C-
Genre: Historical: European, Inspirational, Regency, Romance
Archetype: Diverse Protagonists, Single Parent/Guardian
I have so many mixed feelings about Unmasked Heart. This is a super melodramatic Regency romance that features a Cinderella plot with a mixed race heroine, a Duke with a Dark And Troubled Past, and two kids with learning disabilities. I’d eat it up with a spoon if the heroine would just quit crying all the damn time.
The story has a lot of twists and reveals but at heart it’s very simple: the least favorite daughter of a genteelly poor family falls in love with a duke, who recognizes her true wonderfulness and marries her. But this is a full-length novel so along the way there are impediments, including but not limited too: misunderstandings, mistaken identity, secrets, poisoned tea, abandoned churches, murder attempts, significant stationery, blackmail, classism, racism…pretty much everything short of an invasion by Martians.
The somewhat improbably named Gaia Telfair is the daughter of a local family. She has a darker complexion than her sisters and has been told that it’s due to Spanish blood. Gaia’s father withholds affection and treats her as a servant. Her primary job is to take care of her little brother, Timothy, who is almost completely non-verbal (whether this is due to hearing loss or autism is not established). She learns that her mother, who is dead, had an affair with a man from Africa, a man who is Gaia’s biological father.
Meanwhile, the local duke, William, has come back to town because he wants to raise his daughter quietly and he’s avoiding a blackmailer. William is a recent widower. Like Gaia’s brother, William’s daughter is nonverbal (what are the odds). Who better to help him out than Gaia, who has had considerable success teaching her brother to talk?
This is an inspirational Regency that comes with a big side helping of Gothic crazysauce. At one point a crazed killer drugs Gaia with tea, spirits her off in a black carriage across the moors, and leaves her to wander, hallucinating along the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea on a windswept night. That’s some gothic shit right there. At some point the revelations about family secrets on both side pile up with such ferocious density that it gets kind of funny. Once things between Gaia and William start looking serious, Gaia realizes that she has to explain to him about her parentage before they get married. Poor Gaia is desperate to reveal her secret to William but he’s so beset with other reveals that she can’t get a word in edgewise.
I found it impossible not to root for Gaia, who just wants some respect, gosh darn it, but I also found Gaia to be annoying. She cries constantly – it’s a running joke between her and William that every time he sees her she’s either crying or just finished crying. Granted, she has a lot to cry about, but still, enough crying is enough. A lot of her character arc involves learning not to be a doormat, which is great, but she spends an awfully long time learning this lesson and in the meantime she sits around weeping while people are mean to her. She’s also very much the voice of ‘good’, which makes her come off as somewhat angelic and somewhat sanctimonious. Gaia is pure ingénue through and through.
This story is, in many ways, quite silly. Plot points come and go out of nowhere. Characters change radically to meet the needs of that same melodramatic plot. I did not believe that any part of this story was real, nor did I believe in any of the characters. However, the book was also pretty fun – I mean, who doesn’t like a “death by wandering on the cliff edge over the stormy sea after being poisoned with tea” scene? Certainly I am helpless before that sort of thing. And the storyline with Gaia’s biological father ended up being handled rather well. Initially there’s a lot of internalized racism and accusations from Gaia’s adoptive father, but as the story goes on, Gaia learns more details of her history and she is able to regard it with pride.
This book will be a better fit for readers with a greater interest in the inspirational aspects of the romance – I wasn’t prepared for them and they don’t align with my personal preference, which of course is not the fault of the book. For me, the aspect that was most interesting was seeing Gaia come to terms with her biracial heritage. I’m giving this book a C- because frankly it was kind of a mess (there is such a thing as well-constructed gothic crazysauce but this book is not it) and Gaia was both too saintly and too soggy (I refer of course to all the crying). However, when this book really committed to being utterly off the wall, it was surprisingly fun.
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I would very much like to see your recs for well-constructed gothic crazysauce, Carrie S. Or anyone else’s. I have such a weakness for that.
Me too! I really, really, really want well-constructed gothic crazysauce
” But this is a full-length novel so along the way there are impediments, including but not limited too: misunderstandings, mistaken identity, secrets, poisoned tea, abandoned churches, murder attempts, significant stationery, blackmail, classism, racism…pretty much everything short of an invasion by Martians.”
One can only wonder why the author did not have Martians invade.
While I am a Christian, I usually dislike inspirationals because they never seem to me to be rooted in real life, not to mention the preaching and the generally, at least in the ones I have read, a view of Christianity that does not welcome every person as if they were Jesus, which is to say, people in the inspirationals I’ve read do not tend to love their neighbor as themselves.
This book sounds very much like yet another one of them not rooted in reality because, honestly how many of us run into all of these in combined into one life? Misunderstandings, mistaken identity, secrets, poisoned tea, abandoned churches, murder attempts, significant stationery, blackmail, classism, racism… Bit much, doncha think?
Yes, please! If there is a list, or a thread, I would dearly love such a thing. gothic crazy sauce, here I come!
I seem to remember Victoria Holt as a writer of crazy Gothic novels. But that was decades ago, and I was probably easily impressed. 🙂
I do know I need to read more Phyllis A. Whitney. I’ve read a couple of her books. Poinciana was delicious; the climactic scenes included a loopy old woman dancing through her 1920s mansion in Palm Beach as a hurricane approaches.
I burned through most of Victoria Holt and a good portion of Phyllis A whitney when I was a kid.
I don’t remember Holt being all that heavy on the crazysauce but she is still one of my faves. I often revist The India Fan in particular for some reason. Also the Captive. Those are both among her later books. The Shivering Sands was the first of hers I ever read and it had a few Gothic highlights: a mysterious Gypsy and creepy children among them.
Not wait, that’s not right: the first one was The Secret Woman. I read the abridged version of that in Reader’s Digest Condensed books if you can believe it. I was probably about 12.
I don’t remember much of what I read of Whitney. I know I stopped her because I started feeling a little icked-out by the fact that heroine’s love interest was always the husband of her sister/cousin/whatever.
Would someone explain to me what a reviewer means will they use “melodramatic” to describe the goings-on in a ROMANCE book? Seems to me if one’s characters CAN’T be melodramatic in a romance, in what genre of book is that appropriate? I have read all manner of convoluted, nutty, unappetizing plots that have been packed with angst (New Adult) and praised for it, but I have yet seen one called “melodramatic” (which the bulk are) in a review. Sad to say, I’ve only seen that adjective used to describe historicals with non-default leads. It’s as if these rarely written about characters aren’t allowed to have an array of emotions, or have wild stuff happen to them just like in any other historical, no matter how implausible, and must always be the persevering, stalwart types.