C-
Genre: Romance, Historical: European
I read Beyond Scandal and Desire while I was on vacation, and while it may have worked really well for me five years ago, current Elyse is really frustrated with heroes who use the heroine as a device for their revenge. As much as I appreciated other aspects of the novel, my frustration with the overall plotline carried through the whole book.
It did, however, teach me about the language of parasols.
Lady Aslyn Hastings is an orphaned noblewoman who has been raised in the household of the Duke of Hedley. She’s been sheltered her whole life, and is expected to marry the duke’s son and heir, Kip. Aslyn yearns for adventure (in the great wide somewhere) and convinces Kip to take her on an outing to the Cremorne Gardens. While there Aslyn and Kip bump (literally) into Fancy Trewlove and her brother Mick.
Except this is no accidental meeting. Mick has been following Kip for awhile. Mick is the bastard son of the Duke of Hedley, and is aware of his parentage. On the day of his birth he was given to a woman who was paid for her secrecy. Mick grew up with no advantage in life, but was determined to be a success–and he is. His investments in real estate have paid off, and now he only wants one thing: revenge on the duke who cast him aside.
To do this, Mick plans on luring Kip (perpetually short on funds due to a gambling problem) into his circle, ruining him financially by winning all his unentailed properties, and while he’s at it, getting Aslyn to fall in love with him, thereby humiliating Kip, who has no idea that Mick is his half-brother.
Of course all this goes sideways when Mick spends some actual time with Aslyn and begins to fall in love with her.
Here’s the thing: Elyse from several years ago would probably have accepted this plotline as one of the conventions of the genre. It’s a common trope.
Current Elyse is full of rage and expects better out of her heroes. When the hero uses the heroine as a device for his revenge (which happens a lot now that I think about it) especially as a device to get revenge on another DUDE, he’s not seeing her as a person. She’s a tool. She’s a thing. He’s diminished if not eliminated her agency and her humanity, and to achieve revenge, he has to throw away any real regard for the consequences she may endure from his actions.
And those consequences would be massive. Initially Mick pursues Aslyn knowing that she’s basically promised to the son of a duke. She was raised in the duke’s household after her parents died, meaning she’s completely dependent on Kip’s family as her guardians. If Mick’s plan comes to fruition, then Aslyn will be ruined.
Even if Mick doesn’t ruin Aslyn’s reputation beyond the point of her being able to marry well, it’s not like Kip’s family is going to accept her leaving their son for another man. They could destroy any prospects she has. Her financial and personal security for life would be compromised. The family that she’s grown up with, the people on whom she’s entirely dependent, would likely throw her out of their home. The emotional as well as financial results would be absolutely disastrous for her.
And for a man who is pretty pissed off that he was thrown aside and had to make his own way in the world, Mick doesn’t think about the fact that he’s putting Aslyn in the same position. Mick doesn’t care about any of the potential consequences for Aslyn until later in the book because, hey, he’s got that revenge boner out for the duke.
Which brings me to my second issue. The moment that Mick starts to think about Aslyn as a human being who has actual thoughts and feelings and might be really, really jeopardized by his Hurt Feelings Campaign, is when he realizes he’s attracted to her and wants to have sex with her.
People, I think, feel physical attraction often before emotional intimacy sets in, so I get it when pants feelings happen first in romance novels. The issue for me here is that Mick is willing to throw Aslyn’s entire life out with the trash until he realizes he wants to have sex with her. His boner seems to be what leads him to think about her as a person but only to a point: she is a person he wants to bang.
And he never really has a moment where he’s like, “OMG, I am horrible. I was going to destroy your whole life for my own selfish reasons and I’m so deeply ashamed and sorry.”
Nope, the revenge arc goes all the way through to the end.
So yeah. Fuck you, Mick. You aren’t good enough for Aslyn or me.
Despite the fact that I hated the hero, there were parts of Beyond Scandal and Desire that I did enjoy.
First of all, I learned the language the parasols. Aslyn and Mick are discussing how many languages she speaks:
“Five,” she said blithely. “English, of course. French. Handkerchief, fan and parasol.”
He stared at the impish smile she gave him. It transformed her face into rare beauty, something that went beyond the surface. He had no desire to be intrigued or mesmerized by her teasing–no one dared tease him–yet she seemed completely unaware of the danger he presented. “I beg your pardon? Handkerchief, fan and parasol?”
“A lady of good breeding knows them. Did you not teach them to your sister when you gifted her with the parasol?”
“I am not a lady of good breeding.”
Her smiled deepened, causing a strange sensation in his chest, something he’d experienced once when a large wooden crate had toppled onto him. It had been terribly unpleasant, then. It wasn’t so much so now, and yet he still found it difficult to breathe. “No, I suppose you’re not. Do you see the couple walking over there, the lady in the purple gown, the gent with the gray cravat? Her parasol rests on her left shoulder. She is displeased with him. He’s said something that upset her.”
“Perhaps it keeps the sun out of her eyes better on that side.”
She laughed lightly. “My dear sir, carrying a parasol has little to do with the sun.”
Dear sir? He was not her dear anything. He knew that she didn’t understand the consequences of words spoken. Still the endearment left a strange longing that he did not wish to examine. He was thirty-one, reaching the time when it would be natural to take a wife, to have someone call him dear. He’d never really contemplated that before, didn’t know why he was doing so now. She was not to be a permanent part of his life. She served a purpose, and when the purpose waned, he would release her. He wondered why he suddenly feared he might do so with regrets.
“Do you see the woman in blue has folded up her parasol and is touching the handle to her lips?”
“The one who wasted her coins by purchasing something designed to protect her from the sun and is using it most ineffectually?”
“Depends on your definition of ineffectual, I suppose. She is signaling to the gent walking beside her that she would like him to kiss her.”
“You’re bloody well putting me on you, aren’t you?”
Her eyes widened at his sharp tone, or perhaps his profanity, but he hated little more than he hated being made a fool of. She shook her head. “No. Women aren’t allowed to speak their minds, to declare what they want, so they have to do it through bits of frippery.”
Aslyn is intelligent, observant, and clever. And as charming as this scene is, it also illustrates my earlier point. Mick sees Aslyn as serving a purpose, not as a person. He doesn’t believe that she and the other women she points out have desires they would like to communicate but cannot voice directly. He “wonders” why he might regret hurting her after she “served a purpose.” Because she’s a person, Mick. Is it that hard to recognize a human being standing next to you, schooling you in all the things you don’t know?
There was one other thing that I did appreciate about this book. Kip’s gambling problem is clearly an addiction, and it’s treated as such, not as a moral failing. Sometimes in historicals I see the “bad guy” addicted to gambling or a terrible parent’s sins compounded by gambling away everything he owned, and it’s depicted as a reason or justification that someone is “bad,” a reductive portrayal that becomes the equivalent of twirling a mustache.
Kip describes getting a high from winning at cards, and Aslyn realizes that he has a problem, although she has no words to put to it. She recognizes that he needs help. That said, Kip’s addiction is never used to excuse him for hurting others. Kip loses Aslyn’s mother’s necklace and hair comb at the tables, and is callous about it. Aslyn tears into him and he deserves every moment. She understands that his problem is a difficult one to solve, and doesn’t necessarily make him a bad person, but the consequences of his addiction anger and hurt her. It was a difficult balance to maintain, and it was done well here.
In the end, I think I would have really enjoyed this book a few years ago, but as I grow older and more aware of how women are treated in media (and in life) my tolerance for conventions that are harmful to women is disappearing, and my awareness of them increasing. I liked the heroine, and I liked the languages she uses to communicate and translate her desires. But I couldn’t like Mick as a hero. I found his actions repugnant, and he soured the book for me.
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I’m really glad you chose to point this out, Elyse. The story of a man using a woman to do something to another man–get revenge, mark social status, mark territory–is so classic that I hardly noticed it for years. But now, as we’re pulling the shades off all the gaslamps and blinking in the bright light, it’s untenable for me. I can’t get behind the romance of a hero who cares more about damaging another man than he does about the heroine: then it’s a story about two guys with a dick-measuring complex, not a love story at all.
I’ll be fascinated to see how this and other reductive tropes are displayed in this year’s RITA reviews, and see if we can measure any sort of real cultural shift.
I am so with you on this, Elyse. I am older so I have fought against sexism and a few other isms in my time. I decided several years ago that I saw no redeeming qualities in a “Hero” that hurt an innocent person in order to get back at someone else. How exactly does that exact revenge when you destroy the wrong person? The tipping point for me came when I read one of those Greek billionaire categories and the “Hero” seduced a woman, took her virginity and promptly walked out on her. His “justification” for his horrible behavior was that he thought the brother of the innocent had raped his sister. How hurting an innocent woman was revenge on a man is beyond my understanding. Needless to say, the innocent never told her brother who wasn’t the rapist, of course, and ended up pregnant. The hero wasn’t avenging his sister. If he wanted to do that, he would have hurt the rapist.
So, that was the tipping point and now I don’t accept a plot line in which the hero hurts a person because he thinks that will get him revenge against a completely separate person. And yes, it is always a woman who is the collateral damage and has the least amount of power to protect herself.
I made a comment about this on one of the posts earlier this week, but I have found that there are tropes I just can’t handle anymore given the cultural moment we’re in.
Billionaire bosses and their secretaries or dukes and their childrens’ governesses? Nope, I just can’t given that those interactions are/were more likely to be sexual harassment or rape than sexy flirtation.
Fated mates? There is nothing less sexy to me now than the idea of some random dude that I don’t know appearing and telling me that we’re meant to be together and that we have no choice in the matter.
Rakes who decide to “ruin” a woman for…any reason at all? No way, no how, not with what I know about how utterly devastating that would be for the woman. There’s no coming back from that for me.
Ugh, I just hate revenge plots, for lots of reasons. In this particular case, am I understanding correctly that this Mick wants to take revenge on his half-brother for something their father did? Did Kip know about Mick’s existence? Because otherwise, Mick is really trying to damage a whole lot of innocent people here!
I felt exactly the same way. I kept wondering when Mick was going to realize that he’s a terrible person. I needed a good beta hero as a palate cleanser.
@cbackson: Yes to all of this. The trope where the heroine discovers that she is a submissive because the “dom” hero tells her so is another category for me. Who is he to think he can define her sexuality for her? Especially when he also decides she is “his” submissive, which is basically fated mates without the paranormal.
Maybe we could issue a new exercise guide/bingo card?. A few entries: “Hero treats heroine with respect”, “Hero apologizes for his mistakes”, “Heroine and Hero use their words”, “Addiction is treated with care”, “True love fails to fix mental issues”, “Secondary characters support heroine as her own person”, “An amicable ex appears”, “Hero/Heroine acknowledge their part in previous breakup”, “Secondary characters of opposite gender who argue with each other fail to develop a relationship”, “Children act like real children”, “Hero shows competence at his job*”, “Heroine shows competence at her job*”, “People act in a period-appropiate way”, and so on.
*job: yes, being a duke/earl/cowboy/SEAL/billionaire is a job. So is being the daughter, wife, or sister of any of them.
@ Maite: I read a book in which the hero & heroine decide that since they are being chased by monsters, they will wait to have sexytimes after they get somewhere safe. Yaay for adulting!!
My personal bingo card would include an instant-win for “a possibly-devastating misunderstanding arises and either main character explicitly decides to speak to the other person about it instead of jumping to the worst possible conclusion”. I hate muttering “just flipping TALK to each other!” as I’m reading.
I have to admit that I tend to read right through terrible tropes like these. Because one day, there’s going to be a book where she finds out he’s using her for revenge and all heck breaks loose.
A personal flying book trope is when the authority figure twists everyone in knots manipulating to keep the couple apart, fails because someone FINALLY grows a spine, gives a wimpy apology that basicially consists of “I was doing it for you” and then gets a watery smile, a hug and instant forgiveness. NONONONONONO. Just No.
I’m actually a fan of the revenge trope (including — especially? — the need for the hero to transition from seeing the heroine as a tool to seeing her as a person), so since the review is so heavily weighted on that element, I’m here to say that I also would give this book a low C. Partly because I never really felt any draw between the protagonists, partly because the ultimate objective of the revenge plot is a bit of blackmail that feels period-inappropriate to me, but mostly for a couple of revelations reserved for the book’s end (one which made me want to see a secondary character punished with the plague instead of taking tea in the happy-endings-for-everyone conclusion).
@Deborah, I felt the same way you did. I’m also a fan of the revenge trope, but it didn’t really work for me here, and most of the book was solidly average. I hated the ending revelations even though I could see them coming. I guess they didn’t play out as terribly as they could have, but I still wish Heath had chosen a different resolution.
The name Aslyn? Really?
I get that criticism, though I’m hoping I’ll still be able to enjoy the novel. I think one of my favorite things in What I Did For A Duke by Julie Anne Long was that the duke entered his interactions with the heroine seriously contemplating using her for revenge and then almost immediately after getting to know her a bit dropped it as a serious option. It worked as a fresh twist to me, and since it was dropped early enough I didn’t need a grovel. In general I feel the trope is at its best when the revenge plot is solely a reason to bring the pair together; dropped quickly or brought into the open (maybe even with the other lead in on it) early. But sometimes I can enjoy it as a dominant trope in a historical, since I sadly expect less from historical heroes than I do from a contemporary hero.
Kip is the Dutch word for chicken.
So when I hear about someone named Kip…
I can’t even…
As a person who was subjected to grand theft financial abuse, I’ll admit I prefer unforgiving depictions of abusers that fall more into the “banality of evil” category (John Dashwood in “Sense and Sensibility”) or the “complicated, intricate manipulators who leave hero/ines with hair-trigger BS detectors” (“A Crown of Bitter Orange”; Laura Florand – with thanks to the Rec League), BUT I’ll take moustache-twirling villain over anything approaching the Easily Forgiven trope (tm TV Tropes).
Ymmv, but looks like this one doesn’t make the cut.
I have always liked the Revenge trope, but I want the revenge directed at the bad guy, not at some innocent bystander. If “you killed my father,” you should be the one to whom I say, “Prepare to die.” To pick out some stray connection of the villain to be the one destroyed by my revenge is just…stupid. And as Hercule Poirot once said, stupidity is the one unforgivable sin.
To add on to the topic of the revenge trope and using a woman as the object. One book pointed out that the hero should not use either the heroine or ANYONE ELSE as an object of getting his revenge. In SILK AND SHADOWS by Mary Jo Putney the hero gives up his plan of using the heroine. However, he continues his revenge using a brothel. It is pointed out to him that the heroine will see his actions of using the women in the brothel as unforgivable. Of course, he does get forgiven – but that realization is still memorable many years after I read the book. And, of course, I recommend the book…
It depends… I hate revenge on person A by directly hurting person B. That’s just wrong. (And stupid)
I mind less revenge on person A that has consequences for person B (e.g., destroying someone financially will hurt that person’s family. Or destroying someone’s reputation Will embarrass their family).
The historical trope of marrying someone’s daughter (or niece or cousin or sister) for revenge falls somewhere in between. It is still an incredibly stupid form of revenge, so I’ll think the hero is a dolt. But, as I’m buying into the background idea that the heroine was likely to have ended up in a non-romantic, practical marriage anyway, the revenge marriage isn’t putting her in a worse place.
Revenge “ruining” though is just wrong. I’m also at a point where I don’t think a hero can come back from having that plan in the first place, even if he starts to see the heroine as a person… I don’t care.
And if it weren’t for the revenge trope, I’d be out for people using “gift” as a verb in a historical context. Even within my (admittedly increasingly historical) lifetime, the usage was “gave.”
This seriously drives me BONKERS.
Word.
There’s an Anne Stuart from the Rohan series that I *loved* when it came out, Breathless. The guy kidnaps his enemy’s sister, ruins her so she’ll have to marry him and uses the fact to punish the brother who had rejected this guy’s sister who then killed herself. Like, you upset my suicidal sister so I’ll kidnap yours.
When I read it I thought he was brooding and hawt. Now I think he’s pukeworthy and criminal. And the thing was, the female lead was so relatable, so well written in the beginning that she deserved a better story! She had been tricked and ruined at eighteen, had hit the guy on the head with a pitcher, waltzed out and gone home to her loving family who said, sure she should do what she wants and buy a cottage and keep a companion and read and shop and do charity and avoid society. Well, that was a better life, fo sho.
@No, the Other Anne – I was interested so I looked this up. According to the OED, “gift” is attested as a transitive verb meaning “to endow or furnish with gifts; to endow, invest, or present with as a gift” starting in the late sixteenth century, the example given being the Wife in Morel’s Skin, “the friends that were together met, he gyfted them richely with right good speed.”
The OED also gives a second verb meaning “to bestow as a gift, to make a present of” constituted with “to” or dative, also with “away.” The earliest attested usage here is 1619, “tithes, being gifted to Levi in inheritance, can stand no longer than Levi.”
The OED offers multiple examples of both usages of the verb dating from the 19th C, where it seems to have been in pretty common usage. For all this time it has co-existed with “to give” as a verb with a precise shade of meaning, frequently in the sense of receiving something as a gift from a higher power (God, nature, a charitable benefactor, a lord “gifting” a common building to his tenants, or a king “gifting” to his vassals).
This doesn’t mean that usage errors in historical novels don’t drive me bonkers too. But a lot of the time that’s because people don’t actually check the contemporary usage in the period they’re describing. The OED is your friend, and beyond that contemporary sources, preferably letters and journals, and other relatively informal first person accounts that mimicked the speech of the time. What makes me raise my eyebrows in the excerpt is “you’re putting me on” which seems to be used in the sense the OED defines as “to deceive or hoax a person in a joking manner, to tease, to have (a person) on” and which according to the OED is US English, first attested in 1958, well over a hundred years after the story takes place, and on a different continent. (I suspect even now the British usage would be “having me on” not “putting me on,” but British speakers should correct me.) And don’t get me started on a 19th C character casually throwing around the word “bloody” which is much stronger than Americans (or foreign speakers generally) usually realize. “Blasted well” or “blooming well” maybe. Or “damned well.” Either would be enough to make a lady raise her eyebrows in the context of the scene. I’m also not sure about the repeated use of “gent” for “gentleman.” Maybe once. Twice starts sounding like the lady is trying to deliberately sound lower class. In short, yes, the language use is way off. But “to gift with” is the least of its problems.
Sorry, I’d pass the link to the OED, but it’s a subscription service, behind a paywall. Your library may be able to access it though.
The glaring anachronism which I always notice in historical English novels is when characters are writing people, not writing TO them. You always write TO your forbidden lover in UK English.
@Tam – datives for the win! 😀 Especially if the speaker is a man who has received a “gentleman’s” education, and had years of Latin grammar dinned into him. Subjunctive clauses correctly linked with that or which and no elisions. (He swore he would write her. NO. He swore THAT he would write TO her.) Even an intellectually curious young woman with brothers and/or an indulgent father (like Elizabeth Bennet) would probably distinguish between Romani ite domum and Romanes eunt domus.
I agree with this discussion. When humans are at war, there first target is always women, children and then burn the house down. They don’t stop, they move on and repeat.
Wonderful review and excellent points. Getting very sad when smart and skilled authors refuse to modify storylines to decrease the creepiness. They can write anything and readers are not dumb and frozen in tropes. Two other really disappointing books by top authors different genres are Once Burned by j frost and judgement road by c been an. Nasty choosing violence and lame females. Ugh.
Thanks so much for that review! Not going to read the book (obviously), but this was highly educational and helped put into words what I felt about some other romance novels.