Author: Lily Maxton
Publisher: Entangled
Rating: WORTHY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new novel is reward aplenty!
I've had really mixed success with novels released by Entangled Publishing, but I keep coming back because once in a while I'm richly rewarded, and this novel was such a case, even though it was a bit of a roller-coaster ride for me.
I've seen several reviewers describe this as a novella, but it seemed to me to be much more like a short story or a novelette, not a novella. It’s all down to word-count and I don't know the word-count here, so I can't say for certain. Short stories are under 7,500 words, so this was undoubtedly longer than that even though it felt short. Novelettes are less than 17,500 words. A novella is over 17,500, but less than 40,000. Who made up these limits, I don’t know, but it seems to me that this was shorter than that latter range, but that's just a wild guess.
I started out loving this story (notice how I deftly avoided giving it a word-count label?), despite the fact that this title is way over-used. I loved it until the two main characters, Olivia Middleton (not Kate?!), and William Cross (not William of Windsor?!) actually met; then it went a bit downhill. First it became mildly annoying, migrating to outright annoying as the two became…entangled. This sounds like a weather forecast, doesn't it? It was actually more of a 'whether' forecast - whether I could finish it or not!
Frankly, I may not have been able to had it been a longer tale, so perhaps its brevity played into the author's favor here, because at that point I thought I was going to rate it poorly. The interaction between the two main characters was unrealistic, clichéd, and wildly inappropriate even for a 'scandalous' novel. It was the ending which saved it for me because it was so well done.
One thing I didn’t know when I read this was that it's the final volume in a trilogy. The Affaire, and The Wager are the first two, neither of which I've read, although I confess I'm now interested! This seems to be a determined habit with me, since I find myself stumbling into such "middle stories" almost routinely without realizing that more went before. In this case it wasn't an issue because this story blessedly wasn't dependent upon the previous two (and even more blessedly, it was not written in first person point of view! Thank you Lily Maxton!). This one is easily enjoyed as a stand-alone, but I do find myself wondering why the author didn’t simply combine the three into one story, making a complete novel out of it.
The basic story here is that is that the third and youngest daughter of the Middleton family, Olivia, is likely to be the hardest to marry off. In this regard, it reminded me of a trilogy I've been reading by Susan Kaye Quinn, the first two volumes of which I reviewed on my blog this month: Third Daughter and Second Daughter. Note that these are very different stories - young adult, with a steam-punk theme, set in an alternate world reminiscent of India. There is romance, but there's a lot more, as well, although despite the titles, all three of that trilogy seem to be primarily about the third daughter.
But I digress! Olivia's mom has successfully dispatched her two older daughters, and marrying off Olivia is her only remaining goal in life. The problem is that Olivia is considered the plainest of the three daughters and additionally, she's feisty, opinionated, cynical, and refuses to marry for money or title, only for love, which is the diametric opposite of her mother's goal, of course.
The thing which really won me over to Olivia's camp was her sense of humor. Like Cross, I have the opinion that, frankly my dears, I don’t give a damn if a girl is considered 'plain', as long as she's good company and preferably amusing to be with. Olivia could have been devoid of pretty much all of the other things for me as long as she has the sense of humor with which the author endowed her. It was delightful and refreshing, and a rarity in far too many romance and YA novels through which I've waded lately.
Who says female leads can’t be funny or have a good sense of humor? Not me, and this brings me to my first problem: Olivia's humor rather disappeared when Cross arrived on the scene. This made me cross! It was one of the things which turned me off during the middle bit of the novel. I would have really liked this a lot more if we had been allowed to enjoy more time with Olivia before Cross showed up - perhaps seeing her see-off a couple of suitors in the process, with her sharp humor.
And on that score, my other problem is with Cross himself. I've seen other reviewers describe him as a rake-in-the-making or a wannabe rake, or words to that effect, but 'rake' really doesn’t describe him accurately. He's much more of a damnable cad, or in more modern terms and as Britney Spears so admirably iterated, he's a womanizer.
But to be precisely accurate, I'd have to say that he's a coward with a really poor moral compass, and this is why I really disliked him. Because of his own broken family background, he has resolved never to fall in love, but this doesn’t mean that he also has to shed all of his integrity, and wantonly despoil one young woman after another with zero regard for consequences, yet he does, and he shows no sign of learning from his stupidity. In short, he's despicable.
The fact that he's a jerk is made abundantly clear in his interaction with Olivia. From the very beginning, all he was interested in was getting into her pants. He had no regard whatsoever for the more-than-likely irreparable damage he could do to her, or for the potential for her to contract some sort of disease from him, given his sluttish history.
He didn’t strike me as a hero at all, but in the end, he came through. For me this didn’t wipe out his appalling abuse of the much younger and rather naïve Olivia, but it did resolve the story admirably from her PoV, and this is why I was willing to accept it at that. Again here, I would have much preferred a longer story with a relationship arc which seemed realistic and not the "insta-dore" which is really what we had here. Maybe I would even have bought that it was really love if the focus had been less on her behind and more on her mind. I think this was a wasted opportunity.
As to the writing, in general it was well done. The story was very readable. The text flowed comfortably and I found no spelling errors or grammatical mistakes, so the author is evidently very competent in that department, which is really nice to know, should I read more of her work. For an American to tell such an engaging story about early nineteenth century Britain is an admirable accomplishment. Not that I'm an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but her reference to Byron was appropriate, so I'm guessing she got other parts right too.
One thing which struck me as particularly odd from a writing perspective was the genderism involved here - and it was genderism in a highly-restricted and very personal manner! Lily Maxton has no hesitation in employing a certain four-letter word to describe the male phallus, writing 'cock' at one point, but she seemed remarkably inhibited in approaching the emissions from said phallus, and also in describing the female genitalia with the same abandon! Instead, we were treated to all manner of circumlocution and euphemism. I found that peculiar, and in some ways quite endearing, but I really feel that I must insist upon equality of the sexes for genital descriptions: what’s good for the gander is good for the goose after all!
That said, I enjoyed this overall and have no problem in rating it highly since the story as a whole is a worth read it even if, I felt, some parts let it down a bit.
