B
Genre: Historical: European, Romance
I have to admit, I liked most of this book, except for the hero’s backstory. I’m getting really tired of “hero cannot love because of abusive parent,” even when it’s reasonably well done. It just feels overdone to me.
Nicholas Lyon was never meant to be a duke. He was the unfavorite second son, and after leaving his childhood home of Enderley, he made his own fortune by opening a gambling den and collecting the losses from gentlemen who aren’t good at gambling. The house always wins. After his older brother dies, he grudgingly takes the title, and makes plans to divest himself of as much responsibility as possible, since there’s no way for him to fully abdicate.
That leads him back to Enderley, which I didn’t realize until I had to type it how close it is to “Pemberley” and that cannot be a coincidence and I don’t think I like it. (Then again, I didn’t notice it while READING, so… hmmmm. I will not factor this into the grade.) Anyway, at Enderley, Nicholas discovers that his steward is not the Thomas Thorne he expected, but Thomas’ daughter, Thomasina. She took over the job when her father died, and has spent the past two years trying to keep the estate going despite neglect from Nicholas’ brother. Nick’s goal is get the place functional enough to rent, and then he’ll never think on the place again, locking all of his memories and emotions away.
This has elements of the HGTV plots that I love: there’s a lot of broken stuff that needs fixing (which includes the hero’s broken soul! SEE, IT IS THEMATIC). There’s water damage in the ballroom and tenants that need attention and Mina’s been doing the best she can holding shit together with both hands. She’s appalled at Nick’s plan to sell off what he can and rent the place out. Not only would she be out of a job, but she’d be out of the only home she’d ever known.
Plots work best when there’s competing objectives, and Carlyle nailed that. Nick wants to rid himself of Enderley in the most expedient but least irresponsible way possible. (He could have just ignored it, but that is not a hero’s way.) And Mina wants him to keep the place. Her goal is, if she can make him understand why SHE loves it, maybe he’ll come to love it, too. They also REALLY REALLY REALLY want to bone each other, and they both understand why that’s not a great idea. There’s a lot of delicious, delicious tension.
I liked Mina a lot. She knows that she’s at a disadvantage in her life because she’s a woman and an estate steward, but she’s determined to keep this place that she loves together, and damn the man that gets in her way. Nick I was a little ambivalent about, because I kept going “WHAT’S YOUR DAMAGE HEATHER” and yeah, he has a scar on his face, but chicks dig scars. His trauma from his abusive father is significant…
…but I just feel like there’s a lot more trauma here than is strictly necessary and there’s this long tradition of abusive fathers in romance that I’m a bit tired of. How about y’all? How do you feel about this?
(But I must say, hey, after a couple of books with some real assholes as heroes, I did not want to castrate Nick at all. NOT ONCE. THANK YOU FOR THAT.)
Carlyle did a really good job of resolving the conflict and finding a reasonable compromise that resolves the emotional conflict in a way that is both logical and satisfying.
It requires both Nick and Mina to confront their reasons for why they want what they want, and recognizing what’s healthy, what’s not, and figuring it out together.
You know how sometimes the conflict gets resolved by handwaving and no path from A to F? There’s a path here. You see how they both got there.
There’s also a delightful cast of supporting characters, including a cameo by Ada Lovelace. I am pretty sure that I haven’t read anything by Carlysle before, but I really did enjoy this. I think that readers of Megan Frampton and Caroline Linden will like this book and this author. There’s angst, but, like, as a seasoning. The real star of the dish is the well-plotted tension.
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What a lovely review! Thank you, Redheadedgirl! Also, it warm’s my heart to read of solid, enjoyable historical romances without a castration-worthy hero.
Just as an FYI: The first set of spoiler tags seems to be broken and there’s a typo in the author’s name in the last paragraph. 😉
I agree with Katty. Also, to me, it is refreshing to learn the hero is not a spy! Added to my Wish List ….
I am not a fan of heroes who run gambling dens, to be honest. Because while I have no moral qualms about gambling generally, you’re going to make a lot of your money by exploiting compulsive gamblers. For every one of these gambling den-owning noble heroes, how many romances have a plot that involves someone gambling and losing the family home/fortune?
Like, a lot of readers would struggle to accept a hero who owns a house of prostitution, even if all of the sex workers were portrayed as non-exploited totally happy women who enjoyed sex and were treated fairly and were magically spared abuse, unwanted pregnancy and STDs. And yet when the hero owns a gambling den, most of the time it’s this magical place that only takes money from/ruins the lives of dudes who are Bad Guys and totally deserve to lose it all.
(Never mind, btw, that the Bad Guy’s female relatives are totally screwed by the loss of said family fortune/home, since they’re likely not able to work…)
@cbackson
So with you here. It always makes me ask “just how many rejected sons of the nobility were running these gambling dens? Did they also hang with all the hot Dukes?” I would not mind seeing this device being sent into retirement with aforementioned Dukes and billionaire bosses.
“That leads him back to Enderley, which I didn’t realize until I had to type it how close it is to “Pemberley” and that cannot be a coincidence”
It’s even closer to Manderley but the plot thankfully does not reflect either of those books so I will give it a pass.
I too am getting a little tired of both the parental abuse trope and the gaming hells trope (surely there must be SOMETHING else a respectable younger son can do without becoming a “Cit”?) But otherwise this sounds like all my catnip so I will definitely give it a go.
Abusive fathers are the prior fictional generation’s castration-worthy “heroes,” so it makes sense that for every douchebag published, there must be a corresponding traumatized child.
It’s the ciiiiiiiircle of liiiiiiiife!
Ugh yeah, that alongside “hero has issues because of cheating wife/a dead spouse who he will conveniently stop mourning so he can bang the heroine and whose kids will insta-attach to her” are my least fave tropes.
@ cbackson – Good point about the gambling dens and other less-than-legitimate professions for second sons. In Grace Burrowes’ David: Lord of Honor the hero does indeed own a house of prostitution and hires the heroine to take care of the ladies. It is one of my favorite Burrowes novels, so it can be done.
Thinking about RHG’s paternal abuse question … the neglect or abuse is a convenient shorthand for us to know the Duke or the governess is damaged so that love can heal him/her. There have been strings of novels with that theme, most notably for me, The Widow’s Club series by Jenna Jaxon where the ladies have been let down by their fathers.
I am not nearly as annoyed by fictional abusive fathers as I am by fictional abusive mothers. It seems like abusive fathers are like unhappy families, each abusive in his own nasty way, while the moms really do seem all alike, i.e., selfish. They may range from selfish whiners to selfish monsters, but it all seems to be rooted in the mythical selflessness expected of women. I can’t cite statistics or anything, but that is the feel I get from “blame the mom” themes in novels, and it really irritates me.
My personal Burn It With Fire trope peeve is the queer character who was molested as a child by a same sex adult and now can’t stand to be touched, etc. Can we have queer characters who don’t like to be touched by strangers that DON’T have “I was molested as a kid” back sob stories? “Between Saints and Sinners” and the most recent Cat Sebastian book had this and I just can’t with it.
I guess I don’t have any particular objections to abusive mothers or fathers in romance because my parents were emotionally and psychologically abusive, so it’s easy for me to identify with such characters. In fact, since people are generally loathe to acknowledge that experiencing abuse as a child, especially the kind with no physical scars, has lasting consequences that linger well into adulthood, in some ways seeing this representation in fictional characters is almost a relief. In the “real world” I’m expected to be “over it,” and I’m a bad person because I’ve chosen to have no contact with my parents for the sake of my sanity.
However, for the same reason, I do often object to the way that kind of history is executed. If you’re going to do it, do it well and do it sensitively.
Great review. On the abuse question: So I’ll just say that I come from an abusive home. My mother grew up in a physically abusive home and my father from an emotional one. My father turned out to be the abusive parent. The abusive fathers in romance doesn’t bother me since it’s something I’m familiar with. It’s just when something seems off that it bothers me. What I don’t like is when the characters presume things about abusive homes that rings false. I know for people that don’t grow up in abusive homes it can often seem overly dramatic to shut off emotions. I can say from personal experience that this is absolutely true. We can have these waves of emotions, where everything seems to trigger our traumatic pasts. We can also close our feelings off because that’s how you survive in abusive homes. But, I understand you not liking it so much. There are a lot of romances out there that I personally feel did not go into enough depth with the abuse and just slapped it on the character’s identity. This doesn’t mean they have to go into graphics. I appreciate abuse depicted most when the author shows the results of abuse rather than the actual moments when they were abused.