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Okay, got thrown for a loop by a Life Emergency, but pulling myself back on track.
I'd been putting off reading this. For a whole slew of reasons. Partly because I had fond memories of Chase from the early 2000s, which can be dangerous, partly because it's so well regarded in the way that say, you know, Bridgerton is, and I'm quite clearly a duck very out of water there.
I finally forced the issue because I had a zoom session through Carey library featuring her approaching and I wanted at least one of her works to be in the forefront of my mind. Good news: my concern was largely for naught. (I mean, I've purchased her latest because word on the street says as good as she was then, she's that much better now, but given how little bandwidth I have for terribleness in this arena at the moment, it was quite the relief to not be punched in the face with mid-90's misogyny.)
It's not that Sebastian Ballister/Dain isn't a child who needs to grow up in order to be worthy of Jessica Trent. Because, frankly, he is and he does. It's that Chase puts in the work to make the reader understand why he's stuck in a child's emotional state and then makes Dain do the necessary work to push himself past that, which is a) not something we get to see a lot of in this era of histrom (or, you know, in the overwhelming majority of histrom) and b) really satisfying on a bone deep level.
The set up is you have Dain's bumhole of a father, who loses his wife and all his heirs later in life and has to start over again. He chooses to do so with a young, Italian wife, who gives him a son. Enter, Dain. Dain's father is prejudiced AF against his Italian mother, who, when Dain is roughly eight, runs off with her lover and dies from a fever a few years later. One of the elements that Chase gives a lot of nuance to is Dain's mistrust of (and surface hatred of) women as relating back to his mother. The thing that really works for me here is that while Dain might judge women's actions in the text, the text never does, and actively works to make it clear where those women are coming from.
Anyhoodle. Dain picks up enough of his mother's darker coloring and his father's larger size to be bullied relentlessly at school until he proves himself able to bite back effectively. When we next meet him, Dain is an adult living firmly in the demimonde, answerable to nobody but himself, and doing whatever the fuck he pleases in France.
Jessica Trent is twenty-seven, making her an older heroine for a histrom, but unlike many older heroines, she's not been ruined, she's highly desired, there's nothing wrong with her, she just does not wish to marry. Rather, she's extremely good at finding antiques at bargain cost and reselling at actual worth and wishes to found a shop and support herself.
Before that, however, she needs to extricate her idiot older brother, who's running in Dain's circles and is going to ruin himself doing so. This brings her and Dain into each others' orbits.
I rarely feel sexual tension between characters in books. I don't know if it's an aspect of me being so heavily grey and disinterested in vanilla sex as a whole, or what, but even the writers that everyone swears are steam-level-off-the-charts, I'm usually entirely unaware of sexual tension that isn't spelled out to me. And even then, I don't really feel it. Yeah, no, these two have sexual tension the second they look at each other. And it never lets up for a minute.
The famous scene from this book, of course, is where Jessica shoots him, with premeditation--which, I'll be honest, score for sheer moxy, but I don't actually love physical harm between will-be partners, and I think this scene would play a LOT differently if the two were reversed. (In fairness, she shoots him because it's the only power she has in the situation, really, so there would be a number of things that would play out differently.)
For me, where this book absolutely shines is in the ways that Jessica is not just intelligent intellectually, she's emotionally intelligent. There's not a bunch of "oh, he has man parts, however shall I understand him?" In fact, she's all, "I raised roughly a billion male cousins, I know what your damage is, and I'm gonna need you to fix it." But instead of using her emotional energy to constantly be at odds with him, she does three things: 1. she stops fighting with him. She gives him EXACTLY what he wants, in order to show him that, uh, he doesn't really want it, 2. she makes sure he has the knowledge and the awareness that she, as an outside party, can have regarding his damage, and 3. she trusts him, when push comes to shove, to be the caring human she knows he can be.
There are a lot of ways in which this book feels almost outside the scope of romance in moments, not in bad ways, but in the sense that it pays more attention to the outside factors that weigh on the characters than many others do. (This actually feels somewhat reminiscent of McNaught, but I don't think Chase had read her at this time.) The way Chase weaves it first into character and then into the relationship between the characters is what makes it....well. A classic.
I'd been putting off reading this. For a whole slew of reasons. Partly because I had fond memories of Chase from the early 2000s, which can be dangerous, partly because it's so well regarded in the way that say, you know, Bridgerton is, and I'm quite clearly a duck very out of water there.
I finally forced the issue because I had a zoom session through Carey library featuring her approaching and I wanted at least one of her works to be in the forefront of my mind. Good news: my concern was largely for naught. (I mean, I've purchased her latest because word on the street says as good as she was then, she's that much better now, but given how little bandwidth I have for terribleness in this arena at the moment, it was quite the relief to not be punched in the face with mid-90's misogyny.)
It's not that Sebastian Ballister/Dain isn't a child who needs to grow up in order to be worthy of Jessica Trent. Because, frankly, he is and he does. It's that Chase puts in the work to make the reader understand why he's stuck in a child's emotional state and then makes Dain do the necessary work to push himself past that, which is a) not something we get to see a lot of in this era of histrom (or, you know, in the overwhelming majority of histrom) and b) really satisfying on a bone deep level.
The set up is you have Dain's bumhole of a father, who loses his wife and all his heirs later in life and has to start over again. He chooses to do so with a young, Italian wife, who gives him a son. Enter, Dain. Dain's father is prejudiced AF against his Italian mother, who, when Dain is roughly eight, runs off with her lover and dies from a fever a few years later. One of the elements that Chase gives a lot of nuance to is Dain's mistrust of (and surface hatred of) women as relating back to his mother. The thing that really works for me here is that while Dain might judge women's actions in the text, the text never does, and actively works to make it clear where those women are coming from.
Anyhoodle. Dain picks up enough of his mother's darker coloring and his father's larger size to be bullied relentlessly at school until he proves himself able to bite back effectively. When we next meet him, Dain is an adult living firmly in the demimonde, answerable to nobody but himself, and doing whatever the fuck he pleases in France.
Jessica Trent is twenty-seven, making her an older heroine for a histrom, but unlike many older heroines, she's not been ruined, she's highly desired, there's nothing wrong with her, she just does not wish to marry. Rather, she's extremely good at finding antiques at bargain cost and reselling at actual worth and wishes to found a shop and support herself.
Before that, however, she needs to extricate her idiot older brother, who's running in Dain's circles and is going to ruin himself doing so. This brings her and Dain into each others' orbits.
I rarely feel sexual tension between characters in books. I don't know if it's an aspect of me being so heavily grey and disinterested in vanilla sex as a whole, or what, but even the writers that everyone swears are steam-level-off-the-charts, I'm usually entirely unaware of sexual tension that isn't spelled out to me. And even then, I don't really feel it. Yeah, no, these two have sexual tension the second they look at each other. And it never lets up for a minute.
The famous scene from this book, of course, is where Jessica shoots him, with premeditation--which, I'll be honest, score for sheer moxy, but I don't actually love physical harm between will-be partners, and I think this scene would play a LOT differently if the two were reversed. (In fairness, she shoots him because it's the only power she has in the situation, really, so there would be a number of things that would play out differently.)
For me, where this book absolutely shines is in the ways that Jessica is not just intelligent intellectually, she's emotionally intelligent. There's not a bunch of "oh, he has man parts, however shall I understand him?" In fact, she's all, "I raised roughly a billion male cousins, I know what your damage is, and I'm gonna need you to fix it." But instead of using her emotional energy to constantly be at odds with him, she does three things: 1. she stops fighting with him. She gives him EXACTLY what he wants, in order to show him that, uh, he doesn't really want it, 2. she makes sure he has the knowledge and the awareness that she, as an outside party, can have regarding his damage, and 3. she trusts him, when push comes to shove, to be the caring human she knows he can be.
There are a lot of ways in which this book feels almost outside the scope of romance in moments, not in bad ways, but in the sense that it pays more attention to the outside factors that weigh on the characters than many others do. (This actually feels somewhat reminiscent of McNaught, but I don't think Chase had read her at this time.) The way Chase weaves it first into character and then into the relationship between the characters is what makes it....well. A classic.
