Edited 14 December 2017: This review has been revised and the grade has been changed. Please see note at the bottom of this review for amended grade information.
This week, while hanging out with the residents of my local cat café, I read my first Joanna Shupe historical. Shupe is known for writing American historicals set in the Gilded Age, and the first book of The Four Hundred Series, A Daring Arrangement, sticks to that theme.
I loved the change in setting from the Regency historicals I usually read, so this probably won’t be the last book I read in the series, but some issues with the plot left me pretty irked at the end.
This is an engagement of convenience story. Lady Honora Parker was sent to live with her aunt and uncle in New York after her father, an Earl, caught her in flagrante delicto with her lover (and love) a penniless artist named Robert. The Earl thinks Robert is a fortune hunter and wants Nora to find an American husband (or at least stay across the pond until she forgets about Robert).
Being a determined woman, Nora is like, “Fuck that noise.” So she finds the most completely unacceptable person she can, Julius Hatcher, a wealthy and outrageous playboy, and concocts a plot. She asks Julius to pretend to be her fiancé until her father, horrified, hauls her back to England where she can see Robert again. What’s in it for him? Julius is new money and his shenanigans have made all the gossip papers, so he hasn’t been accepted into “society.” Why does he want access to said society? When Julius was a child, his father, a financier, entered in a gentlemen’s agreement with three society dudes. When the investment fell through, those dudes didn’t honor their part of the deal, ruining Julius’s family financially. His father was so devastated that he killed himself.
Julius is bound and determined to find these men and destroy them the way they destroyed his father. He’s been incredibly successful at investing and is loaded, but as new money he’s not welcome in the same circles in which Nora travels freely. Being engaged to her will open doors for him, and hopefully allow him to find the men who took his father from him.
A lot of this book worked for me. I really liked Nora and her absolute determination to follow the path she wanted for herself and not the one society and her family set. I was delighted to read a historical heroine who
I also really liked Nora’s aunt who was supportive and knowing without being overwhelming. Strong female relationships, y’all.
Julius was a more uneven character. When Nora first approaches him, he’s completely shitfaced, riding a horse around a ballroom because he and his friends thought it would be funny to dine on horseback indoors. That’s gonna ruin those floors, you guys. That’s the kind of behavior that Nora thinks her father will abhor, and the kind of shenanigans that make Julius a darling of the gossip pages. Except after that one event, Julius isn’t scandalous at all. He’s a hard-working man who pulled his family back up, which doesn’t leave a ton of time for drunken indoor equestrian events.
Julius explains to Nora that 1. the party was his birthday not an everyday occurrence and 2. the gossip papers exaggerate. I get that but also it seems to me that he would have to give them some fodder to run with. The Julius we get in the book is a really solid guy who, aside from being new money, seems like someone Nora’s father would be fine with her marrying.
Now, some of this inconsistency is explained by Julius’ not wanting to get kicked out of society now that he’s in because that will derail his revenge plot. Nevertheless, the character that sells the plot and the character we get just don’t match up.
I liked Julius the solid guy, though. He falls in love with Nora first, and unlike many romance novel heroes, the minute he has some Feels he doesn’t immediately stare down at his body in confusion and horror, like he’s been bitten by a radioactive spider or something. He also thinks Robert is a fortune hunter (because Nora is amazing! Why wouldn’t he fight harder for Nora? She’s amazing!) and he’s determined to prove to her that he’s the better guy. But he’s not shitty and manipulative about it: he comes right out and tells Nora what he intends to do.
All of this means that Nora is actually the character who falls in love and comes to terms with it last, which is an interesting departure from many of the plots I’ve read. Julius is far more aware of his own feelings than Nora is.
Also he has a turret-library for sex. How great would that be? Meet me in the turret-library. Pants optional.
But what really, really bugged me at the end was the resolution of Julius’s revenge plot which I can’t fully explain without spoilers. Sorry.
So yeah, that’s a big problem. And while I enjoyed most of the book, it soured the end for me.
The originality of the setting and the badass heroine kept me from being too furious and I’m sure I’ll read the next book in the series, but plotting gaps kept me from being fully satisfied with A Daring Arrangement.
…
When Kay Taylor Rea tweeted at me her discovery of the descriptor “gypsy eyes” in her e-ARC of this book, I was horrified and aghast, not only at the use of a really offensive, racist term that frankly should not be used any longer, but that I’d missed it. I’ve encountered it in other books and ARCs and my reaction is similar to hers: we nope the hell out of the book.
Because I missed it in this book, I kept going when I ordinarily would have stopped and picked up something else. Now that I’ve seen it, my experience of the book and my appreciation for it is substantially diminished, and I’m amending my grade from a B- to a C-as a result.
Missing its usage and not mentioning it in the review is on me. But it is also way, way past time for this term to stop being used as a descriptor. It is racist, and offensive, and it needs to stop.
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I’m kind of turned off by Julius’s drunken horse shenanigans. It seems incredibly immature. Was this his 21st birthday party? Youthful hero!
On the other hand, the revenge plot (including the spoiler) sounds like classic Krentz/Quick to me, which I love. I’m only left wondering…
@Deborah: Fixed it for you!
Am now sad that I will probably never get to tell someone: “Meet me in the turret-library. Pants optional.”
The dinner on horseback was an actual event according to the author notes. When I read that, I had to search. There are photos.
https://blog.mcny.org/2016/06/21/a-dinner-on-horseback/
Nose boops rating scale – brilliant!
You’re right that Julius never really came together. My pet peeve was the masquerade. All of his friends are asking about his awesome masquerade and he’s like not anymore I’m engaged and I’m thinking he’ll be pressured to have it, Nora will sneak in, crazy stuff would happen and it will be awesome. But nope, he just doesn’t have the masquerade. Don’t tease me with potential masquerade and not carry through.
I really like Jonanna Shupe. Her Knickerbocker series was really good, although I was reading the second book during the election last year and had to pull back because all the politics were a little too close to home. My favorite book by her was the first full book in that series (it technically started with a novella). I think the title was Magnate and the hero shares some of the basic characteristics with Julius–he is new money, except he didn’t come by much of it in the most legal of means. Most of the society people, including the other members of the Knickerbocker Club, consider him to be nothing more that a gangster. Of course, he was basically a teddy bear when it came to his family, especially his younger sister. There was a revenge plot in that one too, but I don’t quite remember why he wanted revenge on the heroine’s brother.
The thing that stood out about that book was that the heroine was a financial genius and got involved with the hero so she could start her own brokerage, which her brother/guardian would not allow her to do.
I agree the revenge resolution seemed quick and pat, but I also think Julius thought about what now matters to him/them. I also think Julius become the solid guy in order in fit in society, contrary to how Nora wanted him to act. I thought the Robert plot was a bit over the top. All in all, an enjoyable read!
I’m English, and I just wanted to say that ‘gypsy’ is still an official term on the British census, and that the major UK advocacy group for the community is called the National Gypsy Liaison Group. It’s been a few years since I lived in the UK (nearly ten) but the members of the British Romany community whom I personally knew (as opposed to European Roma or Irish Travellers) referred to themselves as Gypsies.
Personally, I do try to refer to people by the names they wish to be called, and in North America, I’m very careful not to use the word ‘gypsy’ as I’m aware that here it’s considered offensive. However – I do think it’s problematic to state that because a term is offensive in one culture, it should then be considered offensive everywhere. (I’m reminded of a cringeworthy occasion in which I witnessed a white American lecturing a South African girl on why she should not call herself ‘Colored’. It was – grim.)
Also, I am not defending the use of the term ‘gypsy’ in an othering, exoticizing context (which seems to be what’s happening with ‘gypsy eyes’). But if I read a British historical novel which referred to ‘Gypsies’, I would not find this offensive or pejorative the way Americans seem to do, any more than the term ‘Indian’ for ‘Native American’ would ring alarm bells.
@Tam
Totally understand where you’re coming with that, but it’s by an American author, published by an American publisher, and set in the States. As always, members of any stigmatized group are their own arbiters when referring to themselves, but the word has a long problematic history and it’s use in this context was not only awkward and exoticizing, but entirely unnecessary.
<topic drift>
In Canada, one recognized ethnic group is Metis–a word that happens to be the French reflex of the Spanish mestizo. I flinch whenever I encounter it.
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Yet another contemporary disguising as a historical romance, it seems. Not even a whiff of what it would have been like to live in the past as a woman (a woman of a certain class, status, etc.). Family and society were not (as they are not today either) just a backdrop to be changed or discarded at will. In the past they used to bite back with much greater ferocity than today and had enormous power over you, while their punishment would have been at once brutal and subtle (if you were of a certain class, if not it would have been just brutal). I want to see some of that in so-called historical romances (even a slight allusion would do). What I don’t want to see is next-door contemporary sensibilities and mores proclaiming to be ‘historical’ because of the frocks and the carriages. Writers of historical romances should not seek to indulge contemporary sensibilities but be true to their subject matter first and foremost. For those who only like contemporary projections upon the whole past of humanity there’s a huge market of contemporary romances to choose from. As for me, I will definitely give this non-historical romance a wide berth.