Carrie Lomax, $3.99, ISBN 979-8201902124
Historical Romance, 2019
Carrie Lomax’s The Wild Lord doesn’t boast a particularly original premise, as I’ve come across it a few times before: a woman, typically a governess, is called in to discreetly rehabilitate and tutor a grown-up nobleman that is behaving more like an ape than a human being.
Yes, it’s the whole Tarzan thing.
This time around, the heroine is a doctor. Harper Forsythe has honed her skills at the neighborhood loony house, and her superior decides to send her to treat an unusual patient: Edward Northcote, who had been lost while the family was fleeing some political turmoil in the South American region.
He’s now found 15 years later, not exactly a model of polite decorum, and this is an issue because his father had come into an earldom in the years since Edward went missing. This means that the future earl is now more hoo-hoo ha-ha eek-eek than the standard rake, and hence, he has to be “cured”.
Harper is determined to prove that she is a professional and break the insulting assumptions about her being an emotional, unprofessional, and intellectually inferior wannabe-doctor just because she’s a woman… and so she ends up getting all ooh-shiver-me-down-there-her-patient-is-so-boinkable. Way to go in paving the way for future female doctors!
Perhaps because of the need to be circumspect and not aggravate the white women’s burden brigade, this one is actually a pretty tame read. The hero isn’t too hoo-hoo ha-ha eek-eek; he’s more of an English-speaking fellow that needs a finishing school more than a head doctor, but I suppose if he had been a genuine feral human, the story would become far too complicated and anger readers that identify as sexy primates.
Both the characters are agreeable sorts, although Harper’s descent into self-determined martyrdom can get annoying toward the end, but the biggest problem here is that there is no sense of urgency. I know that Edward needs to be polished, but he’s not a tough nut to crack at all. There seems to be no genuine hurdle in Harper and Edward having a thing, as Harper conveniently has a pedigree that meets the bare minimum of propriety.
Things happen here, but I never believe that these characters need to overcome the odds because everything has that “Meh, who cares, as I know they will be alright in a few pages!” feel to it.
The sole source of melodrama is Edward’s “muahahaha” younger brother that is as subtle as a slap in the face with a leg of mutton when it comes to being the source of all the bad things in the story. Am I supposed to be surprised that he’s the bad guy? It’s even mentioned in the official synopsis that he’s the bad guy!
In the end, I am perfectly fine with having read this one. It doesn’t make my blood pressure spike in the wrong way, but it’s just that it also doesn’t make my blood pressure spike in the nice way, if you know what I mean. It’s just not an exciting read. Despite the interesting premise, it’s a sedate read with characters that behave more dramatically than the actual drama they face.
So yes, I like it, but I just like it. I wish that I can give it more love, as it’s certainly well written enough to deserve that, but it doesn’t move me much. Let’s file this one as a three-oogie read that is head and shoulders above most three-oogie reads out there.
