TEST
A Winter’s Earl is a big, loud, crashing melodrama of a book. The romance between our heroes is, to a degree, disappointingly gaslighty – and you’ll have to accept a number of things about their relationship if you want to fully indulge in this story. A few redemptive touches keeps this away from D territory, and even help the book with a tense and well thought-out middle section, but the beginning and ending had me raising my eyebrows in places.
Richard Ashbrook, eldest son of the Earl of Portland, trembles as he reads a missive from Sherborne Clarke, the man who always vowed to call on him again, someday. Richard fled his life in England for the sunnier climes of Italy after Sherborne blew his life apart by exposing his homosexuality to the broadsheets. Sherborne is a notorious poet/scholar – mad, bad and dangerous to know – but what he’s looking for isn’t an affair this time – he needs help getting the baby that’s been dumped on his doorstep to an orphanage, pronto.
Sherborne is charmed by the female infant, whom he irreverently names Parsley, but she is a noisy thing and he knows he’s not the father type – and he understands Richard, knows how good he is with babies. Surely Richard can forgive Sherborne for publicly outing him, his father’s intent to remove him from the line of succession, his subsequent flight from England and his suicide attempt? Well, hate him he might, but Richard has never been able to cut Sherborne out of his life, and he comes running to England when he calls.
Richard is pissed that Sherborne’s emergency isn’t really an emergency, but he soon finds himself stuck – along with with Sherborne, the house’s servants (including two mysteriously close new female arrivals) and Beth, Richard’s cousin, a charitable type who’s cleaned up her past misdeeds by doing good works – at Sherborne’s crumbling estate as a winter storm rolls in. The sight of Richard rocking Parsley makes Sherborne want to rock Richard’s body, and as they wait the snows to melt the possibility of beginning again lingers in the air. But can Richard forgive Sherborne for his previous deeds?
It takes a lot of time and growth, but it happens – and in a tightly-paced way. But A Winter’s Earl is floridly over the top, featuring a pet bear, a near-death incident, and much moody emotional constipation in between. It’s all told with gasping melodrama, and while sometimes this appeals, at others, the tone grates.
You will have to accept – well, at least during the beginning of the story – that Richard thinks Sherborne ruined his life and basically drove him to attempted suicide but is still so in love with him he’s willing to turn a blind eye to all that. He partially proves his mettle but he begins the story as a doormat, so weak for Sherborne that he’s willing to endanger an equilibrium he’s worked hard to regain to help the man. It takes about half the book for Sherborne to stop being smarmy and haughty and start appreciating Richard, and in the meantime, I just couldn’t buy that Richard, even as much as he had loved Sherborne, would take this risk (i.e returning to England) for him. The rest of the story features Greene’s hallmarks – two pining men who won’t communicate their love, both characters being switches (though it was awesome to see Richard gain a little more control over the relationship by topping), amusing servant characters, badass female secondary character with a secret, preposterous third act twist that almost but not quite makes no sense in the Regency-ish era (I’d reveal it here but for it being a huge spoiler. At least this makes more sense than the marriage ceremony in The Vicar and the Rake).
Among the secondary cast in the book, I really liked Beth – at least until another fourth act reveal – and had a soft spot for Richard’s protective valet, Arturo. The rest of the servants are decently drawn, but not all that memorable.
All in all, A Winter’s Earl mixes its good and bad points thoroughly together while producing a pretty decent novel, but there’s a lot of emotional ground to cover if you want to buy into its romance.
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Grade: C+
Book Type: Historical Romance
Sensuality: Warm
Review Date: 19/11/21
Publication Date: 11/2021
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’m a bit embarrassed that while you all have brought up some arguably significant issues with this book, my issue was that I couldn’t get past the name “Parsley” for a baby.
Ha! To be fair, thats just a nickname, they actually name her something else.
This is the trope that I dislike above all others:
“Surely Richard can forgive ….. his father’s intent to remove him from the line of succession….”
because it is just simply ignorant and wrong. We’ve had discussions here before about how British titles are created, inherited, die out, etc. but it would take an Act of Parliament to stop Richard from inheriting and the grounds would almost certainly have to be treason. Loving another man isn’t treason now and wasn’t then. Dangerous, yes, but not grounds for preventing an heir from succeeding his father. This kind of stupid proposition makes me grind my poor teeth very hard!!
There wouldn’t have been the need to murder people in the line of succession over the centuries if you could just “removed” them by scratching their name off a list.
Exactly! The Princes in the Tower is an example though not all historians think Richard III did the evil deed. I expect nearly all peers and monarchs wanted primogeniture to continue which it does today.
You’re more forgiving than I would have been, Lisa – a doorstep baby, poor romance and a stupid misunderstanding would have made this a non-starter for me. This sounds like another turkey from this author.
I like the cover, though. Good to see a man with all his clothes on.
Agreed. I think the cover is probably the best thing about it.
I will add my voice to the cover love. It caught my eye right away.
In addition to all that, I can’t get past the premise that one hero outed the other in the broadsheets of (I assume) Regency England, and the other hero can somehow recover from that. Sorry, but if you got publicly exposed in that way, you would have been toast. And talk about a missed opportunity! Instead of going back to England where the outed fellow would have been shamed, shunned, imprisoned, or hanged, the other guy should have come to Italy. I’m not sure why so many Regency authors (okay, pretty much all of them) insist on keeping their gay characters in England when they could have breathed a little easier in Italy or France. Plus, who wouldn’t want to read a gay Regency that takes place largely on the continent? I would.
I do agree with you and Marian though that this is a nice cover. It reminds me of someone who might have been in the publishing industry who said something like, “If a book was a real turkey, the cover design team put in extra effort- sometimes to the extreme- to help attract sales if the prose obviously wasn’t going to do it.”
Well, he tried to commit suicide from the social shame and was basically exiled in Italy because of this and he’s been removed him from the line of succession. I’m guessing the author was too enamored of the idea of “rougish man trapped in snow with infant” to care about logic
. It’s a very fanficcy kind of book.
That’s kind of what I figured.
As Italy was and is a RC country you would think the double “stigma” of homosexuality and suicide would be a worse place than England to escape to.
You would think, but the reality was actually quite different from what I understand. Southern Europe then, as now, tends to be more culturally Catholic than strict practitioners of the religion. In fact, in Victorian times, a lot of gay men in England went to Sicily for sex tourism purposes. No, homosexuality wasn’t accepted in Italy either, but people were more likely to turn a blind eye to it as long as people were reasonably discreet. Actually, there was- and is- a lot of forbidden activity that Italians would overlook as there is a long history of distrust and distaste for the government or any kind of official authority figures.
Then there’s France, another Catholic country, that repealed punishments for homosexual activity around 1791. Culturally accepted? Not really, but quietly tolerated.
Like the author has talent, I can’t ignore that. She just trips over her own two feet plottingwise.
I glanced at the preview, and the writing seems good. But it doesn’t seem good enough to ignore all the other issues. Sigh.