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Review: Leather and Lace, by Rebel Carter
Feb. 15th, 2021 03:54 pmI went back and forth over whether to even talk about this book. I want to support this author. She comes out of fandom, she has poly titles, POCs, other stuff I want to see in romance, and particularly in histrom. And in general, my experience with her on panels is that she's a smart, fun human.
This is an f/f histrom, which is pretty rare. It's basically her, Olivia Waite, and Jenn LeBlanc in that camp. I REALLY want to like this book.
That said, it just doesn't work on a number of levels.
The first problem is that the characterizations are pretty flat, as are the motivations for the characters. Mary James, our protag #1, is the daughter of widowed Sarah James, whose foremost characteristic is that she's a money-grubbing bitch. I like a problematic parent as much as the next person who lives and breathes for h/c, so in theory, this isn't a problem. However, that's really all Sarah is. She's written as nothing more than a caricature of a gold digger.
Mary, who is our POV character, is grieving her father, a merchant who was lost at sea. She is also pregnant, apparently because Sarah forced her to have entrapment sex with a wealthy male character from a former book. There are...a lot of pieces to this part of the book missing for me. The guy clearly doesn't know, as far as I can tell, because nobody knows, since they're trying to get Mary married off before anyone finds out. There's no suggestion that the father is a bad person, which leads me to question whether he might want to KNOW that he has a child on the way, but setting that aside, okay, pregnant, needs a marriage before child comes.
Mary then meets Alex, our protag #2, who, within the space of a conversation a) figures out that Mary is romantically interested in her, b) that she's in trouble and needs a spouse, c) offers to be that spouse for reasons that seem to amount to "paying it forward" but what she's paying forward is unclear, d) explains that marriage of all kinds are perfectly legal in this particular town, and e) comes up with a plan to trick Mary's mother to allow this.
So. I have a lot of problems here. First, as a lesbian, who knows other lesbians, and has on many occasions spoken with even more WLW, it is actually intensely hard to tell when a woman is hitting on another woman. We're not socialized to see it. When I say to another woman, "you look great in that dress," she can rightly assume that I mean, "you look great in that dress," and I might absolutely mean that. But I might also mean, "You look great in that dress and I would like to peel it off you with my teeth." There are VERY few WLW I know who haven't had this dilemma. Which makes it incredibly hard for me to believe that at a time when the word "lesbian" wasn't yet a term, that it would take a few minutes for these women to figure out they are romantically interested in one another.
Honestly, I need more than "someone did something nice for me once and now I'm helping you." Uh. You're offering to MARRY her. Presumably to intertwine all your holdings, which we, as readers, are led to believe are at least decent, with this woman you've just met. At least tell me what that person did for you. Something. Anything. (Nor is this followed up on. We're never given the reason Alex does what she does. At best, I am left to presume that she finds Mary TEH HAWT and so is like "aw yaaaaas" and figures she gets a kid in the bargain, too?? I have no idea.)
Perhaps the legal marriage thing is explained earlier in this series, as to how that came about in this town. But it's nutballs? Like, even in frontier-times, there was SOME level of state control? Or federal, if it was a territory. And I get that romance novels are about escapism, except that I personally want something to anchor that escapism. I don't care if you want to come up with a whole alternative timeline of the States. I mean, PLEASE, tell me stories where European settlers never come, or other things. But give me the necessary narrative underpinnings for it. Here, I feel like the answer to everything is "why not" which, yes, is an author's prerogative, it's just not one that works for me as a reader.
Finally, I'm not sure WHY there needs to be a whole "tricking Mary's mother" plot. On the face of things, Mary is legally an adult. Her mother has no ability to stop her from getting married. Furthermore, the way things roll out, Mary and Alex end up getting married spur of the moment anyway, which makes it doubly unclear why close to a third of the book is spent without Mary and Alex having any interactions, and instead it just being about this plot to trick Sarah into letting Mary marry Alex.
The last third of the book is stronger than the first two. Mary and Alex are married and they go back to Alex's farmstead. There's some cute flirting and then we end on some sex, which seemed perfectly passable to me, I'm not really into sex scenes and this one didn't blow me away, but I think if you are someone who enjoys sex scenes, it probably registers as a sweet one. I think, possibly, if the middle third of this book were taken out, the open shored up a bit, and the ending expanded to really establish these two, this might work better for me? I still didn't really have a great sense of who either of these women were--although, admittedly, I knew Mary much better than Alex--by the end of this book, nor was it clear to me why they loved each other.
There were some interesting ideas here, and fun tropes to be explored, but in the end this felt like a first draft to me, and one that needed a bunch more in order to flesh out the main characters, what they see in each other, and the ins and outs of the marriage-of-convenience aspect of the book.
This is an f/f histrom, which is pretty rare. It's basically her, Olivia Waite, and Jenn LeBlanc in that camp. I REALLY want to like this book.
That said, it just doesn't work on a number of levels.
The first problem is that the characterizations are pretty flat, as are the motivations for the characters. Mary James, our protag #1, is the daughter of widowed Sarah James, whose foremost characteristic is that she's a money-grubbing bitch. I like a problematic parent as much as the next person who lives and breathes for h/c, so in theory, this isn't a problem. However, that's really all Sarah is. She's written as nothing more than a caricature of a gold digger.
Mary, who is our POV character, is grieving her father, a merchant who was lost at sea. She is also pregnant, apparently because Sarah forced her to have entrapment sex with a wealthy male character from a former book. There are...a lot of pieces to this part of the book missing for me. The guy clearly doesn't know, as far as I can tell, because nobody knows, since they're trying to get Mary married off before anyone finds out. There's no suggestion that the father is a bad person, which leads me to question whether he might want to KNOW that he has a child on the way, but setting that aside, okay, pregnant, needs a marriage before child comes.
Mary then meets Alex, our protag #2, who, within the space of a conversation a) figures out that Mary is romantically interested in her, b) that she's in trouble and needs a spouse, c) offers to be that spouse for reasons that seem to amount to "paying it forward" but what she's paying forward is unclear, d) explains that marriage of all kinds are perfectly legal in this particular town, and e) comes up with a plan to trick Mary's mother to allow this.
So. I have a lot of problems here. First, as a lesbian, who knows other lesbians, and has on many occasions spoken with even more WLW, it is actually intensely hard to tell when a woman is hitting on another woman. We're not socialized to see it. When I say to another woman, "you look great in that dress," she can rightly assume that I mean, "you look great in that dress," and I might absolutely mean that. But I might also mean, "You look great in that dress and I would like to peel it off you with my teeth." There are VERY few WLW I know who haven't had this dilemma. Which makes it incredibly hard for me to believe that at a time when the word "lesbian" wasn't yet a term, that it would take a few minutes for these women to figure out they are romantically interested in one another.
Honestly, I need more than "someone did something nice for me once and now I'm helping you." Uh. You're offering to MARRY her. Presumably to intertwine all your holdings, which we, as readers, are led to believe are at least decent, with this woman you've just met. At least tell me what that person did for you. Something. Anything. (Nor is this followed up on. We're never given the reason Alex does what she does. At best, I am left to presume that she finds Mary TEH HAWT and so is like "aw yaaaaas" and figures she gets a kid in the bargain, too?? I have no idea.)
Perhaps the legal marriage thing is explained earlier in this series, as to how that came about in this town. But it's nutballs? Like, even in frontier-times, there was SOME level of state control? Or federal, if it was a territory. And I get that romance novels are about escapism, except that I personally want something to anchor that escapism. I don't care if you want to come up with a whole alternative timeline of the States. I mean, PLEASE, tell me stories where European settlers never come, or other things. But give me the necessary narrative underpinnings for it. Here, I feel like the answer to everything is "why not" which, yes, is an author's prerogative, it's just not one that works for me as a reader.
Finally, I'm not sure WHY there needs to be a whole "tricking Mary's mother" plot. On the face of things, Mary is legally an adult. Her mother has no ability to stop her from getting married. Furthermore, the way things roll out, Mary and Alex end up getting married spur of the moment anyway, which makes it doubly unclear why close to a third of the book is spent without Mary and Alex having any interactions, and instead it just being about this plot to trick Sarah into letting Mary marry Alex.
The last third of the book is stronger than the first two. Mary and Alex are married and they go back to Alex's farmstead. There's some cute flirting and then we end on some sex, which seemed perfectly passable to me, I'm not really into sex scenes and this one didn't blow me away, but I think if you are someone who enjoys sex scenes, it probably registers as a sweet one. I think, possibly, if the middle third of this book were taken out, the open shored up a bit, and the ending expanded to really establish these two, this might work better for me? I still didn't really have a great sense of who either of these women were--although, admittedly, I knew Mary much better than Alex--by the end of this book, nor was it clear to me why they loved each other.
There were some interesting ideas here, and fun tropes to be explored, but in the end this felt like a first draft to me, and one that needed a bunch more in order to flesh out the main characters, what they see in each other, and the ins and outs of the marriage-of-convenience aspect of the book.
