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.
