brother.
At this point, I put down my reading device to add some eye drops into my eyes, thinking that I may have been reading too much and my optical nerves have become crossed-up as a result. No, I read that correctly. Oh my god, what is happening? Is Victoria in love with her own brother or something?
When Lucien is badly wounded and may not make it, Victoria’s anguish is that he never gets to tell her that he loves her. Oh my god, how narcissistic can this creature get?
This is the fatal flaw of The Madness of Viscount Atherbourne: the heroine is way too emotionally stunted, and as a result, she cannot provide any believable reason for Lucien to somehow go all brooding and obsessed over her. There is no believable pathos or drama in this story, because while Lucien is valiantly trying to be all Heathcliff on me, the heroine acts like everything is about her and how dare the world doesn’t allow her to indulge in her impulsive whims right away.
Now, you can say that well, isn’t Catherine Earnshaw the same way with Heathcliff? Here’s the thing: nobody in Wuthering Heights and not even the author would pretend that Catherine is a sweet ingénue. It’s pretty clear that Catherine is a selfish, narcissistic creature, and that’s the beauty of her relationship with Heathcliff: they are both like that, and they know it, embrace it even. That’s why their love is so wonderfully messed up.
Here, though, Victoria feels like the author’s effort to portray a sweet ingénue gone awry. She is said to be kind and all, but all I see is a selfish, self-absorbed twit that thinks the world revolves around her. Because of this, she adds nothing to the story or romance aside from being a vapid snot in every scene she is in. There is no grand, dark, tortured romance here, just me wondering what the hero sees in this wretch.
For a good idea of how a story like this could have been done so much better, see me point a finger at Amanda Quick’s Scandal or Christina Dodd’s That Scandalous Evening. Both have very different heroines and routes to a happily ever after, but one thing they have in common is a heroine that challenges the hero in some way, to cause a beautifully melodramatic shift in the hero from hate to love. That is noticeably absent here.
Lucien does his best to drag this story to the finish line, but nah, he should just go find a fun mistress instead, if you ask me. The Madness of Viscount Atherbourne desperately needs a different kind of heroine to make it work.
