Book Review

His Wicked Charm by Candace Camp

His Wicked Charm is a fun Regency Gothic romance. This is one of many books in the “Mad Moreland Series,” which is about an unconventional upper class family in England. In this book, one of the Moreland brothers, Con, teams up with his sister’s friend Lilah to solve mysteries and fight crime (basically). Con is the “bad” brother and Lilah is the “boring” friend. The story kicks off with a kidnapping and winds up full-in Gothic complete with a dungeon and misty bogs. It’s frothy, ridiculous, and unbelievable, but it is entertaining.

At the start of the book, Con’s brother, Alex, marries a woman named Sabrina. Lilah is Sabrina’s best friend. Con and Lilah are frequently in each other’s company because of Alex and Sabrina’s relationship. Apparently Con tried to kiss Lilah once, and she slapped him, and now Lilah believes that Con thinks Lilah is boring and prudish. As a result their interactions are awkward.

It’s true that Lilah is under intense pressure from her proper aunt who is raising her to be extremely proper to the point of suffocation. The aunt hopes that by being extraordinarily dull Lilah might live down an old family scandal involving Lilah’s other aunt, who shall come up in a moment. The Morelands, on the other hand, seem to thrive on scandal. They’ve never been dull for a moment in their lives. Con thinks that Lilah has hidden depths, as evidenced by the fact that no matter how proper her dresses may be, her stockings are unusual colors (he catches occasional glimpses of them when she goes up stairs, etc).

Anyway, following complicated events including but not limited to a kidnapping (Con and Lilah to the rescue), and a case of mistaken identity, Con and Lilah end up hanging out at her family’s incredibly Gothic country estate with her incredibly Gothic other auntie who used to do famous seances and doesn’t have a proper bone in her body. They have to solve a Gothic mystery which involves a key, a secret staircase, a cult, and Lilah sleepwalking in a hedge maze in her white nightie.

It doesn’t get more Gothic than this:

The land rose gradually, and the low-lying fog became patches of mist drifting across the ground. They turned onto the drive leading to the house, and the ache in Lilah’s chest swelled. There it was: Barrow House, looming before them in all its hulking, shopworn grandiosity, a testimony to the conceit of successive generations of Holcutts.

And then there’s the first night in the house:

Going to the window, he pushed aside the drapes and gazed out at the night. The moon was almost full, palely lighting the landscape below him. He could make out the dark shapes of trees and shrubbery, the broad pathway leading to the center of the garden.

A white figure moved below him. His heart gave a jump, then he smiled at himself. It was a real person, no phantom, just a woman in a white nightgown. He leaned closer to the glass. Why was a woman walking in the garden in the middle of the night?

It was Lilah. She was too far away and the light too faint to see her clearly, but he recognized that fall of hair even in the fainter light from the moon. What the devil was Lilah doing outside at two o’clock in the morning? And dressed only in her nightgown?

WHAT, INDEED.

Fun fact: “barrow” is a word with many meanings, including “ancient burial mound.” It can also mean “a male pig castrated before maturity.” Y’all have no idea how happy it would make me to discover that the house is secretly named for castrated male pigs.

The partnership, both practical and romantic, between Con and Lilah is believable and fun to read. Lilah’s desire for acceptance and love following a childhood marked by abandonment and family shame is deeply touching and comes across as the most grounded and realistic aspect of the book. Con is a good, if bland, hero: he does hero things with a touch of scoundrel, he knows how to pick locks, and he respects Lilah’s intelligence. Aunt Vesta (the one who does seances) is an adept and funny matchmaker.

But I don’t think anything in this book made a lick of sense, and it was so frothy that when I picked it up to review it a week after reading it, I couldn’t remember what it was about. Do recall that I love science fiction and fantasy, and I’ll believe a lot in a story. However, I had the feeling that this book was constructed by putting a lot of Gothic things into a shredder and then dumping the resulting confetti onto the page. It resulted in something busy and fun, but not something I believed or was invested in emotionally. I was never creeped out. I never worried about the outcome. I did not believe the PLOT TWIST for a single second.

However, I enjoyed the funny dialogue, the great chemistry, and Lilah’s character arc. Even though I thought the Gothic elements were overdone, I did enjoy them. The Gothic stuff is too overblown to actually be creepy, but that very overblown quality makes this a fun read for an autumn evening when I want my Gothic atmosphere but don’t have the energy to invest in anything emotionally. I didn’t believe in a single thing that happened in this book for even a moment, but I rooted for Con and Lilah anyway. It was an entertaining romance of what I call the soap bubble variety. It was pretty, it was entertaining, and when it was finished I forgot all about it.

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His Wicked Charm by Candace Camp

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  1. Heather T says:

    “Soap bubble variety.” I love it! I’m going to use that instead of my usual description of such books as “eminently forgettable.”

  2. MirandaB says:

    I like the dress on the cover.

  3. The Mad Moreland Series introduced me to historical romance back when I was in high school. I loved this book so much when I read it in March—I pre-ordered it because I was so happy the series was back. I’ve been itching to reread it, so I am going to take this as a sign and pick it up again.

  4. Louise says:

    The Gothic stuff is too overblown to actually be creepy
    It isn’t a truly period-authentic Gothic unless every last creepy thing–the more sinister and far-fetched, the better–is eventually revealed to have some ridiculously mundane, prosaic explanation. (Why was a wax facsimile of Laurentina’s mouldering corpse hidden behind the black veil? Aw, heck, who cares.)

  5. Zyva says:

    I remember reading that what people see fit to laugh at was VERY telling.
    (From memory, that theory was expounded in features on Kath and Kim .)
    Likewise, what people find horrifying. (That one was in the background material for the film “Saved!” I’ll never forget the documentation of kids fighting over roles for Christian Haunted House at Halloween: ‘No, I get to go as the heroin addict!’)

    So I really doubt I’d find ‘deflated Gothic’ fluffy and forgettable just because lighter tones are an ‘adulteration’ of a traditionally tragedy-loaded genre.

    That doesn’t mean I’d like any given book in that vein (no; case by case basis), only that I would have thought there was plenty of material not to be dismissed as lightweight in that space, i.e. along different points on the soft to hard on scale of gothic gravity / severity (think, like ‘Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness’ on TV Tropes):

    from ‘Monsters Inc’ to ‘Care Bears (with early villains)’, through Beetlejuice the TV series to Beetlejuice the movie, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall ….BEFORE you get to eg that Le Fanu novel where the heroine’s kid is stolen because he’s the heir – even though she bloody near died having him.

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