Scandal On the High Seas!

As I may have mentioned before, I'm not much for romance novels.  I've read a few, and there are even a few that I love and reread.  But invariably, those are the ones that have something going on besides the romance, whether it's grand adventure or a detailed look at ranching in the 1880s.

What I am into, though, is swashbuckling.  And girls who dress up as boys and run away to (fill in the blank).  So I picked up Elizabeth Essex's Almost a Scandal on a whim, with trepidation in my heart.

But oh, it's so worth it! Ignore the cover--I'm halfway through and Sally hasn't worn a dress yet.  You see, when her brother, Richard, ran away to become a parson instead of following family tradition into the Royal Navy, she simply had to preserve the family's honor by showing up in his place.  Luckily, at 18, she can pass for a 16-year-old boy.  She's soon faced with an overbearing midshipman and a suspicious commanding officer, but she was raised by the navy, so she's ready for anything.

Now, the big risk with any girl-disguised-as-boy romance novel is the fact that the hero naturally doesn't know she's a girl.  So the requisite barely-repressed longing becomes confusing, especially for romance.  It's not that the authors aren't open-minded, but romance novels cross a lot of political divides, and when I see that particular dilemma coming, I'm never sure if the author or the characters are going to be able to handle that confusion of throbbing organs without some horrible pangs of homophobia. 

Bless Elizabeth Essex (if that is your real name--who believes that?), she sidestepped the question entirely.  Mr. Colyear recognizes the little sister of his old friends very early on in the story, leaving him free to be maddened and bewitched, and to feel electricity shoot through his body and all sorts of other feelings that permeate every fiber of his being. 

Because that's what feelings do in romance novels, and yeah, it's a romance novel.  But really, those parts are just punctuating things.  Again, halfway through, this is really a story of Sally doing her thing, and Col admiring her and not being sure what to do about her.  Yeah, there's the occasional bout of thinking about each other too much, and the occasional unfeminist desire to teach her a lesson (spanking or kissing, not sure).  But mostly they respect and like each other and are trying to manage the situation--with the added difficulty of his being the commanding officer of a great sailor who's also kind of stubborn. 

Of course, since this is a Harlequin Historical, they won't have sex until page 180, and they won't end up together until at least 275.  I did a careful study during my misspent high school years.

So yeah, this book is, thus far, pretty awesome as romance novels go.  Really, if they were all like this, I'd read them all the time.  "Headstrong" is too often a word for flaky in these books, but not this one.  This book reminds me very much of Bloody Jack--the first one, before Jacky's life started getting more and more hypermanic--and of the Temeraire series, in its fun, detail-filled picture of the Napoleonic war.  In short, I'm seriously loving it.

Here's where I disclose that I got a free copy for review.  And I'm so glad I did, because I can tell you I never would have paid money for a romance novel, but knowing what I know now, I really might for this one.  And I think I might give another Elizabeth Essex book a shot.  It depends on how the rest of the book pans out--if she maintains a strong, smart, competent female character who doesn't fall apart just when the man needs to pick her up, nor do stupid things that prove that the guy's the only logical one in the story, then yeah, I'm all over the Essex oeuvre. 

Brief Reviews

Finished three books in quick succession.  I already blogged about some of them, but some final thoughts.

Almost a Scandal, by Elizabeth Essex.  How I love Harlequin Historicals.  There's such comfort in their familiar rhythms, even when they don't make perfect sense.  This book, for example, didn't have a misunderstanding keeping the hero and heroine apart, but rather a practical situation.  So the resolution was almost unnecessary--they were in perfect agreement by the end.

But the best part is that my calculations were proven true.   A HH novel is between 280 and 320 pages long.  Let's say 300 for mathematical purposes.  On my Kindle, that means that each percent that I tick off is three pages.  So if I'm right, they'll have sex at 180 pages = 60%.  I think 59% is well within the margin of error.

As I said before, this is a great book for someone who wants to read about the British navy but with some romance and a chipper girl as your heroine.  There's a lot of naval lore here.  It's like Bloody Jack only a bit less convoluted.  Good stuff.

I'm a Stranger Here Myself, by Bill Bryson.  Dude is an old crank.  It made me so sad to dislike Bill Bryson so much, when I've loved him so much in his other books.  Admittedly, only one was a memoir (A Walk In the Woods), and the others all research-based (At Home, A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Mother Tongue).  And in Walk, he does get awfully opinionated in a cranky old man kind of way (why is the Adirondack Trail so woodsy?  In England they'd have charming farms and cottages with privet hedges.  All this nature is so dense and thick--where's the fun in that?).  But anyway--I'm reserving judgement on him in general till I've read the  next one I picked--In a Sunburned Country.  I am neither defensive nor knowledgeable about Australia, so I think this will be a good test.

Finally, The Face On the Milk Carton, by Caroline B. Cooney. That cover makes it look creepier than it is--this is the story of a girl who sees her own childhood portrait on a milk carton, and the fallout from that.  I saw the movie--After School Special?  Made for Lifetime?--ages ago, and I really liked it. 

Turns out this book is only the first half of what the movie covered, which made me a little impatient with it.  This book is entirely about Janie Johnson's internal struggle with the question of what this Missing Persons photo means.  Are her parents not really her parents?  Are they kidnappers?  Who can she trust?  What will happen if she tells?  There's a lot of good, complicated family stuff here, though it feels a bit dated--Janie's parents are so great and perfect, they're all so close, and there's an underlying assumption that it's all either-or.  Her parents are the wonderful people she assumes, OR they're monsters who are terrifying and evil.  OR maybe they're crazy and have amnesia about what they did?  Black and white--is that because she's in high school, or because the book is from 20 years ago, when "suburban" meant "safe" instead of "soul deadening?"

Anyway, it's all worth going through, but I was much more interested in the complexity of what happens after this all comes out, and that's really where the book ends. It reminded me of The President's Daughter series in that way, actually.  I liked the ones about PTSD and the character dealing with her life being turned upside down more than the one where she's actually kidnapped.  But I'm definitely going to read the next one, Whatever Happened to Janie?, which promises to be exactly what I'm looking for to follow this up.  Too bad the library doesn't have it for the Kindle.

So, now we're up to date.  Hopefully I won't fall off the map again.  Toodles!

Observational Humor

One of my favorite pastimes is poking around the library's ebooks website to see what's new.  If you check frequently, you can get the books before the waitlists get too long.  The problem is that they usually acquire in batches, and these batches are often thematic and not particularly interesting.  It makes you wonder what kinds of requests the librarians got to put in these orders, or if the ebooks come in packages.  You'll get the entire back catalog of a certain author (Ann Perry or Jude Deveraux), or a whole slew of books on spicing up your love life, studying for the GRE, or dealing with hard-to-manage coworkers.  This month, we got romance.

I'm not a very big romance reader, but Sarah seems to go on these binges, and it kind of convinced me to pick one up.  I've got a reviewer copy of something called Almost a Scandal, which is about a woman who disguises herself as a man to join the Navy and falls in love.  I'm a sucker for one of those--can't wait to see what happens. 

In my opinion, though, romance novels are like wedding dresses.  Any individual one looks fine close up, but when you fill a room with them and look around at that room, it's the tackiest thing you ever saw.  Observe:

Okay, so a little sultry, but it's just a book.  But then you get a run of them:



Looked at collectively, they're not delicate beadwork and embroidery.  They're bedazzled polyester.  And that's just the images--look at the titles.  Bad Boys in Kilts; Lady Drusilla's Road to Ruin; Sheikh Without A Heart (which I'm pretty sure is spelled wrong).  Maid for Him. Assassins in Love.  I can't stop--they're all like this!

A few notes on more general themes that I  noticed: highlanders; pectorals; the Amish; ranchers; ranchers holding babies; business executives holding babies; more Amish.

And do you want to know the worst part?  In going back to look up titles for this post, I reread the blurb and found myself--yes, you guessed it--putting a hold on Lady Drusilla's Road to Ruin.  And I kind of can't wait till it comes in.  Curses!