TEST
The year is 1882. Michael “Mick” McCann is a New York City policeman, not long off the boat from Ireland. He sees a street gang tormenting a boy and rescues him, only to discover that his waif is a woman in boy’s clothing. Her name is Timona Calverson, and she says she was kidnapped and forced into a brothel, from which she escaped. Mick patches her up and lets her stay the night, not quite believing her when she claims she’s not a prostitute. Mick doesn’t judge her; he gives her the last of his tea. In this first chapter of Somebody Wonderful, first-time author Kate Rothwell creates a quiet intimacy between Mick and Timona that really moved me. It takes place in a New York tenement between a cop and a woman he thinks is a hooker, but even so, it is deeply romantic.
I’ve read a lot of books in which the hero falls in love with the heroine in the first chapter, and spends the rest of the book pursuing her, eventually convincing her that they can overcome whatever obstacles lay between them. In this book, the roles are reversed. On page 29, Timona decides that she will marry Mick. But Mick has his own plans for his life, and they don’t include Timona – especially once he learns that she is a wealthy, famous blue-blood. Mick knows it’s impossible for people bridge such a wide gap of social class. It will take Timona the entire novel to convince him that he’s wrong.
I believed in Timona’s love at first sight. That’s because I loved Mick, too. In the first few chapters, he displays kindness, humor, integrity, and leadership. He does try to get Timona into bed – he thinks she’s a hooker, after all – but he gives her plenty of opportunity to pull away, and when she does he doesn’t resent it. Mick is the very best kind of beta hero: gentle by nature but tough when he needs to be; fair-minded but stubborn as a brick; not afraid of any man, but protective of his heart. Rothwell, thank God, manages to capture the rhythm of his accent without spelling it out phonetically with a lot of apostrophes and things. If Timona was a bit precipitous in deciding that he’s the man for her, well, that just shows that she’s got good taste. Mick McCann is far and away my favorite hero of 2004.
I sympathized with Timona’s desire to make Mick her own. I also sympathized with Mick’s caution. His is not a case of “I’m not good enough for her;” he’s good enough, all right, but the chasm that lies between his tenement and her penthouse is a deep one.
Timona is quite unconventional to the point of strangeness. She had a very unusual upbringing: her parents are divorced, and she spent her childhood following her eccentric father on archaeological digs in Africa and Asia. She’s never been to school, and her education into human behavior has come from numerous cultures. So she is eccentric, but she’s also intelligent and independent enough to come to her own conclusions about things without relying upon anyone’s guidance. I liked and respected that.
However, she also has a serene, somewhat Garwoodesque disregard for cynical reality that I find just a little annoying. Timona’s blithe disregard for class boundaries, in particular, was hard to swallow. It isn’t that she defies these boundaries, or works to overturn them; she’s portrayed as being unaware of them, and gets all bewildered whenever anyone displays any class prejudice. Mick thinks to himself, “Poor Timmy knew about rank but could not really grasp the importance of a person’s place in the world.” At another point, he admires her ability to slip through the walls designed to keep the riffraff from mixing with the quality: “Of course, she was helped by the fact that the walls weren’t built to keep her out.”
Now that’s just not true, and if Mick is too naïve to know it, Timona shouldn’t be. The resentment of the poor for the rich is surely just as strong as the contempt of rich for the poor. That’s a wall that still exists today, and it was made of stone in 1882. It’s a wall that Timona should have smacked into often enough. I could believe that she chose to ignore class prejudice, but her blindness to it didn’t make sense to me.
It doesn’t help that Timona is clueless about other things, too, not just class. She has no idea that one major character is obviously a villain. The woman who knew that Mick was a good man within 24 hours of meeting him shouldn’t have taken years to realize that this other person was a snake.
My standard for a Desert Island Keeper is whether I want to reread the book. Well, I got to about page 60 of this book, stopped, and started over. The opening chapters of this book are completely enchanting, and I wanted to savor them. I would give the first half of this book an A (or perhaps an A-, because the story of Timona’s abduction really isn’t at all believable, even though it turns out to be true). But this is the author’s first published novel, and it shows; the pacing falls off the last half of the book. Several new characters and plot elements are introduced, much too sketchily; we spend too much time on these other things and not enough on Timona and Mick. Perhaps most crippling of all, the author withholds some information from the reader in order to supply a surprise ending. It works, but it’s not done very skillfully. I didn’t know that things were going on behind the scenes, all I knew was that I didn’t understand why the characters were doing what they were doing; an artificial distance was created between the me and the action. The result of all these things is that, the last half of the book sags. It’s still pretty good, but it doesn’t shine like the first half.
I certainly do recommend it, though. The setting is unusual and well-realized, the main characters are unique, and the hero in particular is a gem. Somebody Wonderful is worth reading for Mick McCann alone. This author can write heroes: we very briefly meet Timona’s brother Griff, and I’m already hoping that he’ll get a book of his own. Kate Rothwell is a talent to watch.
Buy it at Amazon/iBooks/Barnes and Noble/Kobo
Grade: B
Book Type: American Historical Romance
Sensuality: Warm
Review Date: 23/09/04
Publication Date: 2004
Recent Comments …
Yep
This sounds delightful! I’m grabbing it, thanks
excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.
I don’t think anyone expects you to post UK prices – it’s just a shame that such a great sale…
I’m sorry about that. We don’t have any way to post British prices as an American based site.
I have several of her books on my TBR and after reading this am moving them up the pile.