Carrie Lomax, $2.99
Historical Romance, 2020
One of the weirdest things about historical romances set in 19th century England is how sometimes, the author seems to detest everything about that time period and locale, and this manifests through the presentation and behavior of the heroine.
Amity Mayweather is said to have “sharp quips” based on the official synopsis, while her cousin, the pretty one, is meant to be the shallow and vacuous one. Finlay Weston, therefore, is meant to dump the cousin, whom he intends to marry, for Amity during a Christmas party.
Sure, Carrie Lomax’s Twelve Nights of Scandal seems on paper like every other story of this kind that is set in a big house in the country during Christmastime, but there is a severe disconnect here between how the author perceives Amity and how that heroine behaves in the story.
It’s a common setup. Amity’s family is poor, and her mother is doing all she can to marry Amity off so that everyone else can have some decent financial stability to live off.
Instead of doing her best to accommodate, our heroine behaves like a petulant nag, hating this and that and whining that her mother should have just pushed the youngest sister (predictably, the hottest one) out to the party scene instead.
Then, when her mother finally gets her into a dress made out of old sheets, Amity does her best to antagonize Finlay and even better, gets herself compromised and then acts like she’s too unbothered by the whole thing.
Does this wretch want to ruin herself and her own family? Is she insane?
Fortunately, the hero finds this wretch charming enough to love, so Amity gets money and respectability as well as the realization that she does like being rogered after all, all in spite of doing her best to make sure that the happy ending never happens.
I like the author’s way with words, and it’s pretty remarkable how she keeps me turning the pages even when the heroine is doing her best to be an unlikable train wreck.
Still, this doesn’t change the fact that this is one of those stories that would have worked so much better with an ending that sees the heroine ruined, homeless, and whimpering in a ditch about what a colossal imbecile she is and how sorry she is to have subjected me to her antics in this story.
