Grade: D

In theory, this book should have been kickass. I mean, we’ve got two leads who were forcibly married when they were children (to each other) and now that they’re all grown up, the female is a celebrate London actress and the male is a powerful marquis who wants the female to be his mistress, without knowing that she is actually his wife. Add to that a scheming former mistress who pretends she’s pregnant just to trap the marquis and a pretty powerful supporting male lead (sequel bait) who plays the heroine’s boss and is all deliciously broody and yummy, and THIS BOOK SHOULD HAVE BEEN AWESOME. But it’s not awesome. It’s not even good. In fact, it’s pretty frickin’ dull. How could a book with a ridiculously evil mistress who is practically cackling as she schemes against the saintly sweet heroine be so damned boring? At first the book had me pretty engaged. I mean, the heroine is all feisty and determined, while the hero is all appropriately bitter and rakish, but then… it all just falls apart. At the end of the book, I just felt kind of gypped.

There’s a cute scene in the beginning of the story where the hero, the Marquis of Savage, spots the heroine, Julia Hargate a.k.a. Jessica Wentworth, dancing like a fairy princess in a fair and decides that she’s the most beautiful girl he has ever seen. He moons and drools over her, lures her to a dark corner, and cheerfully molests her. He tells himself that she’s the kind of girl that he wants to marry someday, but he’s already… married. Anyway, he sees her, now a successful theater actress, three years later at some fancy London party and decides that she’s going to be his mistress no matter what, so he goes up to her boss, Logan Scott, and tells him that he will give him a bunch of money as a contribution to the theater if he could get Jessica Wentworth to have dinner with him. Sleazebag. Anyway, he tells Logan that the theater can keep the money even if Jessica Wentworth doesn’t go to dinner with him and this, of course, compels Logan to blackmail Jessica to go to dinner with Savage or she’ll lose all the choice parts of the theater season. Just in case you’ve forgotten, I’ll remind you again that SHE is HIS wife.

Come on, is that juicy or what? At this point, I’m rubbing my hands in anticipation, thinking, “Oh, man, this is going to be good.”

But no. Because Julia Hargate a.k.a Jessica Wentworth has Daddy Issues. Daddy never loved her, so she became pretty adept at pretending that she was loved and cherish, and that’s why she became an actress. Ho-hum. At first I respected what Julia was doing. Without the help of anyone, she landed a job at a prestigious theater and made a name for herself all on her own. I also understood that she didn’t want to be dependent and reliant on some man like her mother, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that no matter what Julia did, it wasn’t for herself, but for her pathetic attempt to please her father. Or to show him that she doesn’t need him. Or something. Whatever. No matter what it was, it was still boring.

Anyway, Julia knows right away that Savage is her husband, but she doesn’t want to tell him that she’s his wife because she believes that if he knew, he would try to control her life, and she wouldn’t be able to act, anymore. Savage is appropriately controlling and possessive, so it’s obvious that we’re supposed to think that he’d stand in the way of her happiness, and she’d be forced to choose the theater over him. There’s even an old lady who is Julia’s tutor and was once a great actress who was forced to choose between her lover and the theater. Oh, brother. As to be expected, we’re treated to a bunch of scenes of this woman telling Julia that she must follow her heart.

Savage, on the other hand, is just… a dick. Not only is he a dick, he’s a hypocritical dick, too. There’s even a scene in this book where Julia asks him if he’s married and he says no. From that point on, I just couldn’t get myself to like him. Lying liar!

And then there’s the evil mistress. I don’t remember her name now, but I thought she was pretty awesome. She’s like… the total composite of all the evil mistresses in all the romance novels I’ve read. She’s beautiful, devious, scheming… I’m still laughing at the scene where she confronts Julia in a dress shop and tells her to stay away from her man because she’s pregnant with his baby. She’s not pregnant, of course, but she’s just so luridly melodramatic that I was very entertained by her.

I won’t talk about Logan Scott because he has his own book that I’ll be reviewing as soon as I read it.

I think what really made me mad about this book is how Kleypas made such a big deal about Julia having to choose between her career and Savage. There’s even that bullshit contrivance with the theater going up in flames, so Julia and Savage would be forced to spend time together. That alone says that Julia can’t have both. You know how it ends. I knew how it would end before I even started reading it.

I think this is the shortest review I have ever written. I was just so bored by this book that I’m hard pressed now to think of something to say. This book could have been so cool. Instead, it committed the ultimate sin of boring the shit out of me. As it is, I just don’t like this book. Period.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 28th, 2006 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Books, Grade: D, Romance: Historical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.