Sex and Scandal in England (Guest Review)

by Melody Thomas

Guest Review by Sreya
Read Shen’s review here.

For the time being (the duration of this review) I’ll be taking over for Shen — no rotten tomatoes, please! — and I’ll be reviewing a novel that she lent me. She reviewed it herself, so I guess this is simultaneous.

Shen and I both love to read trashy romance novels. This is, of course, to the chagrin of our mutual friend Venuri and my boyfriend K who wonder why we bother. I’ve had novels wrenched from my hands. “Why do you read this stuff?”

Because it stinks.

Because on some basic level, Shen and I enjoy the suckage of other writing and the guilty pleasure of sharing in some random middle-aged woman’s freakish kinkiness. This is something shared by the lovely women who write for smartbitchestrashybooks.com. It’s fun to read something just shockingly awful, sinful or ridiculous. The wounded heroines, the inaccessible heroes, the impenetrability of high London society, are all part and parcel of this usually silly genre.

There are some golden romance novels out there that manage to transcend the stereotype. This is not one of them.

Ladies and gentlemen, this was one 375-page long suckfest.

How do I begin?

With the title and cover, for one. No, never judge a romance novel by its cover. Fatal mistake. It’s still really funny anyway, offering a great view of a woman’s naked back in a dress. It’s not titillating. All I can think about is, “Where on Earth is her mother?”

This book functions much better as a mystery than it does a romance novel. The historical elements are interesting: a Lord Whitley is a leader among a pack of anarchists wanting to bring down the government, citing its oppressive actions against factory workers that make up the backbone of England’s industrializing economy at this time. This man invites Ian Rockwell, a former agent for the Crown, to this gathering for his perhaps nefarious reasons. Bethany, a former underage hottie of his is now a mature woman of twenty (gasp! Do these women forget how immature the average twenty year old is? I think they have) and is present at this gathering so that she can expose the murderer of her best friend who was a teacher at the Academy at which she formerly worked. There is a man named Sir John who she believes to be culpable.

Shen told me she couldn’t figure out the solution to the mystery from the beginning. This would have been a plus had this book been an actual mystery novel. The timing dragged to accommodate the weird sexual intrigue between Bethany and Sir Rockwell. Sir Rockwell is supposed to be this Dashing Secret Service Hero thing, and he’s a pretty thick piece of meat. If he’d had sense, the book would have ended halfway before it did.

The scenes — kissing/love/sex — were very awkward. There’s a great line from the first sex — and I think only — sex scene.

Then he was off his bed kicking his pants free. His sex sprang free from the concealing shadows of wool.

Translation: Hello, everybody, I have a bouncing penis! Woo hoo!
(An incidental comment: has this woman ever heard of commas? There are a million of them that NEEDED to be in this book.)

And there’s that awkward “your hymen is going to break, but it’s okay … we enjoy it!” discussion between Bethany and Ian as well. I’ve seen this repeated throughout in various romance novels. It annoyed me to see it in this one.

So much for the sex. What about literary merit?

Bethany’s dialogues reeked a little false with me, anachronistic if you will. This whole “liberated woman who would have done so well had she lived in the present” just doesn’t take with me. She came off as shrill and mousy at odd times and her character was inconsistent at best.

Bethany, however, was better than the hero, who I just wanted to shoot. Must they all be so blockheaded and suffused with this sense of “honor”? Since when was being dishonorably honorable so sexy anyway? If you’re a ruthless Secret Agent, act like one, don’t swim in the lovely, alluring eyes of a shrill twenty-year-old.

As you can tell, I had very little patience for the novel and probably skipped some crucial scenes that had plot points of some interest. The plot was pretty ridiculous. Lots of violations of the “show, don’t tell” rule. Their initial meeting is glossed over, and as the reader we’re supposed to be aware of some residual feelings and take them for granted. The most absurd parts of the novel were only just getting warmed up. Our hero’s wife — wait, he was married? — isn’t really dead. Actually, nobody who was supposed to be dead was really dead. It reads like Batman, except Batman actually had some character development which allows me to excuse the comic’s silly inability to truly kill off its supervillains.  There is some scuttling around — Bethany is given an offer by Ian’s boss to work for him to apprehend the anarchists (Lord Whitley’s people are suspected of having murdered some bigwig somewhere.)

I’m going to spoil it all for you — there is a happy ending. But I felt relief, not just happiness, at the end of the book. Bethany and Ian deserve each other as long as they don’t return in a sequel I won’t read.