Okay, so it's Monday again
Mar. 15th, 2010 07:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jmc_bksAnd it must be time for SBD.
My topic today is: Duchess in Love by Eloisa James.
This book was published back in 2002, but I haven't read anything from James since her first few books, the "Pleasures" series. They came out in hard back and got all kinds of attention. Romance! Written by an academic! OMG! Validation for genre fiction! Eh, whatever. They were okay but not great, and I've felt no urge to read her since then. Why this one? Well, she was a speaker at RWA last year, and I really enjoyed her speech, so I thought I'd give her another try.
Blurb:
A duke in retreat
Gina was forced into marriage with the Duke of Girton at an age when she'd have been better off in a schoolroom than a ballroom. Directly after the ceremony her handsome spouse promptly fled to the continent, leaving the marriage unconsummated and Gina quite indignant.
A lady in the middle
Now, she is one of the most well-known ladies in London...living on the edge of scandal -- desired by many men, but resisting giving herself to any one.
A duchess in love
Finally, Camden, the Duke of Girton, has returned home, to discover that his naive bride has blossomed into the toast of the ton. Which leaves Cam in the most uncomfortable position of discovering that he has the bad manners to be falling in love -- with his own wife!
As usual, the blurb is pretty inaccurate. And also, not very well written.
Gina and Camden were married as children (12 and 18, respectively) (for a trumped up reason that makes little or no sense when it is revealed) by his father, who appears to have been a right bastard. Camden ran away and stayed away, even after his father died, leaving the estate to be managed by his estate agent. Except there's a lot of stuff that the landlord needs to do that an agent can't, and so Gina's been doing all that stuff. But she's now met someone she wants to marry, so she wants an annulment. Camden comes home to give it to her, after spending twelve years living abroad, doing as he pleases. He is purported to be a talented sculptor, known among the ton for his goddess sculptures based on his various lovers and mistresses. He's planning on annulling his marriage, then returning to Greece and his sculpting.
Frankly, Camden as hero was a huge loser in my mind. He ran away as a teenager, okay, fine. But he behaved like Peter Pan for most of the book. I can't put my finger on exactly why, but his sculpting comes across (to me) as dilettante-ish, rather than as a vocation. He wants what he wants, and no one has ever made him grow up or think outside of himself. The idea that the estate agent couldn't decide everything or take care of everything, or do the things traditionally done by a landlord in terms of the personal relationship with the tenants, seemed utterly alien to him, which seemed odd given his likely education and training as a young man. (Weren't ducal heirs supposed to be brought up learning that kind of thing?)
Plot-wise, the book felt too busy and a bit frenzied. Readers are treated to not one but two subplots, both involving friends of Gina's who are estranged from their husbands for various reasons. And there's series bait all over the place.
Also, when Rounton the solicitor returned to his offices in the Inns of Court, I wondered two things: first, would he call them offices rather than chambers? (Was "offices" even used in that sense at the time? Must look up the etymology.) And second, which of the Inns of Court?
The cover art is pretty, if generic.
The plot was well-paced and did not lag in any spots. The prose...well, it didn't stand out as being wonderful or terrible.
All in all, this was not a bad book, it just wasn't a great book. Which makes me wonder where it falls on the continuum of James' work. This alone wouldn't send me on a search for the rest of the backlist, which appears to include several books related to this one and a preponderance of duchesses.
C+ for me.
My topic today is: Duchess in Love by Eloisa James.
This book was published back in 2002, but I haven't read anything from James since her first few books, the "Pleasures" series. They came out in hard back and got all kinds of attention. Romance! Written by an academic! OMG! Validation for genre fiction! Eh, whatever. They were okay but not great, and I've felt no urge to read her since then. Why this one? Well, she was a speaker at RWA last year, and I really enjoyed her speech, so I thought I'd give her another try.
Blurb:A duke in retreat
Gina was forced into marriage with the Duke of Girton at an age when she'd have been better off in a schoolroom than a ballroom. Directly after the ceremony her handsome spouse promptly fled to the continent, leaving the marriage unconsummated and Gina quite indignant.
A lady in the middle
Now, she is one of the most well-known ladies in London...living on the edge of scandal -- desired by many men, but resisting giving herself to any one.
A duchess in love
Finally, Camden, the Duke of Girton, has returned home, to discover that his naive bride has blossomed into the toast of the ton. Which leaves Cam in the most uncomfortable position of discovering that he has the bad manners to be falling in love -- with his own wife!
As usual, the blurb is pretty inaccurate. And also, not very well written.
Gina and Camden were married as children (12 and 18, respectively) (for a trumped up reason that makes little or no sense when it is revealed) by his father, who appears to have been a right bastard. Camden ran away and stayed away, even after his father died, leaving the estate to be managed by his estate agent. Except there's a lot of stuff that the landlord needs to do that an agent can't, and so Gina's been doing all that stuff. But she's now met someone she wants to marry, so she wants an annulment. Camden comes home to give it to her, after spending twelve years living abroad, doing as he pleases. He is purported to be a talented sculptor, known among the ton for his goddess sculptures based on his various lovers and mistresses. He's planning on annulling his marriage, then returning to Greece and his sculpting.
Frankly, Camden as hero was a huge loser in my mind. He ran away as a teenager, okay, fine. But he behaved like Peter Pan for most of the book. I can't put my finger on exactly why, but his sculpting comes across (to me) as dilettante-ish, rather than as a vocation. He wants what he wants, and no one has ever made him grow up or think outside of himself. The idea that the estate agent couldn't decide everything or take care of everything, or do the things traditionally done by a landlord in terms of the personal relationship with the tenants, seemed utterly alien to him, which seemed odd given his likely education and training as a young man. (Weren't ducal heirs supposed to be brought up learning that kind of thing?)
Plot-wise, the book felt too busy and a bit frenzied. Readers are treated to not one but two subplots, both involving friends of Gina's who are estranged from their husbands for various reasons. And there's series bait all over the place.
Also, when Rounton the solicitor returned to his offices in the Inns of Court, I wondered two things: first, would he call them offices rather than chambers? (Was "offices" even used in that sense at the time? Must look up the etymology.) And second, which of the Inns of Court?
The cover art is pretty, if generic.
The plot was well-paced and did not lag in any spots. The prose...well, it didn't stand out as being wonderful or terrible.
All in all, this was not a bad book, it just wasn't a great book. Which makes me wonder where it falls on the continuum of James' work. This alone wouldn't send me on a search for the rest of the backlist, which appears to include several books related to this one and a preponderance of duchesses.
C+ for me.
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no subject
Date: 2010-03-16 11:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-16 12:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-16 02:19 pm (UTC)Reaaally looong post!
Date: 2010-03-16 02:29 pm (UTC)I'm currently reading Eloisa James's Duchess in Love. It is excellent, somewhat of a bedroom farce meets Sex & the City, and has one of my favorite (oft-repeated by me) themes of reunion. The basic plot is that Camden Serrard, the Duke of Girton, returns to England from his home in Greece (where he sculpts plump naked women from pink alabaster) to grant his wife Gina an annulment. Apparently they were married when Gina was only 12, and Cam ran off immediately after the wedding. This book is so humorous and entertaining -- I particularly loved that Cam didn't recognize Gina when he first sees her at a ball. Too funny! ~dated 2/6/2003
Now here's my review to Fool for Love, which was my wallbanger:
A disappointing second installment (2 stars)
When I finished the sparkling and delightful DUCHESS IN LOVE, I couldn’t wait for the next installment in Eloisa James’s new series. Now, having read FOOL FOR LOVE, I can only express my disappointment.
In FOOL FOR LOVE, the main characters are Henrietta and Simon – not one of the couples introduced in DUCHESS IN LOVE. Simon Darby is Esme Rawlings’s nephew, heir apparent to her late husband’s title and estates. However, Esme is pregnant, and so Simon needs to wait out her confinement to see if the baby is a boy or not. There are also doubts as to whether Esme’s child was fathered by her late husband. When Simon comes to Esme’s country estate with his much younger half-sisters in tow, he meets – and is fascinated with – Esme’s neighbor, Henrietta Maclellan. He woos her, after a fashion, until he discovers that she can not only not carry children to term, but that she also probably should not even participate in activities that could lead to pregnancy. Henrietta wants Simon and his two sisters, so she does not give up, and with Esme’s help, contrives to trap him into marriage.
Around this point, the book just started to wander along paths that made no sense. Simon, who in the first half of the book appears to truly need his uncle’s estates (given the way he rushed off to the country to determine if Esme was indeed pregnant), suddenly reveals that he has a fortune worth twice Henrietta’s dowry. Henrietta stubbornly refuses to consult a better doctor in London about her deformity and her childbearing ability. A great deal of stress is placed on how she longs to be a mother to Simon’s two sisters, but little is shown of how she manages to handle the two extremely difficult girls. For that matter, much is made of younger sibling Annabel’s “weak stomach,” and I kept expecting Henrietta to find the solution to this illness, but nothing happened. Similarly, there was no explanation offered as to why older sibling Josie mourned so much for a shrew of a mother she apparently never really knew. To top it all off, I had a hard time believing Simon and Henrietta were ever really in love; their declarations to one another felt rather rushed, and even the cause and resolution of Henrietta’s medical problems were glossed over.
I think what frustrated me most about FOOL FOR LOVE is that the scenes between Esme Rawlings and Sebastian Bonnington stole the show. This book should have been their time at center stage, and the fact that they were only granted minor scenes (even if those scenes were the strongest in the book) makes me feel downright cheated. In fact, I sensed that James was setting readers up for Rees and Helena’s story next, which means Esme and Sebastian will be continuing background characters, awaiting their own book for some time. But at least Rees and Helena are a compelling couple. Simon and Henrietta left me cold, frustrated, and wanting to knock heads together. I settled for throwing the book across the room. I recommend FOOL FOR LOVE only for Esme and Sebastian’s sake.
Re: Reaaally looong post!
Date: 2010-03-17 01:13 am (UTC)Esme and Sebastian...I feel ambivalent about them as a couple, and am not sure I'd be willing to read any book just for them.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-16 02:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-17 01:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-16 07:18 pm (UTC)I think I like James' voice, but I read romance for the emotional oomph, and this wasn't oomphish. So, like you, I wasn't motivated to buy the backlist.
Marianne McA
no subject
Date: 2010-03-17 01:11 am (UTC)