D+

A Midnight Dance

A Midnight Dance by Lila DiPasqua is complete ridonkadonk historical crazy sauce. The cover and title suggest that it’s a Cinderella story, but I’m not sure it really qualifies.

The story takes place after The Fronde in France. The heroine, Sabine Laurent, is suffering: her father (a once successful playwright/ theater owner) is dead, her sister is missing, the theater is gone, and she owes more in taxes than she can ever hope to pay. Sabine and her brothers hatch a crazy scheme to rob some pirates of trunk loads of silver–Sabine will pretend to be a prostitute “Elise” and lure their leader into a false sense of security, and then they’ll get the men to drink drugged wine so they pass out.

Turns out one of those “pirates” is a man Sabine used to see at the theater and fantasize about as her Dark Prince, Jules de Moutier. Jules’ father was accused of treason and his family lost their standing. Jules became a pirate (I think?) and the silver is going to be used to help clear his family name.

So anyway, the plan goes awry when Jules forbids his men from drinking the drugged wine and Sabine has to sleep with him for real. It’s okay though–Jules has a magic peen and the sex is real good…which didn’t totally make up for the fact that the whole thing was kinda squicky.

Jules is shocked to learn that Sabine/Elise is a virgin, but again, the sex is real good, so…yeah. What follows is more crazy scheming to get the silver and then Jules finding out Sabine’s real identity and getting pissed and then some running around because they have to find Sabine’s missing sister and clear Jules’ family name.

A lot of things happen in this book fairly rapidly. New characters are introduced so quickly it’s difficult to tell them apart. When I got to the conspiracy involving Jules’ dad, I was pretty much lost. This book suffers from a case of Way Too Much Plot Held Together By Sex Scenes. Rather than focus on the internal conflict between Sabine and Jules, the external conflicts (and boning) drive the novel. And Jules seems to fall in love with Sabine because she’s so great in bed and they have sexual chemistry.

Overall the novel suffered from a crazy, meandering plot and a use of sex in place of emotional development. Jules wasn’t particularly likeable either–he spends most of his time thinking about Sabine and how sex-able she is and doesn’t fully see her as a person until she’s almost raped by another man. I love a good Cinderella story but A Dance at Midnight wasn’t it.

– Elyse

Inspired by the tale of Cinderella, Lila DiPasqua weaves a steamy story that offers a glass slipper, a dangerous deception, and an impoverished beauty determined to find her handsome prince…and make him pay.
Born into wealth, Sabine Laurent and her twin sister lived a life of luxury, their father’s prestigious theater frequented by royalty and aristocracy alike. And Sabine dreamed of her own prince charming—the devastatingly handsome Jules de Moutier.
That was before the loss of her sister and her family’s fall from grace—a disaster Sabine blames on the Moutier family. Now, with her father’s death, she’s inherited his sizable debt and the responsibility of caring for his spoiled long-time mistress and her two wastrel daughters. But with the help of Sabine’s eccentric friends—the balance of her father’s acting troupe—she plans to get very close to her old infatuation, seduce the rake—and make away with a fortune.
Resisting Jules’s skillful mouth and tantalizing touch is not as easy as Sabine supposed. And soon she must decide whether her desire for vengeance is greater than her desire for her one and only prince…