TEST
Oh yeah – you’ve definitely read this formula before. Man hates women because of his past – until heroine. Heroine hates men because of her past – until hero. The romance in Waiting for a Rogue features two people falling in love as they aid the dementia-stricken great aunt of the heroine and banter over a boundary marker that divides their properties. Even with the overly-convoluted plot and formulaic twists involved – you won’t see that storyline in a lot of places.
Lady Caroline Rowe – daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Pemberton – is done with the marriage mart. Her last season ended in disaster following a midnight trip out of London with her best friend and neighbor Eliza’s roguish beau and subsequent loss of her fiancé. She had been trying to protect her Aunt Frances from nasty gossip which might lead to her being institutionalized, but everything went wrong, leaving Caroline is embittered about both love and her parent’s uselessness. Now Eliza – having lost her father, brother and husband in one fell swoop – has moved away with her young daughter, and that’s one too many changes for Caroline to accept. Caroline charges immediately into the situation to argue that Eliza’s former home, WIllowbrook House, falls on her family’s side of the land boundary in the hope of dislodging the new owner, who’s moved in with his mother next door – a man that Caroline simply and disdainfully refers to as The American.
For Jonathan Cartwick, coming back to England is a matter of thumbing his nose at the ton – his family had been shunned by British society because they were poor relations. They moved to America and there his father’s shipbuilding empire made them rich, and now, by a tragic stroke of fate, he has become landed gentry. It’s all come too late for Jonathan’s father, who died before they could reach prosperity, leaving Jonathan bitter about what could’ve been – as did his broken engagement to a woman named Letita.
Even though Elisa has a new husband and happy ending of her own, as per book two of the series, The Viscount Can Wait, and lives elsewhere, Caroline blames Jonathan for driving Eliza away, counting him as another example of male dominance and another reason she has vowed she will never marry. No matter how cute Jonathan is. But as her aunt’s ailment worsens – and her parents threaten to marry Caroline off since she refuses to choose a husband – will she get her own happy ending.
Caroline can’t do anything about Willowbrook House without her father’s permission. The ton does not seem overly scandalized by his existence and he has acres of land; he couldn’t part with five for Eliza?
Waiting for a Rogue is one of those romances where everyone is kind, but massively flawed. This sometimes makes them human, and sometimes makes you want to step on their faces. Thus, Jonathan does come off as selfish and thoughtless about Eliza’s plight, and he hates English society and cultural mores so much you wonder why he’s bothering to play at gentry living when he hates everything about it. Caroline comes off as immaturely bratty and then tearily moribund – acting entitled to land that doesn’t belong to her (she doesn’t see why Jonathan shouldn’t just give a few acres to Eliza seeing he has so many), which is plain silly as neither Eliza nor Frances need the land, so her fight is ridiculous from the start. Later, she hits her big ‘all is lost’ moment and becomes weepy and cowed by her parent’s presence. Where was her earlier fearless fire?
Ahh, but at least Jonathan and Caroline are not cowed by one another. Banter they do. Clearly, they’re destined for each other – when they’re splitting arrows together or Jonathan’s comforting Caroline after dealing with her aunt’s faltering, they work quite well. And I liked Frances and Jonathan’s smart-as-heck mother a lot.
Unfortunately, I can’t reveal the plot-point that truly sunk the book for me – but considering what Caroline knows of Frances, that she blames the woman for her actions is bizarre. She’s forgotten Caroline’s name and face at least once and keeps chasing her childhood rabbit around the grounds of the estate in her shift; I had no idea why Caroline would see the notion of what happens so horrifying.
The romance does work (mostly), which is why Waiting for a Rogue doesn’t dip into D territory. It’s not perfect, it’s not bad – it’s just… average
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Grade: C
Book Type: Historical Romance
Sensuality: Warm
Review Date: 30/08/19
Publication Date: 07/2019
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.
Lisa Fernandes is a writer, reviewer and recapper who lives somewhere on the East Coast. Formerly employed by Firefox.org and Next Projection, she also currently contributes to Women Write About Comics. Read her blog at http://thatbouviergirl.blogspot.com/, follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/thatbouviergirl or contribute to her Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/MissyvsEvilDead or her Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com/missmelbouvier
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I just noticed this – but what is WITH that cover? More specifically, the backless dress? In Regency England? Really? I know there were women who scandalously dampened their petticoats so that the fabric would cling to their legs, but … COVER FAIL!
I recently saw a Regency romance cover where the heroine wore a strapless dress.
Sadly, there are quite a few of them about…
LOL I swear it’s been a pattern for me.
Though the one with the heroine with scarring from a fire and yet none on the cover is way, way worse.
Kass, those are all great book ideas. If you haven’t read Sherry Thomas’ historical romances, you might check those out. Always a favorite of mine to return to in this time of HR drought!
It’s on my TBR, waiting for a historical mystery in-the-mood period. :)
Oh, for heaven’s sake! For a start, in those days, the sister of a duke with dementia would have been kept at home – plenty of rooms in a big house to incarcerate the ill, the undesirable, the different, etc. Not an institution. From Lisa’s review, though, it looks like our TSTL heroine will end up the same way as her Aunt Frances with her silly behaviour, going off at what seem to be silly tangents. Oh well. I am currently reading a Mary Balogh. So refreshing, so well written, so much better than lots of the tripe currently appearing under the guise of regency romance.
I keep saying to myself that I’m going to make a list of “authors to avoid” in this genre, because there are SO MANY of them! What on earth has gone wrong with HR? I’m trying to work it out, but can’t put my finger on it. It’s not just the propensity of American authors to get titles and terminology wrong, and it’s not just about historical accuracy either; it goes deeper than that.
Are there more authors out there? If so, maybe that’s the cause: quantity but no quality. I feel glad that I still have a few Balogh to resource to when in extreme case of need. (I just finished A Secret Affair, the last from The Huxtables series. Not her best, but still way better than any other HR I’ve been reading recently.)
It is also true that even some of the authors I normally rely on have not been up to their standards recently. Lorraine Heath or Kelly Bowen come to mind.
Nonetheless, I have some novels in line, from Laurie Benson and Lara Temple, that seem to be promising. And I am hopeful for the next novels from Caroline Linden (even if the pre-published reviews are not stellar), Julie Anne Long (even if the first in her new series was not fabulous, at least for me), Julia Justiss (I liked her last series a lot), Kate Bateman (new name for K.C. Bateman, with a new series) and Lisa Kleypas (really liked her The Devil’s Daughter, after a disappointing Hello Stranger). Oh… and OF COURSE the next Westcott from Ms Balogh. :)
Re : quantity but no quality, I had NO idea how true this was until I went on a historical romance jag and downloaded about twenty free titles from Amazon. Even though I picked the best covers and blurbs, so far none of them have been good, let alone keepers.
I love Elisabeth Hobbes and Shana Galen!
The new Caroline Linden is good but not as good as the others in that series, and I think the grade I’ve given the book (a B – review to appear nearer publication) is the lowest I’ve ever given her. Sadly, she’s fallen prey to the current need to insert “issues” into every historical romance novel out there, and while the storyline is a valid one, it’s poorly incorporated.
The Ravenels series isn’t really working for me – but I continue to be impressed with several of the authors currently writing for Mills & Boon/Harlequin.
The Ravenels series have been up and downs for me. The first one was meh, but I loved Marrying Winterborne. Devil in Spring was so, so. I was quite disappointed with Hello Stranger (and I was so hopeful for that one!) but I very much enjoyed Devil’s Daughter.
Meanwhile, a few years ago I would never believe if someone told me that I would enjoy so many Mills & Boon/Harlequin books… but yeah, I’ve been enjoying several authors quite a lot.
Yes, please make a list Caz. Writing an HR has become a procedural affair. Authors throw little bit of everything that has an emotional appeal combine it with lazy research and magically you are a published author. I am finding that they write more to emotions than to intelligence. We consummate readers need both.
Is it partly that no one is willing to take any risks in HR anymore? The part that really strikes me is that not only is everything awful, but everything seems to sound the same, as though all these authors have exactly six ideas between them, none of which are well-executed. There’s like four different Disney Princess heroines, six plots, and exactly one duke hero. Mix and match. I’m not seeing a lot of interesting or different premises. It’s true that HR relies on a rather small set of tropes, but this is different somehow. Whereas Mary Balogh and some of the Harlequin authors are writing fairly traditional romances, but they’re still taking risks.
One recurring theme I notice in particular (because it’s a personal pet peeve of mine) is the faux-scholar/faux-activist/faux-radical heroine, where the text informs you repeatedly that the heroine is unusual and different and amazing in some capacity and yet absolutely fails to support its own claims. This seems to be allllll over HR right now, and I think it’s related to that same unwillingness to take risks, in that the authors are creating these heroines they think will sound appealing to people like, well, me, but then actually writing them like more traditional heroines (and badly, at that), and the result is somehow both bland and incoherent. I’m sure there are other examples that I’m not as attuned to.
I think it’s a combination of that, and some of the things Usha mentions in her comment. too. All writers write for a specific audience, and in most genres, it’s possible to ‘move with the times’ as it were, and come up with characters that will appeal to readers in a changing political and social climate – specifically, the recent #metoo movement has had a huge impact, and I don’t think there are any who would argue that as a bad thing. The trouble is that you can’t apply that sort of influence to characters who are supposed to exist a couple of centuries in the past, and I think that’s where many of the current HR authors are falling down. They want to write heroines who appeal to the modern reader and demonstrate an awareness of shifting values, but you just can’t transplant a scholar/radical/activist heroine into an historical without showing them to be active in their chosen field. It works in a contemporary because those sorts of things are the norm, and we all have a point of reference. But in the 19th century, it was rare for a women to be able to do any of those things, so the author needs to create more of a foundation for those skills/attributes. (Note, I’m not saying there weren’t forward thinking, pioneering women out there – of course there were,. but they were few.) In fact, the plethora of these types of heroine has already become as annoying and boring as the already existing plethora of dukes!
In HR, you can’t get away from the fact that women existed in an extremely patriarchal society and were subject to all sorts of conventions and restrictions. We may not like it now, but IMO, the art of writing a good HR is in confronting the challenge posed by writing a romance set at a time when men’s and women’s interactions were governed by an extremely strict set of rules. Okay, authors have to take some liberties, but just throwing them out the window isn’t the way to go, and I honestly think there’s a very specific mindset needed on the part of an author who writes successful historical romance. It’s not just about research, it’s about being able to put oneself into that mindset and work within all those conventions and rules and STILL create a satisfying relationship.
Well said, Caz. For a long, long time I have objected to first 20th then 21st century women crammed into corsets and regency frocks. Why do authors want to do that? Yes, perhaps to appeal to younger readers. But what about those of us who actually took history courses in high school or the many like me who have a BA or MA in the subject? Here in the UK history as a subject can be dropped before you are 16 in school so younger folk grow up not having a clue about the history of their own country let alone anyone else’s unless it’s either the Tudors or the Nazis. I went to high school in the US in the 1960s and I learned more in my history classes about UK history than the average person who lives here.
I don’t mean to get political here but this is one reason why it’s difficult to discuss Brexit and the European Union with younger people. When I say to them, consider the history and outcome of previous unions of nations and their leaders such as the Romans, the Holy Roman Empire, The Austro-Hungarian Empire, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, the post-war Soviet sphere of influence and control, etc. they haven’t a clue what I am referring to let alone have the wit to make even the slightest analogous connections. So I wonder if outright ignorance means that younger readers can’t spot inaccuracy where it is glaring and so don’t care anyway. I do wonder what will happen when the older generation of HR writers retire and pack it in. Will wallpaper HR with #metoo heroines, 6 plots, one type of heroine and hero and complete avoidance of any sort of accuracy be acceptable and unquestioned because the writers themselves know no better then their readers?
Will wallpaper HR with #metoo heroines, 6 plots, one type of heroine and hero and complete avoidance of any sort of accuracy be acceptable and unquestioned because the writers themselves know no better then their readers?
Is sadly what I think is happening now. So many of the newer HR writers seem to do their research by … reading other HR, so if those get it wrong (and it continues to amaze me how many experienced authors are STILL tripped up by things like titles and inheritance law, which is easy enought to look up) then the errors are perpetuated. Plus, the number of reviews I’ve seen of books by Georgette Heyer where the readers complain about needing to have a dictionary on hand… well, disheartening doesn’t begin to cover it.
Dabney and I come at HR from the complete opposite end of the spectrum – she’s not overly worried about historical accuracy – but I want to make it clear that what you and I are talking about here isn’t really about that. I can ignore a slip in terms of accuracy if the author has created memorable characters and situations, but the trouble is that the ‘issues’ based HRs appear to be forcing those things out (Courtney Milan’s latest books are a prime of example of that problem) as authors trip over themselves to create characters they think – or that their publishers think – will work for the modern audience (sell more books). It really does seem to be a case of quantity over quality at the moment.
The author tries to explain Caroline’s fears away by saying her father’s autocratic and strong arming, which he does try to do RE getting Caroline married off so she’ll stop embarrassing the family (and left Caroline alone to suffer for much of her youth with her elderly aunt) but i never bought he was the kind of evil that would dump his dementia-stricken sister in an institution, especially the sort of institutions that existed during the Regency.