Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

Love the review.  This book sounds seriously ridiculous, even for a crazy medieval.

I just have to say WORD on the object anachronisms.  I have read two separate books ( so far that I’ve noticed) where parts of the heroes’ anatomy in a medieval and in a late Georgian have been compared to “steel.”  Steel was not popular in England until the Bessemer process was invented in 1858 (thanks to wiki for the fact check) and definitely wasnt well known in 1178AD.  It totally takes me out of the story—its like steel rage instead of potato rage.  I’m willing to forgive the Georgian because some steel was being made but I’m not so lenient on the medieval.  Couldn’t the writer just substitute “iron”? Although then the prerequisite cliche phrase would not be in the book.

I’m new-ish to romance reading and this was one of the first I read. I remember thinking that if all romance novels were as contrived as this one, this was going to be a passing phase for me at best. Fortunately that turned out not to be the case. I especially love your description of everyone rushing to Pembroke because that’s where the plot is happening and why wouldn’t you want to be there? Reminds me of old Thin Man movies where you get a body at the beggining, then an hour of heavy drinking and 1930s banter and not a lot of actual detective work, and then everyone winds up in a room together and Nick Charles wanders around and then goes “IT WAS HER!”, and her whoever pulls out a gun, is subdued, and we all go back to the wet bar. Same thing here with crazy Wynni, except with a little extended baby drama after.

I’m not actually sure that Welsh inheritance law would be the same as English. Wales kept a different law code until 1535, and I vaguely recall it not being primogeniture? I guess it would depend, too, if you were dealing with an English Marcher lord or a true Welsh lord. (And see, right there it sounds like I’ve surpassed the author’s research.)

My personal pet peeves of historical inaccuracy?
1) The stirrup didn’t start being used until sometime in the sixth to eighth century. Romans didn’t use stirrups.
2) The word “Hello” didn’t start being used until the invention of the telephone. Wiki says it was first written in 1833, but the dictionary puts it at 1877. In either case, it was not used during the Regency era. Period.

Oh boy. Sounds like a definite pass. And to answer your question on Brock and the Stableboy? They went off together. Because with this many crazy women around they’d have to shack up together to just get some sane in their lives.

A friend once ended up throwing a book across the room when, in a medievil historical, someone said, “grow where you’re planted.” She still starts sputtering in rage when reminded of it.

Another RedHeadedGirl review!  Thanks for taking time to share with the rest of us, especially considering your crazy, hectic schedule.  Awesome as always!

Oh I cannot stand it when authors get something basic wrong. If you are going to write a certain time period, or a certain set of people (the aristocracy), then you have to get the details right.

Two things that have caused deletions on my kindle this week, riding in a chaise and four from Leamington Spa to London…in a day >.< and drawers being delved into when our heroine is in the 18th century… thats all 19th C peeps

Kiera and Kelan?  Ick, instead of “couple for the ages” I get “yuppy fraternal twins in expensive private preschool wearing Burberry coats at age 3.”

Great review!  My fav part:  ” (“Oh I see!  You’re my wife’s sister and you’ll do anything I say?  I love this game!”).  lol.
Thanks for the giggle this morning!

Hah, I read this based on the HABO too, because why not? Seriously, it was terrible. I had to skip so much of the text because the “holy sh*t, what NOW?” made my brain hurt. Good on you RHG, I could not pay enough attention to this book to actually review it.

Even if the book didn’t sound so ridiculous, I could never read it because the title may be the worst thing ever.

“Impostress”? REALLY?

I remember reading one “regency” - in the 80s? 70s? can’t recall for the hideousness, but the heroine was zipped into her gown by her maid, and she went to visit the Eifel Tower for a weekend while she was in a snit with the hero. The characters were Lord Rex and Lady Muffy, or soemthing like that as I recall. All I remember is that it was published by Dell.  I’ve never knowingly purchased another book by Dell.

@awasky:  you are absolutely right that Medieval Welsh law was different from English/Anglo-Norman.  In many respects it was superior.  I don’t know the details of inheritance law as it affected males and females, but researching the matter would not be unduly difficult.  The Wikipedia article on Welsh Law would get one off to a good start.

Some of the names infuriate me (as I think I mentioned when the book came up as a HABO).  Again, sources for genuine Welsh names are not hard to find, and confusing Welsh and Irish is unforgiveable.  I just do not see the point of an author setting a story in a given place and time if she is not interested enough in that place and time to learn some facts about it.

Ha!  Dell was responsible for the book I read where a Regency miss took a train to Bath.  I’ve always wondered if the author intended it to be a Victorian novel and Dell edited it to a Regency because they had a Regency line—it was either late 70’s or early 80’s.

Thank you RHG, I just spent the first 45 minutes of my work day (stay in school!) listening to my coworkers rage about the way things work around here. As this happens at some point everyday, it was lovely to spend ten minutes of pure delight reading your review.

Funny story about anachronisms - which make me bats**t crazy - I was going off on a book in which the medieval heroine was worrying about the corn crop. Corn, new world food, medieval time period. Rant. “I’m writing this woman a letter” rant, “What kind of idiot doesn’t know” rant. Rant, rant, rant. And then, while researching that letter I was going to write, I discover that back in the way back corn was a general term for grain crops. So, aren’t I the red faced idiot?

This was a DNF for me.  I read about 25 pages and decided that life’s too short to read bad books.  I don’t know how you made it to the end!

I actually read this poor puppy a few years ago. It was terrible. I mean TERRIBLE. My hat is off to you RHG, for finding ways to make it funny.

@Donna—OMG! I had the corn anachronism meltdown, too! It was a Jo Beverley book and I remember being surprised that she made an error like that. Thank heavens I figured it out before I made an ass of myself.

You know, `likes sex, can hold his liquor, loves his mother’ would basically get it done for me, but I have simple needs.

Donna:

That is why I think historical romance novels should have a footnotes section in the back explaining terms that are unusual or may have changed definition over time.

‘Corn’ is still the generic term for any cereal crop in modern British English;  it can refer to wheat, barley, oats etc.  What you lot call ‘corn’, we call maize.
;-)

hi your blog is so nice i like it very mch thnx
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He likes sex and can hold his liquor. And he loves his mother.  There’s not much else there.

I’m with cbackson on this.  In an ideal world he also wouldn’t be able to speak English.

Never read the book, but I love the review.  Thank you, RHG!

Speaking of names, I’m reading ‘Betsy Ross: The Making of America’. An actual male name of the era: Plunket Fleeson. Mr. Fleeson was a well-to-do upholsterer.

OKay - a couple of things I want to comment on. RHG as usual your reviews are hilarious, but as a Welshwoman I want to comment on one or two things you’ve picked on.
There are, and always have been, heaps and heaps of Irish descendants in Wales. My grandfather’s family had been in Wales for 5 generations and his name was Kieran Patrick Lynch. His father was Connor Aidan Lynch. Ireland and Wales are geographically so close you can travel between them in a rowboat, without oars if the currents are right. Irish names in Wales are common and have been for at least a thousand years.
That said, they were less common among the nobility who tended to marry other members of the nobility, who tended to be pure-blood Welsh.
And yes, to those of you who have commented that medieval Welsh law was not the same as English law. It was different. Boy, was it ever. In 12-something women in England could not even own property. The women in this story would most certainly have been able to inherit their fathers’ property, and their father would most certainly have made damn sure they married someone who could protect it and them. Their Prince would have required it.
If you want to read some Welsh historical romance with some accuracy to it, may I suggest that you try Sharon Penman’s glorious Last Princes series, beginning with Here Be Dragons.
Be prepared to cry. Lots.
The best part is that these books are about real people and stuff that actually happened. Penman is a serious historian and she knows her stuff, but she also writes amazingly sympathetic characters, who are some of the most fascinating people in history - Eleanor of Aquitane, Richard Lionheart, King John, Llewelyn Fawr and my personal favourite, Llewelyn’s wife Joanna who was one of King John’s illegitimate daughters. Llewelyn and Joanna are the protagonists of Here Be Dragons.

If we’re going to be talking about mistakes in inheritance laws, I have to call out a contemporary pet peeve (it’s not even an anachronism - it’s just a fake cliche):  AFTER SOMEONE DIES, FAMILY MEMBERS DO NOT GATHER INTO A ROOM SO A LAWYER CAN READ THE WILL OUT LOUD.  I know this because I’m a lawyer who writes wills, and probates them, and deals with some really batsh** crazy familes.  And what we do is mail a copy of the will to people who are going to get stuff.  Or we email a pdf.  And then if they have questions about what the will says, they call on the phone and we talk about it.  And if everyone really hates each other, they all go and hire separate lawyers and spend all the dead person’s money fighting.

@donna:  Lindsay Davis used to have a pretty funny piece on her blog talking about an American reader who called her to task for using “corn” in her Roman-set mystery novels.

@cathyb:  women could, in fact, own property in 12th- and 13th-century England.  Under English law, if there were no sons, the daughters inherited the land in equal shares.  (There was no primogeniture for girls.)  John of Gaunt’s first wife, Blanche (the duchess of Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess) was a huge heiress, and there were others before her.  Their husbands would control the property, but upon the wife’s death, the land would go to her heirs, subject to the husband’s right to curtsey (a life interest in all the wife’s land IF there was a child of the marriage that lived long enough to be heard crying).  Widows also owned land—they had a life interest in a third of all the land their husbands held during their lives.

This book would have to be set in very late “12-something” for there to be an entail; the statute that made the fee tail possible, De donis condicionalibus, was enacted in 1285.

If someone would only write an opera based on this novel, I would pay serious money to see it. I think the plot and dialogue could really work with an orchestra, louder, and in Italian.

Speaking as one who went all rant-y about potatoes in medieval novels a while ago, I have to say that “potato rage” is the best possible descriptor of the irritation I felt. I nominate it for entry in the Urban Dictionary.

potato rage
noun
puh-tey-toh reyj
the peculiar combination of disgust and fury experienced by a reader of historical romance novels when confronted with an anachronism so blatant as to provoke book-tossing and blog-ranting.
N.B. Potato rage is reserved for the most extreme transgressions of historical accuracy.
OMG, that Regency with the Rolls-Royce totally gave me potato rage.

In Italian with a Cockney accent à la Dick Van Dyke???

After all, all us British sound the same, yes?

Historical inaccuracies, ESPECIALLY in places I know, are my number one pet peeve. And here, the ones you’ve listed could be easily rectified by easy application of google-fu. It’s not hard, writers. Names, in particular - if you’re not sure, look up names of people living in that century and use those.

(Er, Jackson, you do know that in Welsh, the double-d in ‘Wynnifredd’ changes the pronounciation to ‘Wynnifreth, right? Please tell me that extra ‘d’ wasn’t just a random insert in the manner of a ‘y’ instead of an ‘i’?)

What I do know of Welsh inheritance law is that it was nearly as crazy as this book based on the premise of feudalism: it couldn’t have been better designed to divide up large estates into suburban housing plots than if they’d done it on purpose.  The land was divided more or less equally between a man’s sons, both legitimate and illegitimate (if acknowledged).  I don’t know how daughters worked into that; it’s possible a daughter’s husband could inherit if there were no sons—IIRC it worked that way in medieval England, an heiress of a large estate was a huge matrimonial prize; that’s how John of Gaunt became Duke of Lancaster actually.

Speaking of names, I’m reading ‘Betsy Ross: The Making of America’. An actual male name of the era: Plunket Fleeson

But let us never forget the unforgettable Nicholas If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barebon.

But let us never forget the unforgettable Nicholas If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barebon.

Are you SERIOUS? Because that is the greatest name of all time if you are.

(captcha: short37. As in “this name would be short if it had 37 fewer letters.)

@Suzanne, Dick Van Dyke, LOL!  I confess I was leaning more toward the tragic, a la Lucia di Lammermoor, where the story is Scots and everyone wears kilts—but the drama, and the singing, is all in Italian.

(Here’s some of the Wikipedia summary of Lucia di Lammermoor:  “...Enrico visits Edgardo to challenge him to a duel. He tells him that Lucia is already enjoying her bridal bed. Edgardo agrees to fight him . . .Raimondo interrupts the marriage celebrations to tell the guests that Lucia has gone mad and killed her bridegroom Arturo.”—The story is originally from a novel by Sir Walter Scott.)

I think Impostress would be a great opera.  You have a girl in pants, a marriage gone awry, sisters impersonating each other, everyone in love with the wrong person, people pretending to die, the evil neighbor, nosy servants, a stabbing, a convent, a secret baby, a terribly rushed ending—and it seems to me that the moment where everyone “. . .  heads off to Penbrooke because clearly that is the place where the plot is crashing together” would make an AWESOME opera moment with six or eight singers all standing on the stage together and belting six or eight different lines of music all at the same time.

And my Dad (who loathes romance novels but is an opera fanatic) would watch with tears in his eyes at the pathos and beauty of it all. Win, win, WIN.

@agTigress and awasky and Joy

I mostly know Medieval and Renaissance Scots law and common law, but I think originally Welsh inheritance law excluded daughters.

In 1284 the government of Edward I enacted the Statute of Rhuddlan, or Rutland—depending on whether you go for wikipedia or avoid your research for a few hours and chase down the statute rolls text, not that I’d do a thing like that….Anyway, the Statute of Rhuddlan/Rutland introduced common law for criminal and civil forms of action, but let partible inheritance stand. BUT the English insisted that the Welsh include daughters (but only where there were no legitimate sons) and exclude illegitimate children.

So just how high the legal crazysauce goes on the Scoville scale of legal crazy depends on when in the 1200s we’re talking.

CAPTCHA: Straight77, which makes it sound disturbingly like my undergrad carrel had a sexual orientation.

If you’re going to do IMPOSTRESS as grand opera, make sure to include the trampoline.

It’s a known fact that an opera company once did this to a prima donna who was bats-crazy and they’d had enough of her. In the piece they were doing, the heroine flings herself from a balcony in suicidal despair, and the stagehands replaced her mattress-soft-landing-thingy with a trampoline. So instead of tragic glory, going out on a high D, you got the heroine again—and again—and again…

I’m told she was Not Amused. But I vote for the Welsh trampoline scenario any day.

romances aren’t easy to write. yes authors cshould goole some things, but editors are suppose to catch some mistakes, and a good (note, good) book has the important facts checked, but might miss a small one. as to language, there are a lot of complaints about the old sounding language. (i can’t stand accents myself, the moles in brian jackson novels killed the story for me) i try to think of it as translated, becuase we wouldn’t really understand most of what was said way back when. think, they said something similar in their languaes, and it only translates loosely, into that old cliche.

(Hi, my name is Emily, and I’m new to reading romances and commenting here but not to this site’s lovely reviews, which were what inspired me to give romance a shot in the first place.)

That whole plot just sounds rambly and incoherent. Kudos to you, RedHeadedGirl, for managing to puzzle it out into something short. Short is a virtue with this thing.

Captcha: issue42. I have WAY more than 42 issues with this book and author.

I still remember trying to read Sorceress, which I think is loosely related to this one. I gave up really quickly due to an odd mishmash of slangy and purple prose; dogs were referred to as “furry sentinels” at one point. This is pretty much the only thing I remember about the book now, and I still sometimes call my dog “my furry sentinel.”

Kiera and Elyn don’t have any brothers, so the title and entail will go to Elyn.

From what I know of Welsh law, women couldn’t inherit at all.  Any sons, legitimate or not, had an equal claim on any property, which resulted in lots of blood feuds.  If no sons, the title would escheat (which is a word that really needs to be used more often) to the crown/prince.

Irish law is yet more convoluted.  Don’t get me started.  But English/Norman women could definitely inherit property - Eleanor of Aquitaine and Constance of Brittany were both duchesses in their own right, even though their husbands held the title jure uxoris.

(It’s really rather disturbing I know all this).

That being said, this book sounds like a freak show.  Thank you for taking one for the team!

Loved the review, but I think this book will be a ‘pass’ for me.

RHG, thanks for taking one for the team, amidst all your classes and internship!

@DebKinnard Thank the goddess I was only drinking water when I read your trampoline suggestion. Water cleans up more easily when spewed across keyboard and screen. Yes, do the trampoline.

@snarkhunter Yes, that’s a real person. There was a time when the Puritans didn’t want to just give a name to their children, they wanted to give entire sentences. More romance novels need to be written about Puritans with names like this!

I love the sound of this book.  Lots of fun antics and some crazy sauce.  Thanks for the awesome review of this slightly, er, convoluted story.

I don’t get too upset over anachronisms, mostly because I probably miss them more than catch them.  But I do want to say that we need to give authors a break.  This book was published LONG before google and wikipedia.  Research that is now at the tip of our fingers was much harder to acquire back in the day.

So, let’s cut’em a little slack, especially when the book was published over a decade ago.  Now, if it were written TODAY, then the author and editor should both be spanked with a wet noodle for such glaring inaccuracies.  Or the author should include documentation to back up her plot choices.
I’m just saying.

Oh, my bad.  I was thinking Impostress was one of the classic eighties romances, NOT one published 2003.  (Self, remmever to check these things before you comment!) 

Okay, bring on the wet noodles.  Authors, do your research!

And, that’s “remember” not remmever.  Yegads, stop typing.

A 12-whatever hero called ‘Brock’?

Badger badger badger badger BADGER!

AFTER SOMEONE DIES, FAMILY MEMBERS DO NOT GATHER INTO A ROOM SO A LAWYER CAN READ THE WILL OUT LOUD.

Well, yes they do in some countries and in some periods. I worked in an Australian solicitors’ office some 30 years ago in a small country ‘city’ (town, really) and was surprised that the relatives came to the office to talk about the will straight from the funeral. My boss said this was quite common when people from the bush had to travel to attend a funeral. They didn’t want to travel long distances twice, so they dealt with all the legal and death stuff in the one trip.

What is common now, may not have always been the case. Bear that in mind when you employ those indignant caps :)

What a fun review!  If I run across this book for dirt cheap somewhere, I might just pick it up to revel in the badness.

You sure didn’t leave anything out, but yes, I read this book and totally agree with you.  I like Lisa Jackson’s contemporaries, but she should definitely stay away from historic writing.  It seemed as if she had a lot of ideas in mind and tried to cram them into one book.

This would absolutely make a fantastic opera in the style of lucia, but there are 2 little problems.  1 opera of this sort does not have a happy ending, and 2 donizetti is dead and so is everyone else who could be entrusted with the music.  As far as I can tell, opera for the past hundred years or so got all obsessed with weird discordant math-y tonal stuff.  I think the tosca trampoline suggestion is a genius way of allowing for the requisite tragic death scene while allowing us to have our HEA, (along with the drowning but not dying…does anyone go mad at any point? doesn’t matter, we can always work in a mad scene somehow or another) but we still need an old school composer…

I’m pretty sure that the beginning of this novel was also a plot point in Deliverance. So I’m guessing Elyn is the vaguely psychotic survivalist Burt Reynolds character in this situation…which makes sense, actually.

Nicholas If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barebon That is one good boy I’d like to see get his hair mussed by a very bad girl.  Someone write this, please.

Spamword: stay46 Why didn’t you mention that 10 years ago?  Ok, maybe because I was hanging out on Usenet 10 years ago and this site hadn’t even been thought of.

Nicholas If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barebon

Apparently, he also invented fire insurance after the Great Fire of London.  (And with a name like that, I can’t help thinking he must have taken a Discworld approach to in-sewer-ants.)
Second the endorsement for Sharon Kay Penman, with one caveat:  she is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a romance writer, though her books do contain some romantic/sexual elements.  As Kathy B pointed out, she’s a serious historian, and most of her characters are real people who came to very nasty ends.  Her mystery series, featuring Justin deQuincy, the illegitimate son of a bishop who becomes a spy for Eleanor of Aquitaine, are a bit lighter in tone, though.

I stand corrected on English inheritance law in the 1200s.
Although, as was often the case back then, the law varied depending on just who you were and whether your king/overlord could give a shit about you. Your average daughter-of-a-merchant would no more be allowed to inherit his property than she could fly to the moon. The rich, powerful and titled were another matter. Eleanor of Aquitaine was a classic case in point: if she had NOT been allowed to inherit her father’s titles more than one war would have been started over who did get them. As it was she was married off to the King of France. (She later divorced him for being a wimp and married the future King of England. My heroine)
And one other point about Wales - I think that most people don’t realise that Wales was not, in the 1200’s, one country. It was a series of little principalities almost continually at war with each other - yes, caused by crazy inheritance laws that divided lands equally between a man’s sons - and those laws did not distinguish between legitimate and otherwise, only that the sons were acknowledged.
There were only ever four men who were born Welsh and acknowledged as Prince of Wales (and that didn’t include South Wales, which was under English control).
You want their stories, read those Sharon Penman books I mentioned - and no, I agree, she’s not a romantic novelist. I still think that Here Be Dragons is the most romantic book I’ve ever read.

Loved the review. Great entertainment, thank you! I tried to comment on the day but the site had problems. Too many people reading & commenting LOL! The review is probably better than the novel. Interesting plot though! I liked the part with lots of sex. I might have to get the novel just for that.

ha! loved the review - and the comments too.. always impressive how much history knowledge romance readers have. goes to show there’s much much more to the genre than just seks. 

(ah and the thin man analogy in the first comment was too funny! ;)

Roberta Gellis (my goddess of earthly worship) also dealth with the 1200s Welsh in her “Roselynde” series. I believe it was the book RHIANNON where the heroine is the bastard daughter of Llewelyn Mawr (“the Great”) and a hill woman with slightly paranormal perceptive powers. A great read from a writer who tops the craft of medieval romance, IMO.

Her mystery “Magdalene la Bâtarde” series is wonderful, also. Well worth a check-into for fans of well-written medieval fic.

Captcha is “black 48”. Since 1348 was a Pestilence year, “black” indeed.

I think that a certain caution in declaring something anachronistic or unreasonable might be warranted.

For instance:

Whereas it is true that the Bessemer method was patented in the 19th century, so-called Damascus steel had been used in Europe from about 300 BC. Shakespeare also mentions steel, so it’s not exactly like people living before the 19th century would be unfamiliar with it.

Regarding inheritance, the Middle Ages is a very long and loosely defined period in which such rules/laws varied a great deal ... and were sometimes ignored: one may note that William the Conqueror was a bastard (in the original sense of that word) and yet he still inherited the title of Duke of Normandy. Also, there were and are titles which females may inherit in their own right (although usually if there are no male heirs).

You want a “fun” Lisa Jackson book…get your hands on a copy of YESTERDAYS LIES and have a go at that one. I had a cackle fest with a friend, then we had a red pen party. It was worth it for the ha ha factor, but not much else, story wise.