Must Love Chainmail

by Angela Quarles

July 12, 2015 · Angela Quarles

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This RITA® Reader Challenge 2016 review was written by Harper Gray. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Paranormal Romance category.

Here is Harper Gray's review:

Fair warning: if faux-dialect is not your thing, you will have a tough time with Must Love Chainmail. Even the ‘modern’ character’s POV gave me some trouble, but I am a grumpy old lady before my time. I also did not particularly like the modern heroine, who seemed at once a bit hyper-modern but at the same time too quick to blend seamlessly into medieval Wales.

Must Love Chainmail is the second in the ‘Must Love’ series of time-travel romances by Angela Quarles. 95% of this book worked as a standalone for me, but one thing that does depend on the first book is the fact that time travel has, presumably, been set up as A Thing That Can Happen in the previous book. Katy is clearly at the mercy of rules we as readers presumably already know from Must Love Breeches, and she twigs within seconds what’s happened. The reader never really gets much explanation other than that this happened to her friend a while back, as well.

There’s also the presence of a certain oddly-dressed gentleman, from whom Katy accidentally acquires the card case. I’ll hide him under a spoiler tag, since he’s, well…

Katy was a really rather bland character. Again – I’ll stop saying this eventually I promise – I wonder if the bulk of her characterisation and backstory didn’t already happen in the previous book, and that was why she seemed so superficial and underdeveloped here. I felt like the reason given for her desire to be so organised didn’t fit the extent of her compulsion. In this book, at least, she’s not obsessively tied to planning and organising more than most people are who just…have that personality quirk, or were raised that way. She clearly experienced an event in her childhood as traumatic, and I would have expected it to manifest as something a little, well, more than ‘I like to have things well-planned and predictable.’ That her compulsion was a result of trauma made her envy of Traci’s spontaneity a little weird to say the least, and the ease with which she a) threw obsessive planning to the four winds and b) overcame her past felt too sweet and tidy.

So Katy finds the card case, wishes that she knew how to become happy, and the card case in its infinite wisdom plops her town in the late thirteenth-century (perhaps because she had been fantasizing about an effigy in a church, because those are super hot, you guys). Anyway, as luck would have it she lands in the middle of a Welsh rebellion against Norman rule, but luckily a knight (in a chain mail ‘hoodie’) finds her and takes her into the castle with everyone else in advance of the expected Welsh siege.

I found Robert a much more compelling character than Katy. Robert’s father found himself on the wrong side of a rebellion, and for this reason was branded a traitor and lost his lands. He had also married a high-ranking Welsh woman which, rather than being used as a tool for alliance, is added to his list of traitorous acts. This leaves Robert, who is Welsh nobility on one side and disgraced Norman gentry on the other, in the position of trying to win the Norman king’s good favour so that he can win his appeal to get his father’s lands back. The story set him up as a really fascinating character, but then just had him stoic right along until we discover he had a squishy heart bit all along. It’s a pretty disappointing underuse of him as a character since:

In her historical note, Quarles writes that she could not write the actual language that Robert had spoken, so she used modern words that she assumed he’d have the equivalent for. While it’s very clear that she did a lot of research to make medieval Wales come alive, the forced speech patterns – and narration – in these chapters make the results of that research difficult to appreciate. Robert’s point of view came off sounding like a RenFaire visitor, which annoyed and distracted me so much that I had to put down the book several times and pick it up again later. On the subject of language, Old French, Middle English, and Middle Welsh are, in fact, languages in many ways quite distinct from their modern descendants. I give Quarles props for acknowledging this, but I still thought that Katy acclimated (both culturally and linguistically) too damn fast for believability. And even while she made noises about cultural sensitivity, her irritation about having no agency struck me as a willful ignorance of the conditions (War zone! Medieval setting where you know no one and have no common language!) she found herself in.

Nor was I remarkably convinced by the HEA:

I felt like Katy needed therapy more than she needed Robert, and that Robert as a character never realised the potential for political or personal development that the story set him up with.

Once the story hit its rhythm, the writing was decent, and some of the clunky dialect smoothed out. Overall, it didn’t live up to my expectations and left me feeling pretty ‘meh,’ but it may work better for other readers than it did for me.