I’m now more than a week behind on these. Go me.
January 2012, #3: Unclaimed, by Courtney Milan.
Kraken was intense, so I switched over to a romance novel for the next book. I read a handful of Courtney Milan books last fall (Unveiled, Proof by Seduction and Trial by Desire) and really enjoyed them–Trial by Desire, in particular, is a cute and novel take on the “they sort of had to get married, now they’ll figure out how to fall in love” romance trope, and Unveiled played with the complications of marriages and inheritances in an interesting way. (They’re all historicals, all set in that loosely-19th-century England that seems like the natural home of historical romances.)
The plot in Unveiled had to do with a young woman whose hateful father and awful brothers have managed to lose the family estate to a very distant relative. She’s supposed to figure out how to trick the distant relative into giving it back, but along the way she falls in love with him, as happens in romance novels. Before she falls in love with him, though, she’s utterly charmed by his utterly charming younger brother Mark, who wins her affection by agreeing with her that life is really unfair for women in their society and teaching her (and the female servants) some serious self-defense so that they can fend off untoward advances.
Mark, unsurprisingly, is the hero of Unclaimed, and he’s still utterly charming. He’s written an academic work on the social value of male chastity that has become a big hit in the popular press, bringing him a lot of public attention. Jessica, a career courtesan looking for a way to finance her retirement, is hired by one of Mark’s political enemies to seduce him and expose him as a fraud. He’s fled to the small town where he and his brothers grew up, hoping to get away from the annoying glare of public attention, so she sets herself up in town, pretending to be a young widow.
What’s fun about this one isn’t so much the way the relationship comes together, but the way Jessica and Mark deal with being together. By the time she’s in a place to ruin his public image, she can’t bring herself to do it, but if she doesn’t get her payment for ruining him, she’ll have to go back to being a courtesan, and she can’t bring herself to do that either. Mark’s built his career on not blaming women for the horrible situations society pushes them into, but his first reaction on learning about Jessica’s situation is to hate her for it. When they sort all of that out, Jessica is extremely hesitant to expose Mark (and his family) to the stigma of her past, even though they all keep insisting that they can fix most of it and live with the rest.
I read romance novels for a few reasons. One reason: they’re good escapist fun. And this one is fabulous escapist fun. Jessica wears really beautiful dresses, and Mark is a (completely ahistorical) feminist dream who (for instance) repeatedly smacks down the villagers for their attempts to slut-shame Jessica over her really beautiful dresses. Another reason: engaging characters and character relationships. This book also hits pretty squarely on that front, and particularly on the family stuff. If I didn’t already know Mark from Unveiled, he might have seemed a little stiff or priggish at the beginning of this book, but he warmed up very fast when he met Jessica, and I felt like the whole book found another gear once his brothers Ash and Smite showed up in the last act.
Courtney Milan seems to be writing historical romances that are gently tweaking the genre. I like historicals a lot better than contemporaries, since there’s so much restraint built into the social systems in the historicals, but a lot of the authors I like best are the ones who are messing around a little bit with those restraints. (Lisa Kleypas does this really well too, in my experience.) Milan’s books mostly center on people who are a little bit outside the heart of Victorian high society–you still get all the trappings of ball gowns and marquesses and estate entailments and risking being compromised in the garden or whatever, but the marquess might have grown up as a factory owner’s son whose mother was an abusive religious zealot, and the garden tryst might be essentially a screwball comedy. They’re not, like, “transcending the genre” or anything pretentious–these are straight-up category romances–but they’re a little askew, and a lot fun. (And I’m totally looking forward to reading Unraveled, where Smite, the third and most difficult Turner brother, gets his love story.)
Posted Sunday, January 15th, 2012 at 8:30 pm. Filed under: personal.
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I recently discovered Courtney Milan and zoomed through all of those books, too, and loved ‘em. She’s a far better writer, on the sentence level, than most. Another reason I like her books is that the heroes are not always “neurotypical.” Depression, signs of Aspergers…they’re really unusual in that way.
I see that the third ‘brothers’ book is self-published, which means I am about to pay actual money to buy a self-published book off of Amazon, which is a first for me.