Back when I was a little baby Elyse, still too embarrassed to check out romances from the library lest the librarian judge me, I raided my aunt’s Johanna Lindsey stash. I had just finished reading everything Kathleen Woodiwiss had ever written (which wasn’t much) and was hungering for more. My aunt was an avid romance reader and had all of Lindsey’s paperbacks lining several shelves in her basement. It was a feast of bronze-chested Fabios, golden mullets fluttering in the wind.

If I remember correctly, Lindsey was a little more sexual and little more approachable than Woodiwiss. Then there were her sci-fi romances. OMG. Warrior’s Woman holds a special place in my heart to this day. Glorious. At that time, at that age, Lindsey was exactly what I was craving.

So I have a lot of happy Lindsey memories. Fast forward eleventy billion years, and I was interested to see how Make Me Love You held up against my own nostalgia. Turns out you can’t relive those halcyon days of shimmering mullets and violet-eyed heroines. It wasn’t that I disliked Make Me Love You, it just wasn’t as cracktastic as Lindsey’s Old Skool romances, and, frankly, there are much better examples of regencies flooding the market right now. I mean, it was less rapey than Lindsey’s Old Skools (which I would fully expect), a little softer, with still a smattering of crazysauce thrown in, but it wasn’t amazing.

The plot is pretty standard regency fare with a nod to the Gothic. The heroine, Brooke Whitworth has to travel to the dreary moors of Yorkshire to marry Dominic Wolfe because Wolfe and her brother have had a long-standing feud that’s resulted in three duels. The Prince Regent thinks that by uniting the two families in marriage, he’ll get rid of the fighting.

Why Prinny a) cares at all and b) thinks that joining two families that hate each other together would fix anything is beyond me. #historicalromanceproblems I guess.

Anyway, Brooke’s parents and brother are a bunch of abusive shitbags anyway, so she’s happy to be out of there. She’s just got to convince Dominic to marry her because she doesn’t want to go back.

Dominic is a very growly, beastly sort of man. He’s laid up with a leg wound from the last duel and Brooke, a herbalist, along with her witchy lady servant, heal him. This involves Brooke touching his naked thigh a lot. Like my own husband, Dominic doesn’t handle feeling unwell very graciously (LOVE YOU HONEY!). The scenes where Brooke tends to him reminded me of when Belle cleaned The Beast’s wounds after he saved her from wolves in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. That part I loved it.

The setting is deliciously gothic, and there’s a mystery for Brooke to solve regarding why Dominic hates her family so much (hint: it has to do with Dominic’s tragically departed sister). There’s also a rumor that Dominic might turn into an actual wolf, and I spent the first half of the book wondering if I was getting Surprise!Paranormal, but no. He doesn’t actually shapeshift, it’s part of the Gothic undertones, not a werewolf book.

I really liked the first half of the book, but the second half, not so much. Dominic and Brooke leave Yorkshire and their boat blows up and there are highwaymen and Dom’s mom is not nice. It was a lot of external things happening without any internal things happening. In that respect it did remind me of the older historicals I used to read. They were packed with action and often that action was a mechanism for the hero and heroine not getting together. There wasn’t a ton of emotional heavy lifting–lots of external conflict, a misunderstanding–then boom it’s fixed by the end. That’s exactly the formula Make Me Love You follows.

What really bugged me is that the setting of isolated Yorkshire, with Dom trapped in his pouty-castle or whatever, is the perfect way to force these two together and explore their relationship in a nuanced way. Having a tough hero laid up and forced to accept his vulnerability (and the heroine’s ability to heal him) opens the door for some mega-character development. We only get a little of this, and I wanted so much more of it. Instead we jump ahead to a lot of action and a lot of resolution brought about by convenient secondary characters.  I didn’t feel like Dom ever changed–he just realized that Brooke wasn’t so bad after all–and that realization didn’t come from a moment of clarity, but again, from external sources.

Still, it’s clear that Lindsey’s writing has changed. There’s no forced seduction. Brooke is a much more fully realized character than past Lindsey heroines. She has a complex relationship with her mother. She has hobbies and talents and interests–like medicine and horse breeding. Dominic doesn’t hold up as well. He never veers into alphahole territory, but you can tell he wants to. He’s grumpy and difficult but never domineering. The result is sort of bland. He’s handsome and pouty but never very heroic or interesting. For most of the book he’s just chronically misinformed, and that’s the basis of his conflict. It’s never great when the reason the hero can’t admit he loves the heroine is because he has bad information–it feels too thin and insubstantial.

I did get a little gem of gloriously purple Old Skool dialogue though:

She put a hand to his cheek and with the boldness that had overcome her said, “If you think we aren’t going to be interrupted, I would like to feel you on top of me–inside me. Please don’t stop, not when we’re both caught up in this primal storm.”

Honestly the thing I liked best about this book was comparing it to the Lindsey’s of old and reliving my early romance days. Make Me Love You isn’t a bad book, but it doesn’t hold its own among more nuanced, character-driven historicals.