Both Elyse and I had Things To Say, so here you are, a joint review!

Darling Beast by Elizabeth Hoyt is a Georgian Beauty and the Beast story and is book seventh book in her Maiden Lane series. The beast in question is Apollo Greaves, Viscount Killbourne. Apollo has recently escaped from Bedlam after being imprisoned for years, falsely convicted of killing three men.

Now that he’s out, he’s low on funds and is posing as a lowly gardner, rebuilding the pleasure garden associated with Harte’s Folly Theatre. He’s living rough in the garden (I think it’s worth mentioning the garden here is huge). All his money is tied up in the theatre, which burned down, and the garden. He needs it to be a spectacle and a success to get the cash he needs to live on the lam.

Apollo isn’t a scarred or cruel or explosively tempered; he’s just big and kind of scary. He has a reputation for extreme violence due to the nature of the murders he was accused of, but he’s not actually a violent man. Due to a horrific beating in Bedlam, he has lost the use of his voice and communicates using a notebook and pencil stub.

Actress Lily Stump is currently living in the burned out theatre along with her son, Indio, their maidservant, Maude, and their dog, Daffodil. Lily acts under the name Robin Goodfellow and often stars in mildly scandalous “breeches” roles. She’s also secretly a playwright, but her brother sells the plays under his own name.

Lily is famous and an amazing actress, but when she left one theatre to come work for Harte, she burned her bridges. Then when the theatre literally burned, she found herself blacklisted. She needs the theatre and the garden to re-open so she can support her family.

When Indio finds Apollo in the garden one day, Lily is at first afraid and then intrigued. She forms a friendship with the gardener who she believes to be of common birth and limited intelligence. When Lily realizes that being mute doesn’t necessarily mean being slow, her friendship with Apollo, whom she calls Caliban, starts to form into something different. She sees him bathing shirtless in the pond. Such sexual tension. Very mantitty.

Apollo is smitten with Lily. She’s the first woman since Bedlam to capture his interest and her kindness to him is a balm after his ordeal.

The conflict cranks up when Apollo is discovered and men come looking for him. The only way to escape Bedlam again and to stay with Lily is to prove he didn’t commit the murders. The best place to do this? A house party of course, where Lily will be putting on the play she’s just written. Both Lily and Apollo have enemies waiting in the wings and secrets they are keeping from each other, upping the stakes.

RHG:  Hoyt really does like her missaliances, doesn’t she?  An Actress and an Earl!  Who woulda thunk it! 

The real thing I want to talk about is the use of the Plot Moppet.  When I coined the term, back in the distance past, the Plot Moppets in question literally existed solely to give the heroine a place to go take a bath on a regular basis.  When she no longer needed to do that, they vanished from the narrative.  Indio isn’t a Plot Moppet by that definition- he’s got an inner life and most of Lily’s main plot revolves around him for various reasons.  (He also has a ridiculouus Italian greyhound named Daffodil, who is as smart are you can expect a nervous dog with a brain the size of a large walnut to be.  But Indio loves Daff, and Daff loves Indio, and there are few things as sacrosanct as the bond between child and dog.) 

Anyway, so the inclusion of a child in a book does not make an automatic plot moppet.  But when you have an impossibly adorable, impossily preconcious, impossibly impossible child, that’s when you need to rethink your strategy, I think.

 

Elyse: I really like that Hoyt writes about characters who aren't just aristocrats. My favorite book of hers is Wicked Intentions. The heroine runs an orphanage and the hero is a lord who is into bondage and looks like Lucius Malfoy. Her books are very different, and I think they really have a sense of time and place. They are definitely Georgian versus Regency.

That said, Darling Beast isn't my favorite of her books. I also had a lot of issues with Indio and Daff. They were just too cute, to the point where they were two-dimensional. Also Indio features so heavily in the first part of the book and then really isn't in the second half at all.

Have you read any of her other books?

 

RHG: Yeah, I’ve read…. a number that is greater than three? of her Maiden lane books (At this point, Elyse is on narcotics and so I was chugging a beer, because it felt more fair.  So… fair warning).  And I liked them a lot!  I also like that her time period is pre-Regency Georgian, because damn, we’re all up in the Regency a lot. 

 

Elyse: Yeah, I'm on painkillers (prescribed not recreational). I don't know why but this book didn't work for me as much as the other Maiden Lane books I've read. And yay for the Georgian era! Her books are definitely a little grittier than most regencies.

It could be the drugs, but there were some things that just didn't work for me. Like I didn't think this was really much of a Beauty and the Beast story. Apollo wasn't a beast character in my opinion. He was described as large and kind of ugly, but not beastly. The Beast hero has to either accept physical deformity or overcome a harsh and cruel personality (or both) to find love. Apollo really didn't need to do either of those things.

 

RHG: No, you’re right.  He wasn’t even ugly, he was just big and in dire need of a bath and a shave and some decent clothes.  He also, as I recall, wasn’t trying to actively clear himself, and maybe he was waiting to start in on THAT problem once he solved the “lack of cash” problem, but dude, you escape out of BEDLAM.  Suck it up and borrow a bit from your sister, solve the part where EVERYONE THINKS YOU’RE A CRAZY MURDERER and then work on the cash problem and pay her back.

I know, I know, if he did all that, we wouldn’t have a book.

I was, I admit, really intrigued by uh…wosshisname, the Duke that collected information and got bored easily. I hope he is the sequel bait I both need and derserve.  I want to see HIS story.  The heroine that can deal with him would be AMAZING. 

 

Elyse: Yes and yes! Apollo escaped Bedlam, so I couldn't figure out why he was still hanging around. I get that he needed the garden to be complete to get his investment back, but his sister is a DUCHESS. Borrow some cash and get gone.

And I LOVE the Duke of Montgomery–in no small part because Hoyt was inspired by Tom Hiddleston and Simon Baker for the character, my two biggest crushes.

I also really really wanted to know more about Lady Phoebe and her bodyguard Captain James Trevillion (who star in the next book, I think).

I think I might be unfair to Hoyt here. Had any other author written Darling Beast I would have been more generous. I just have SUCH high expectations for Hoyt. She writes the most amazingly complex, damaged characters and she's one of my favorite authors ever.

For example, Apollo being mute? She handled that SO well, and it could have been a disaster. As he slowly gets his voice back through the book he gets his VOICE back too. He's no longer the victim who was brutalized in Bedlam.

What did you think about that aspect of the book. I thought it was implied that Apollo was raped in prison, but again, drugs.

 

RHG: Oh, it flat out says that a guard was going to rape him, and may have done. 

I thought the privilege aspect was interesting – if he’d been anyone else, he would have just been hung, not committed.  It wasn’t really explored much, nor was the aspect of “treatment” of the mentally ill, but I liked the idea.  (I mean, not every book needs to have a treatise on the topical issue at hand- god knows that often goes poorly.)

 

Elyse: One thing that I really liked was the setting. I love the gothic feel of the burned out theatre and garden. Seeing the potential for the garden through Apollo's eyes was interesting.

I have a gray thumb–I don't garden and I kill houseplants. The only thing I've managed to grow is a mold colony on my patio. I never really realized how involved or large pleasure gardens were. I thought they had to be small because they're in a big city.

I also loved the Duke of Montgomery's house party and how he was collecting secrets. He was wonderfully amoral.

I'm glad there were no ubiquitous ballrooms in this.

One thing I didn't get was how Apollo's family didn't recognize him when he was at the house party. Was that explained?

Also, I have stitches in my belly button. They itch.

 

RHG: Hoyt tends to stay away from ballrooms.  Montgomery struck me almost as not-homicidal Loki-as-a-trickster-god who just needs to keep himself amused. 

As to why his family didn’t recognize him, Apollo had never met his uncle or cousin, so they wouldn’t recognize him.

So what do you think?  Solid for anyone else, but we have higher expectations for Hoyt?  

Elyse: I think that's fair.

For me it's a solid B+. It was a good read, but lacked the Beauty and the Beast storyline I really wanted. Also Plot Moppets. And questionable choices on Apollo's part.

Oh, there are great sex scenes though!

So…maybe A-?

 

RHG: The sex scenes were great.  I’d agree with the A-.