Miltantly Romantic

This romance stretches a number of the conventions of historical romance in a healthy way, and I enjoyed the results, but I think this is definitely a case where, for a lot of reasons, this probably isn't for a significant number of histrom readers.  The book is escapist in the way that all romance is, you know you'll get the HEA, but getting there is hella rocky and a lot of what the characters undergo in this is the kind of stuff where, there's genuinely no way these characters aren't going to have PTSD the rest of their lives.

Content warnings for this puppy: graphic violence, "onscreen" death of both good people and bad people, rape, nonconsensual drugging and body modification, and forced prostitution.

First off, this is a Restoration romance, which, not the most common time period of choice.  Things were pretty dicey, England was sort of just getting back on its feet, and there was a lot of inner turmoil that wasn't well resolved.  It's, by nature, a more dramatic time period to place the book in.  Cale does a really good job of threading some of that in quietly, in the history of Nick's family.

As is totally normal for romance novels, this book begins at a hanging, where one of the heroine's only friends, a highwayman, is hung to death.  Cale carries it off.  It's, in some ways, the beginning of the end of our heroine, Sally's, obedience to her pimp, Wrath.  She just doesn't know that yet.

Sally was born Celestine Rami.  She fled from France as a young woman, believing she had killed her stepfather in self-defense.  She had chosen England as her landing spot because she knew her biological father was English, so it seemed as good a place as any.  Through a series of unfortunate events, she ends up essentially being trafficked, which is where we meet her, some years later.

Nick is the younger (possibly-half) brother of a highwayman who is trying to be legit and tutor young nobles.  His employer is not paying him, making it hard to stay honest.  

For the first hundred pages of this book, Nick and Sally barely see each other, and when they do, only once is Nick not holding up his own employer's coach out of sheer hunger and desperation.  That is--Sally only sees his face once in those first hundred pages.

Sally attempts to run from Wrath after he kills her best friend, and he stabs her and leaves her to bleed out in the street.  Nick finds her and takes her back to his brother's workshop, and from there, things are almost weirdly sweet.  Sally, who grew up at an inn, learning to bake, bakes for the shop of highwaymen.  She helps with getting one out of Newgate.  Her and Nick dance around each other, each too shy and full of their own insecurities to admit they're head over heels for each other.  It's some very nice pining.

There's a distracting and unnecessary jealousy plot involving the older daughter of Nick's employer.  She is developed in an interesting, if disconcerting way late in the book: this makes sense, she is the lead in the second book, but most of the time she felt like a tired plot device.  Aside from that, the way Nick's family mystery, the question of Sally's father, and the ongoing thread of who, exactly, Wrath is, tie up nicely.  It's almost a little jolting how nicely they tie up, given everything that's come before, but at the same time, I'm reading as a romance reader, so I WANT that neat bow.

Overall, I found this a little bit different than a lot of what's available, the characters endearing, and the darkness worked for me.  Do with that what you will.

TW/CW: rape, racism, homophobic tropes.

For those of you who have been following the news, you may have seen that the term "white, Jewish woman from Kansas City" is not a good look at the moment.  And as someone who's pretty grossed out by the term #notallmen, I feel like the only way to engage with that dialogue is to essentially not do so, and just keep trying to be a person who works on herself to be anti-racist and a worthwhile addition to the human race, but jeez.  

Given this, romance had ONE JOB this weekend and let me tell you: it has failed.

It began when the whispers started circulating that there were serious problems with Dunmore's sophomore effort.  Reviewer Aarya's review on Goodreads is a truly fantastic breakdown of the lack of awareness around cultural appropriation/recognition of the harms of colonization in the book, and it turns out there's a Gay Villain.  Both of which should have been caught on a first read through, let alone before it made it out the door and on to shelves. 

Now, let me pause for a moment to say that as a queer person who knows other queer people, we come in all flavors, from awesomeblossom to douchecraft carrier.  It's not that I deny that gay people can be bad people.  It's that there's a long, unfortunate history of queer or queer-coded villains being the only queer representation in media.  And since it's unlikely that in a Victorian-era romance you're going to have a groundswell of LGBTQIA+ characters who make it clear that, oh, queer people are just people, I feel that perhaps a bit of caution in enacting that choice is due.  Given that I was super excited about that book, maybe more than I'd been for any in a long time, that news sucked a lot.

Perhaps I would have recovered by this morning, had I not been finishing Quinn's book last night.  Sadly, I was.

I want to try and be fair here.  I've never read Quinn before, which is interesting, given that she was actively writing in the nineties and is almost exclusively historical, and that's my bag.  I picked up this one specifically because Shonda Rhimes has optioned it through Netflix, and that idea excited the hell out of me.  Nobody has ever attempted to adapt what I would consider to be a true genre historical romance.  Even just the deal itself was a sign of a watershed moment in recognizing that women have money and buying power as a fan block.

I knew the Bridgerton series was a thing, and I hadn't been avoiding it, but it had always just struck me as more lighthearted than my usual preferences.  I want suffering and heartbreak and pining and possibly a torture scene or two before I get my HEA.  What's a little light torture between friends, I ask?

In any case, now was the moment.  In retrospect, I should have thought "self, this was written in 1999.  It was the wild west back then.  Johanna Lindsey (may she be living it up in the ever after) was still putting dubiously consensual spanking scenes in nearly all of her novels.  Gird your loins appropriately."  I was tricked, though, by the fact that it had been optioned for a 2020-and-beyond audience and had a new cover.  Lulled into complacency.

Quinn is a good writer, and her framing device of having a gossip sheet by an unknown author deliver most of the exposition is enjoyable.  As characters go, I feel like both Daphne and Simon are insubstantial, at best.  Daphne's the girl who is always thought of as a friend, possibly because being the fourth of eight children, and the first girl, she has somewhat grown up being one of the boys, although that element of her character is not really developed.  The only element of her character that is developed, so far as I can tell, is that she's kind.  And, uh, aside from being a fairly amorphous trait, that makes what truly bothers me about this book even worse.

Simon had potential.  He's the only child of a duke, his mother dies in childbirth and the duke, who's a waste of space, tells everyone his son is dead when he discovers Simon has a stutter.  But basically Simon just figures out how to control his stutter and fucks off to travel around the world after school for six years.  It's not even clear what he's doing.  I mean, probably for the best, given that he's going to countries where he was likely exploiting the locals for profit in some manner, but it's just as if they're both outlines of characters that were supposed to get filled in at some point but never did.

Simon was good friends with Daphne's eldest brother, Anthony, at school and there's a lot of deeply paternalistic stuff happening on Anthony's side  (as well as Benedict's and Colin's, her other two older brothers) throughout the book.  Their father being dead, Anthony is the head of the family, so there's some logic to it.  At the same time, it goes well beyond "my sister's too good for anybody" to "we're all basically raving psychos who want our sister to live out her days in a convent conceiving in the immaculate fashion."

The plot as it were, is a bit of a hot mess, but to sum up: Daphne and Simon pretend date, they get caught kissing by Anthony, who challenges Simon to a duel.  Simon lives on a combination of rage at his dead father and world-weary resignation, so instead of ask the woman he rather likes and could see himself being happy with to marry him, he accepts.  Daphne, knowing Simon is going to delope and Anthony is going to kill a duke over her, which, messy, basically lies to Simon, telling him others had seen them, and she will be ruined if he doesn't marry her.  Simon tells her that he cannot give her children, and she makes the decision to marry him despite this.

They get married, sex it up a lot, Simon's all in on the withdrawal method, and nobody has ever told Daphne anything about how things work, so she doesn't realize for a while that it's not that he's physically incapable of having children, as she believed, it's that he has chosen not to.  When she figures that out, she accuses him of lying to her over the difference of "cannot give you children" and "will not give you children."  And, okay, I suppose there's an argument there, except, not really, because he conveyed the pertinent sentiment, which was that he was unwilling to have children with her.  She refuses him her body because she's mad.  Seems reasonable, it's her body, they're fighting, she doesn't want to sleep with him.  Cool.

Simon goes out and gets drunk.  Also the right of a fully grown human.  He comes back to the house about fourteen sheets to the wind and asks her to stay with him while he sleeps.  She agrees.  She's sitting beside him, when he begins to have an erotic dream.  And without any hesitation, she thinks "he's asleep, probably kinda still drunk, if I get atop him right now and bring him to completion, he'll have no way to withdraw."  And then goes right through with that.

Yes, she rapes her husband.  Quinn later tries to create some gray space around this, but it's too little too late.  Simon, understandably, wigs the everloving fuck out, and leaves for one of his other estates telling her that if she conceives, she should ask his steward for his direction.

Now, what follows is all my reaction and nowhere in the text, because the text barely seems to even recognize that what Daphne has done is not okay.  There's some sense of "oh, I shouldn't have gone against his wishes" but otherwise, Daphne is portrayed as the victim, Simon as the cold brute of a spouse, leaving her so shortly after their marriage.  When he comes back he says that "he isn't happy with what she did," but that it was really his words locking up in his mouth and that sense of being a child again and being unable to speak that sent him fleeing.

Um.  I'm not sure how anyone can disconnect the fact that he was just RAPED from his reaction/inability to speak in that moment.  There's a clear a to b causality happening.  Particularly in that era, where husband-on-wife marital rape wasn't recognized because a husband quite literally owned his wife, Simon, even if he could speak, would have no words for what had happened, and nobody to speak them to.  His closest friend is her brother, who is threatening to beat him up over leaving her.  

It's hard for me to even remember what happens after that, because my brain was in a non-stop rotation of "whatthefuckwhatthefuck."  Even in the seventies and eighties, most romance novels recognized outright rape for what it was.  Was there a whole bunch of ravishment-fantasy-she-liked-it-so-it-was-okay stuff that needed to be unpacked like a moving truck?  Yes.  Were there husbands raping wives that were later redeemed from something that's not necessarily redeemable?  Looking at you, Catherine Coulter and Judith McNaught.  But I don't know that I've ever seen a dismissal of someone's consent so complete be essentially glossed over almost to the point of ignoring it.

I'm not an assault survivor, I have no sexual trauma caused by anything other than society's expectations of me, and this book made me want to vomit.  I'm still blinking in shock that a) this is considered one of the classics of the genre without serious and ongoing conversation about how not okay Daphne's actions and the books treatment of them are, and b) this is what is being optioned as the first historical romance adaptation to hit screens.  Really??  REALLY??

I'm going to go to my safe place and read a Tessa Dare.  I need to know nothing horrible is going to happen for the space of one novel.

Because writing this kind of sucked donkey balls, I leave you with something wonderful:

Jennifer Holliday, Broadway Legend, pwning I Am What I Am

Keala Settle, up-and-coming Broadway Legend, making To Dream the Impossible Dream hers