This RITA® Reader Challenge 2016 review was written by Mara. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Long Historical category.
The summary:
His heart may be the last thing she ever steals…
Marlowe is a pickpocket, a housebreaker-and a better actress than any professional on the stage. She runs with the Covent Garden Cubs, a gang of thieves living in the slums of London’s Seven Dials. It’s a fierce life, and Marlowe has a hard outer shell. But when she’s alone, she allows herself to think of a time before-a dimly remembered life when she was called Elizabeth.
Maxwell, Lord Dane, is intrigued when his brother, a hired investigator, ropes him into his investigation of the fiercely beautiful hellion. He teaches her to navigate the social morass of the ton, but Marlowe will not escape so easily. Instead, Dane is drawn into her dangerous world, where the student becomes the teacher and love is the greatest risk of all.
Here is Mara's review:
Oof. You guys. I apparently did not know what I was doing when I was picking my RITA review books. I honestly probably would have DNFed it, but I’d already DNFed my other pick and I was feeling weirdly self-conscious that the Bitchery would judge me for not being able to finish a book. So I pushed through. And now I just feel depressed and negative.
Earls Just Want to Have Fun was never going to be a hit for me because the contents simply did not sufficiently match the description. I picked this book because nobody loves old school musicals more than me and My Fair Lady is an all-time favorite. So when I read the description, I was like, Yaaassssssss. Badass pickpocket gets reformed by stuffy rich guy? Who isn’t a weird daddy figure to her? Let’s do this! But no. That’s not really what we get.
Marlowe is…okay? I guess. She’s just not that great at the thievery, and that’s really what sold me on picking the book in the first place. I wanted a badass lady thief, and what I got was a kind of faux-hellion who never really seemed to be that invested in her life of crime. It read to me like Marlowe knew she was in a book where she was going to be rescued from her criminal ways, so she was kind of waiting around for that to happen and never really honed her craft. I think if the book had spent more time really showing a transformation from A to B, both the A and B parts of Marlowe’s characterization would have rang more true. Instead, it seems to me that we are told that she’s like A and then a few chapters later we’re told that she’s now like B.
This book also turns out to feature the one trope I CANNOT DEAL WITH in a historical: the over the top alphahole. Now this particular beast is often found in the disposable category contemporaries that I pop like pills when I need to turn my brain off. You will also find alphaholes in the wild in any number of single title contemporaries, and when it comes to paranormals? The alphahole cup runneth over.
But I can deal with them in a contemporary-ish setting. Probably because feminism has happened and there’s at least some nod or hand-waveium as to why the hero being an alphahole isn’t really about misogyny. And even though misogyny is still lingering around the contemporary alphahole, because of said feminism, I never feel like the heroine is truly stuck with him. She can always go get an education, get a job, find any necessary companionship on Tinder, and live happily ever after with her cockapoo. But in a historical, I feel too anxious for the heroine if the hero is too much of an alphahole, because what can she really do? She has no social status, few rights or recourse, and limited options to sufficiently support herself. Basically, it just takes me out of the story because I’m too worried about the heroine to enjoy anything else.
Dane is probably not as much of an alphahole to some readers as he was to me. But by the time he’s punching walls right next to Marlowe’s face and tying her to a chair, I’m out. I’m just out. It’s too close to domestic violence for something I’m supposed to be reading for pleasure.
Then he mansplains her own body to her and I got all the rage. When he deigns to give her leave to use his Christian name, he manages to do it in the most face-punchable way I’ve encountered:
“Dane” She sighed his name, and he lifted his head.
“My name is Maxwell.”
She blinked at him, her head altogether too fuzzy to make sense of his words immediately. “I can hardly call you Maxwell.”
“I doubt you’ll be saying much of anything in a few moments, but if you must scream my name, you may use Max.”
And then when he gives her what is evidently her first orgasm ever:
Dane was smiling down at her. “You have the biggest grin on your face.”
“Did you know about that?” she asked.
“About orgasm? Yes. You didn’t?”
She shook her head. “I can see why everyone is so eager to swive, if that’s how it feels.”
He chuckled. “I would tell you it is not always like that, but it would be purely self-congratulatory. I hope I’m not so vain.”
Take your magic wang and get out of here, Dane! This was the moment that I knew, despite a very ably written sex scene, Dane could not be any fun to sleep with, so I couldn’t really feel that glad for Marlowe that it was happening. (Sidenote: the opposite scene plays out to my complete delight in Courtney Milan’s The Duchess War. The heroine lady-splains clitoral stimulation to the hero and it’s everything.)
This book was just not for me. I think if you have a higher tolerance for some more old skool-esque tropes, you might enjoy this one. It’s competently written and pretty well paced. I just was not having fun at any point when reading it.
Now how do I rate this…hmmm. On my personal 0 to 7 scale, I’d give this a 3, meaning that it just wasn’t my bag. I guess I’d translate that to a C+? Sure. Because back in my TA days, I’d give a paper a C+ if it failed to meet expectations but showed an average level of competence. So let’s go with a C+, and may my RITA picks next year be more skillfully chosen.
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Great review!
Good review of what sounds like a really disappointing book. I’d have been skeptical right at the start with the 20th century pop reference title–not a good start for a period piece.
What a great review. And I’m so going to go one-click The Duchess War.
The use of gang-slang got on my last nerve by the time I was a couple of chapters in. Instead of sprinkling it in like chocolate chips in a cookie, it was like the author threw the entire bag of chips in my face. When the reader has trouble understanding what’s going on because of the vernacular, you need to scale it back.
I quit a chapter or two in. I am often tempted by historicals with an unusual heroine, but they are almost universally really, really, really bad – it’s rare that the author actually grapples with what being “a female pickpocket”/”a female scientist”/”a female spy” meant in a time when women had so little agency and so few rights. Like the reviewer, it generally reads to me like it’s just a blurb-friendly gimmick so the heroine has something to do in the chapter before the hero shows up and her true life’s meaning (=boning him) begins.
(I also have emotions about the cutesy title crazy. I’m sure often this isn’t something the author chooses, and is foisted on them by a well-meaning publisher, but – come on! Earls just want to have fun? COME. ON.)
I think I started this book…and didn’t finish it. I can’t even remember. How sad is that?
If it makes you feel any better – I felt the same about most of the books I selected for the RITA review except one – it just felt like a slog. I chalk it up to the diversity in romance readership – to be selected for a RITA. someone and probably many someones must have liked your books. But its hard to know whether the book you select from a spreadsheet is something you’ll like.
I enjoyed your Alphahole commentary! I’m the opposite – I can deal with them better in historicals (although they’re not my favourite), but they give me so much rage in contemporaries. Seriously, there’s no excuse anymore, alphaholes. Do better.
I haven’t read the book so I have no comment on that, but I completely loved the voice of the review – if you’re not a writer, you should be. I appreciate that you owned your opinion and explained your issues with the book while inferring that someone else might like it. I wish you were my editor: I can handle an editor who tears my book to pieces with extreme clarity, and I would know where I needed to improve when you were finished. After I laughed so hard I cried. 🙂