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You've been holding on a long time and all this longing
I am seriously considering the possibility that I may have a mild flu. Every day this week I have done something, I have spent the next day literally in bed or at least lying down. Case in point: Thursday I had a doctor's appointment, ran an errand, and helped my parents purchase a tree. Yesterday I lay on the couch, ran a fever, and read three more novels by Courtney Milan even though I passionately hate reading off a screen. Today I am awake and that is the best thing I can say for my body. My bones hurt. My brain seems to have rolled up the sidewalks. It's been days since I felt like I could think. Fortunately I have nothing to do this afternoon except watch Coco (2017) with my cousins at Assembly Row, but this is still not my ideal holiday season. I need to be writing and I'm not. I got my flu shot this year, but I feel astonishingly rotten.
The novels I read yesterday were Unveiled (2011), The Heiress Effect (2013), and The Countess Conspiracy (2013); I enjoyed all three and am slightly afraid I am already running into the limits of my ability to engage with romance as a genre. The Heiress Effect was an unqualified hit: a mid-Victorian screwball comedy with political substance and four romantic protagonists all of whom I like; I still found Milan's dialogue too modern for its decade, whichever decade it is, but her general prose had taken a level to the point where her descriptions of Jane Fairfield's exquisitely, calculatedly eye-searing gowns ("Is it actually glowing?") were some of the funniest and most pointed writing in the book. Unveiled was most interesting to me as backstory for Unraveled (2011): I liked the legal entanglements of the premise, the relations of the parallel clans of Dalrymples and Turners, and quite a lot of Margaret as a heroine, but aside from his dyslexia I found Ash the most conventional of the Turner brothers and the evolution of the romance significantly less compelling than Margaret's realization that she herself is the Gordian solution to the whole messy knot of loyalty and legitimacy her father's decades-old selfishness dropped his children into. (Plus I realized afterward that I short-circuited Richard's arc by reading Unraveled first, because while it is possible to detect in Unveiled that his spectacular blinkered self-interest is fueled by equally spectacular panic, I suspect it's much more effective to encounter him first as an antagonist than a sympathetic trash fire.) And I can tell I was not the target audience for The Countess Conspiracy because I loved the Remington Steele-like setup, I loved Violet and Sebastian as co-leads (even if the names inclined me to expect Twelfth Night where none was forthcoming) and the complexity of the costs and the reasons for their imposture, I would have done significantly better with the science if Violet had not discovered chromosomes in 1867 [edit: I have been informed the author is building a deliberate alternate history, just one that wasn't signposted as such], and I had a great deal of investment in Violet and Sebastian learning to trust one another and get their self-images straight and none whatsoever in the two of them winding up together in bed. Which I recognize is what most people read romances for. But I like stories with strong bindings between people that are not necessarily romantic or sexual and this genre by its nature foregrounds the romantic-sexual aspect of relationships and there is nothing for me to do about that, except read other things.
All of that said, I have had a fifty percent success rate with Milan so far, which is more than I was expecting and more than any other romance novelist I have ever tried. The experiment is worth it.
The novels I read yesterday were Unveiled (2011), The Heiress Effect (2013), and The Countess Conspiracy (2013); I enjoyed all three and am slightly afraid I am already running into the limits of my ability to engage with romance as a genre. The Heiress Effect was an unqualified hit: a mid-Victorian screwball comedy with political substance and four romantic protagonists all of whom I like; I still found Milan's dialogue too modern for its decade, whichever decade it is, but her general prose had taken a level to the point where her descriptions of Jane Fairfield's exquisitely, calculatedly eye-searing gowns ("Is it actually glowing?") were some of the funniest and most pointed writing in the book. Unveiled was most interesting to me as backstory for Unraveled (2011): I liked the legal entanglements of the premise, the relations of the parallel clans of Dalrymples and Turners, and quite a lot of Margaret as a heroine, but aside from his dyslexia I found Ash the most conventional of the Turner brothers and the evolution of the romance significantly less compelling than Margaret's realization that she herself is the Gordian solution to the whole messy knot of loyalty and legitimacy her father's decades-old selfishness dropped his children into. (Plus I realized afterward that I short-circuited Richard's arc by reading Unraveled first, because while it is possible to detect in Unveiled that his spectacular blinkered self-interest is fueled by equally spectacular panic, I suspect it's much more effective to encounter him first as an antagonist than a sympathetic trash fire.) And I can tell I was not the target audience for The Countess Conspiracy because I loved the Remington Steele-like setup, I loved Violet and Sebastian as co-leads (even if the names inclined me to expect Twelfth Night where none was forthcoming) and the complexity of the costs and the reasons for their imposture, I would have done significantly better with the science if Violet had not discovered chromosomes in 1867 [edit: I have been informed the author is building a deliberate alternate history, just one that wasn't signposted as such], and I had a great deal of investment in Violet and Sebastian learning to trust one another and get their self-images straight and none whatsoever in the two of them winding up together in bed. Which I recognize is what most people read romances for. But I like stories with strong bindings between people that are not necessarily romantic or sexual and this genre by its nature foregrounds the romantic-sexual aspect of relationships and there is nothing for me to do about that, except read other things.
All of that said, I have had a fifty percent success rate with Milan so far, which is more than I was expecting and more than any other romance novelist I have ever tried. The experiment is worth it.
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I wouldn't recommend Milan's pre-Turner books. I read them and was very disappointed.
I gather the second one, in particular, got shoved in a direction Milan really didn't like (can't have a hero with clinical depression! Must have him magically get better - which means suddenly he just looks like he was an asshole all along), which might explain how she managed to write a hero I really wanted to hit with a big stick, something she hasn't really done since.
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Cool. This thing where I might actively seek out romance authors is bewildering, but not unwelcome.
I wouldn't recommend Milan's pre-Turner books. I read them and was very disappointed.
I am not entirely surprised to hear this, but still sorry.
I gather the second one, in particular, got shoved in a direction Milan really didn't like (can't have a hero with clinical depression! Must have him magically get better - which means suddenly he just looks like he was an asshole all along), which might explain how she managed to write a hero I really wanted to hit with a big stick, something she hasn't really done since.
Yikes. Did she ever get around to writing a hero with clinical depression once she was on her own?
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