This RITA® Reader Challenge 2016 review was written by Ninja Penguin. 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 Ninja Penguin's review:
Trigger warning: mentions of violence.
Maxwell Derring, Earl of Dane hates the poor. They’re lazy, stupid, immoral, and “barely human.” He blames them for his father’s death—not because a poor person shot or stabbed his father, but because somebody robbed one of his father’s houses, and two weeks later he died of pneumonia. Now, you might be thinking, as I did, that that seems a very weak and specious chain of logic for deciding to hate poor people, but, you see, it needs to be so. Because Marlowe, our heroine, is poor. Or at least was raised as a poor person by a gang of Covent Garden thieves. And also because Maxwell’s brother Brook believes that she is in fact Lady Elizabeth Grafton, the long-lost daughter of the Marquess of Lyndon.
And now that Brook has fobbed Marlowe off on our hero while he goes to retrieve her possible parents from Scotland, Maxwell can easily forget all about his hatred of the poor once he has had a five-minute conversation with Marlowe. “See?”the book seems to say, “All people need to do is meet someone from a group they’re prejudiced against, and they’ll figure out they’re wrong. Poor people, they’re just like us!” As if bigots have somehow spent their lives on a desert island, instead of deliberately ignoring the humanity of people who surround them.
Marlowe is more sympathetic. She would prefer to go back to her gang at first, partially because she misses the other cubs in the gang, and partially because she is afraid of vengeance from the gang leader, Satin. But she also longs to know if she really does have a family who might love her, and if she has a chance for a better life. What she wants most is to have a choice for the first time in her life.
Part of my disappointment with this book is that from the synopsis, I was expecting more emphasis on the “My Fair Lady” aspects of turning a street brat into a lady. This is mostly elided in some off-page lectures and one scene of her getting dressed for the first time. The scene where Marlowe, introduced as a distant country cousin, has to sit through an impromptu tea party with a duchess, constantly trying to snatch tea cakes while people are distracted is hilarious though, and makes me wish we’d had more of this part.
The majority of my disappointment lies in Dane. I’ve already mentioned his extremely rapid turnaround on the issue of poverty (and crime). There are also a couple of incidences of violence in the beginning of the book. Marlowe was literally kidnapped by Dane’s brother off the street, and Dane then tied her to a chair in his bedroom so she couldn’t escape. When she does almost manage to escape he slams his fists against the door right next to her head.
The next morning, when Dane’s sister points out that they can’t kidnap a person, he calls Marlowe “not really a person,” slaps his hand across her mouth to prevent her complaining (and cursing him), attempts to re-grab her when she gets away, and says he regrets “not having [his] hands about her throat.” But hey, at least he’s better than the abusive gang leader who beats and kicks her! He’s constantly complaining about how boring his life is, but one reason may be that he never seems to care about or think about anyone else. He claims that he likes Marlowe because he doesn’t meet many intelligent women, which unfortunately says more about him than about her.
But mainly he seems to like her because she knows so little, so he gets to be a figure of awe. She literally doesn’t know anything about her body’s responses, thinking that she must be sick when she flushes and gets weak-kneed. He has to explain her own arousal and orgasm to her, which really puts me off because it makes her seem more child-like and positions him as the expert of her own body.
I probably would have been a little less irritated with Dane if Marlowe had ever gotten a chance to show off the skills and knowledge she surely picked up during fifteen years of living on the street. But she is just as happy to never steal anything ever again as soon as she isn’t forced to do it. She never shows any talent for conning people–which would have been particularly useful dealing with all these new people. When they get followed by a pack of ruffians, Marlowe gets them trapped in an alley, and Dane takes out the majority of attackers with his sword-stick. Her cunning plan to get rid of Satin, the gang leader…
I had really high hopes for a fun, light-hearted adventure of a story, with Dane showing Marlowe how to be a proper lady, and Marlowe showing Dane how to have fun, but instead I had a boring slog of a story that I probably wouldn’t have finished if I didn’t have this review to write. In the meantime, if anyone knows of any good stories like the one I wanted, please let me know!
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I can think of two books that are not new so you may have already read them. A Lady’s Lesson in Scandal by Meredith Duran has a poor heroine break into an earl’s house to exact revenge. He catches her and keeps her prisoner and teaches her to be a lady so she can claim to be some nob’s daughter (it’s been awhile since I read it and I can’t remember if it’s a scam or not). This book is not lighthearted and shows the grimness of her poverty. Meredith Duran writes with intense emotion and I thought this book was great.
The other one is To Love a Thief by Julie Anne Long. This one has more of a My Fair Lady feel, right down to the jolly friend of the hero. Our heroine is an orphan pickpocket from St. Giles and IIRC she is not a missing aristocrat so when he decides to teach her to be a lady (after he catches her picking his pocket) he isn’t dredging up latent memories of manners but really has to teach her. It’s pretty fun, as JAL has a nice light comedic touch but hits the emotional beats as well.
If I could edit, I would add that I just remembered there’s a bit in To Love a Thief where she convinces the society ladies that “reading dresses” are the latest fashion. So much fun!
All I could think of when I was reading this review was the song “I Don’t Understand the Poor” from the stage musical A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.
Here’s a clip of the actor in full costume singing the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4TCRkogYOk
And here’s the full song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkKg-P6JHRE
Not quite the right time period (or attitude) but there you go…
Not strictly romances but there is Patricia C Wrede’s duology Mairelon th Magician and Magician’s ward. Set in a Regencyesque magical London with a street thief heroine.
I second the recommendation for A Lady’s Lesson in Scandal. As Teev said, it isn’t cute and funny, but it is a really terrific book.
You migth like Bith The Charm School and Halfway to Heaven by Susan Wiggs, I pwrsonally liked them a lot. Also the upcoming book by Maya Rodale “Lady Claire is all that” is on the Pygmalion trope.
You might try Shelley Adina and her Magnificent Devices series. It is not exactly what you were looking for but, I loved the main heroine. Smart, resourceful, takes over a gang and then recues them.
Thank you for your review, @Ninja Penguin.
I read this book and would have given it a pretty solid B had I reviewed. One reason I did not read it with the same expectations at all. What I had to get past was what felt to me to be the improbability of the basic idea that Regency aristocratic parents with presumably the same worries about scandal would ever have accepted a pickpocket potential prostitute back into the family, no matter how much they grieved for their kidnapped daughter. It also seemed improbable that an Earl would marry a pickpocket potential prostitute.
I got over that issue because I just liked Marlowe so much. She has a strong sense of self, of morals, and her values. I loved her honesty. Yes, she was incredibly naive about her bodily responses but considering who she had been hanging around for the last fifteen years, she probably had not been sexually attracted to any of the men she had met.
All I’m getting from this is that Marlowe is okay because she isn’t a REAL poor person – what a relief!
Also, I’m afraid ‘not attracted to any of the (poor) men she had met’ doesn’t seem very realistic to me. If you’re going to pick pockets and run cons, you’re going to meet people who aren’t part of your criminal gang; and somehow we poor people all through history have managed to get past our glaring flaws (poverty) to find love, have families, etc. A thief who’s never stopped to flirt with some young shop apprentice to cover for the fact they’re loitering? That also seems improbable to me.
Well, you simply have to read the book. It works. Her thoughts are full of people with rotting teeth, halitosis even if teeth aren’t rotting, body odor. Also, she is intelligent and she knows a baby follows sex and she has seen too many women in Seven Dials with children they can’t afford to feed and she doesn’t want to become one.
I am very poor. My income has been well below the poverty line since I was deemed disabled in 1995, Believe me, there is no comparison between being poor now in this time in the USA and being poor back in England then.
All I can say is that book worked for me. If it doesn’t sound like it will work for you, then don’t read it.
n any event, Marlowe’s fastidiousness about men is really a Plot Device to make sure she is a virgin when Dane has sex with her because we all know that in Romancelandia when a man encounters a virgin whom he deflowers, that creates a bond, at least in his side, and she is his forever.
Personally, I have always thought it improbable that the taking of a woman’s virginity has such mystical properties. I’ve always found that improbable. But I’ve read it in so many romance novels that I mentally shrug my shoulders and move on.
This books sounds rather sloppily assembled, and the hero sounds like a jerk. But I do have to like that the heroine’s assumed surname is Grafton. For a thief, that is cleverly apt.