Review: Free Fall by Carolyn Jewel

Pity the poor novella that is meant to hook readers into a series. It's judged not only on it's own merits, but also on it's ability to reduce a complex world into an appetizing bite. One misstep on either side and the reader is ready to bury it. With that in mind, pour one out for Carolyn Jewel's Free Fall. Having a vague impression of liking Carolyn Jewel I picked up Free Fall sometime in 2012. As I only read books that are piping fresh or carefully aged, it sat in the TBR waiting for the right moment. Free Fall packs plenty of story into a decent sized length. (Let me pause to say I appreciate how Jewel tells her readers up front how long the text is. You won't end up buying a 20 page plot summary disguised as a short novel.) Here Be Spoilers, lassies!

We met Lys Fensic (the heroic characters tend to refer to each other primarily by their last names) in the lobby of her building, waiting for a friend to help her escape an abusive relationship. Her co-worker is trying to aid her but his assistance only increases her stress. At this point I was very interested in the paranormal world Jewel created. Fensic demonstrated some quasi-autistic characteristics that I wanted to explore. (Reluctance to make eye contact, sensory overload, aversion to unsolicited contact, struggle to use visual cues to translate emotional contexts). Then her friend shows up. My paranormal problems kicked into high gear and never settled down.

Khunbish is your basic predator hero. (He's supposed to have a line over the u but I can't locate the alt command for that so just go with it or correct me in the comments and I'll add it.) Although he's a computer specialist by trade, Fensic thinks of him as dangerously powerful because he's tall and frequently calm. She builds up fantasies in her mind of him banging girls who wear glitter when he's not beating up random men. Fensic has issues. But maybe not. Khunbish immediately refers to the coworker as "a pussy." This is based on absolutely nothing. A perfectly nice man is trying to assist a coworker with her belongings. Khunbish instantly dismisses him with a slur of questionable taste. Nice. Let me go ahead and root for him right now. Or not. ANYWAY.

I'm briefly given hope that Jewel is going to call Fensic out on her vaguely fetishized reading of Khunbish's character. When Fensic explains that she needs someone like Khunbish he does challenge her on her assumption that he's physically adept and or violent based solely on his size and potentially his Mongolian ethnicity. Both of them hand wave it and move on. Of course Khunbish is violent! He's a demon who could, if he so chose, utterly control her and... (Oh god, really?) There's something about how witches are super sexy hot to demons (who are all male, as presented in this short) and they could enslave them but on the other hand mages (who are all men) can enslave the demons and that's worse than actually dying because... I can't even.

Fensic isn't helpless in the ex-boyfriend showdown. (She's equal in power to the other characters but set up as untutored and therefore exploitable.) They go to get something it turns out they don't need and then it's sexy time. I appreciated how Jewel set up the sexual interaction between the characters as freeing for both of them. Fensic has been held back by the domination of others and the fear of herself. Khunbish has been required to suppress aspects of himself to fit into the normalized human culture. (Vanilla is, of course, used as a dismissive descriptor. Because why not hit most all my peeves?) The concept that honesty enhances their sexuality is well presented and well conceived. Until it's not. (This was my Free Fall reading experience, things were great, then really not great, then kind of great... oh no not great.)

Early in their encounter Fensic asks about condoms. Khunbish explains that demon / human sex is free from disease due to incompatibly. She says that's cool and all, but she doesn't use birth control. He says no problem because in his human form he's sterile. He can only impregnate her if he's in his demon form. Fensic wistfully reveals she's always wanted a baby (because OF COURSE) and even in his demon form it wouldn't matter because she's unable to conceive. WAIT! FULL STOP! If she's unable to conceive why is she asking about condoms in a birth control context? Talk about your mixed messages there, Cookie! Is this a passive aggressive conversation? "Well, I could get PREGNANT!" "No, babe, you can't unless I change" "JOKE IS ON YOU! Even if you change I can't get pregnant, HA!" Of course, she totally CAN get pregnant because his magic demon sperm knows no human infertility. So let's make this hybrid baby and get back to the guys trying to kill us.

Fight scene, drama, ex boyfriend, discover your true powers, blah blah blah. Now we're wrapping things up with another bait and switch moment. Khunbish has been forced to call in the local warlords, who are apparently the main couple of the book series. At the close of the fight, the female half of the partnership asks if they're ok with meeting the male half and they agree. Suddenly it's baby-louge time and they're meeting with the male half several weeks after the female half asked if it was cool to do it now. Fine, ok, something changed, we can go with that. We head over to the mansion where the various demon underlings are hanging out and they're doing fist bumps and hand jives and trash talking and we discover some are Indian, some are not described and here's the big dude and.... oh hell to the no.

The big dude is a sandy haired boy next door type who is deceptively un-powerful in his physical presentation. My paranormal problems are having a five alarm fire in my head as he lays down the law for Fensic and Khunbish. Mr. Big Dude condescendingly tells Khunbish to "use his words" (no kidding) to figure out his relationship with Fensic because they can't be together unless both of them swear loyalty (or not) to Mr. Big Dude's gang. If they swear loyalty there is money and safety in it for them as long as they comply with whatever Mr. Big Dude desires. If they don't then they are "a problem" for him and might end up getting killed or something. Furthermore, while their fealty is of their own free will, once sworn any failure of loyalty could result in their death. Khunbish is fine with this because apparently demons are totally used to being in gangs. They kind of like it. He's been a free agent for so long because... some kind of reason... but he knew it probably couldn't last with all the turf wars heating up. Fensic agrees because love and pregnant and all, and because she isn't sure how to control herself without Mr. Big Dude's group teaching her. Mr. Big Dude welcomes them and the baby into his gang. And. The. Baby. AND THE BABY. Wow.

Your experience with Free Fall will depend completely on if we have the same paranomal problems. If I'd been able to set aside my aversion to ethnic based personality traits and alpha hole heroes pretending to be beta and street gang culture as paranormal normality, I'd probably have given Free Fall a pretty high rating. Because I wasn't I ended up with a C read. I still like Jewel, but I think I'll stick to her historical stories instead.

* This review originally appeared at Love In The Margins.

Review: Moonstruck Madness by Laurie McBain

Laurie McBain is an author  often underrepresented in casual histories of the genre. Moonstruck Madness did massive business. I decided to revisit Moonstruck Madness because it was the book I remembered the least. MM is a glorious train wreck of domestic violence and kitchen sink plotting. No wonder I forgot most of it.

We open with Sabrina as a small tween on the battlefields of Culloden. Battle worn and weary, she's fleeing for her life. (I didn't pause to do the math, but I think she's 11 or 12 here. Five years later her elder sister is 18 or 19, so let's ballpark it there.)  Sabrina gathers the remaining members of her family and travels to her deadbeat dad's abandoned estate. Of course she embarks on a life of crime to pay the bills and restore the estate to sustainability. This is a classic 70's / 80's thing. A couple teenage girls, a senile aunt, a servant or two with a very young heir suddenly occupy the family manor and no one ever asks where the money is coming from. Dad is off with the second family in Italy or Spain or wherever, but it's all good.

Enter our hero - Lucien, the Duke of something or other. He's got a controlling grandmother, murderous (and likely incestuous) cousins, a seriously bad attitude and Marry By This Date stamped on his inheritance. He starts out determined to capture the local highwayman, so he shoots Sabrina. In a modern Avon Romance this would form the majority of the plot. Back in the day, we were just getting started. Sabrina taking a bullet from this dude is like the meet cute. Sex happens (ow!) and she's on her way. Over the course of the book Sabrina will be beaten with a whip, slapped across the face, survive multiple murder attempts (by multiple murderers) get married, be pregnant, have PTSD, and THEN start to fall for the Duke. (I left some stuff out, this review can't go longer than my attention span.)  Ok, so after all that she and Lucien start to wonder if they like each other. They do, of course, so a bunch of other stuff happens and then they are in loooooove and the book ends. (Spoiler alert.)

Here's the thing about 70's / 80's big books. For all that I absolutely despise the normality of abuse in the relationships I also really admire how Sabrina is a person with a unique backstory. Her strength and determination to overcome obstacles is not a bug to be addressed, but a feature. Some men admire her, some are fatigued by her, some want to change her, but the women all consider her a person to deal with rather than a problem to correct. She is occasionally self sabotaging and highly emotional, but she's also a teenager. Most of the other women fall into super convenient categories. There's a cheating fianceé whose murder no one cares about enough to even resolve, a crazy psychopath for whom disfigurement is punishment enough, an eccentric elderly grandmother who holds all the power, a psychic sister who longs for a conventional life, and the demented aunt who pivots the plot at the last second. Seriously classic stuff.

What turned me off about Moonstruck Madness (and still does) is the way violence between the hero and heroine is excused. Setting aside the fact that he shoots her early in the book, their relationship is incredibly toxic. He's forcing her into situations she would rather escape. Her sister aids and abets him because of her visions and also because she seems to accept his actions as inevitable. Sabrina is a woman alone, struggling to save people who completely fail to appreciate or protect her. I found this one of the most believable aspects of Moonstruck Madness. When you are in a violent relationship people will not protect you. They will give you up without a second thought because your abuser has learned his lesson, he's really in love, he's never going to harm you now. This is both utterly untrue and a myth our culture refuses to abandon.

But back to Lucien. He's not seen by himself or the book as abusive. There are other toxic men in Sabrina's life largely given a pass while Lucien takes some of their blame along with his own. This sets the reader to be more sympathetic to him than his actions dictate. He's deceptive (so is she!) and occasionally violent (so is she!) but the book couples his shouldering of undue blame with the both sides are guilty twist to absolve him. Even Sabrina, after all that has occurred, parrots the "He'd never hurt me" lines. By the standards of the genre at the time, he won't. He's decided he loves her and that makes it different. 

*This review originally appeared at Love In The Margins.

Review: Daffodils In Spring by Pamela Morsi

* A version of this review first appeared at Love In The Margins.

Daffodils In Spring was a 2011 freebie meant to promote literatureforallofus.org and honor it's founder, Karen Thomson. In fact the cover model strongly resembles a younger idealized Thomson. She doesn't fit the age of any particular character so I think she's there to sell us on reading the story. Inside the cover Morsi tries to graft her Americana style onto urban Chicago with mixed results. I admire almost all of the pieces, but I didn't love the whole. Despite my lack of love a number of elements make Daffodils In Spring worth discussing.

This is a midlife romance, not a late spring fling. It's heroine, Calla, is a widowed single mother who had a happy marriage. There is no undermining of that history. In one of the only direct physical descriptions made, we find out the hero has thinning hair. Landry is not bitter or a player or disappointed in love. He is a hardworking man interested in the heroine and he makes that known. (He is so simply sketched that I did wish for a bit of backstory on him to balance out everyone else's but this is a short novella so we'll let that slide.)

Morsi has written Daffodils very color neutral. There are almost no physical descriptions in the book except for a reference to the "braids and curls" of a teenager with a name (Jazleen) that cues black. This is a book free of skin tone, hair texture and obvious signals. The color of these characters is told in inference. They live in Chicago, where they spend a fair amount of time on their porch steps. Alternative high schools are not an oddity. College is not expected, but is the hoped for result from a long struggle. Women work long hours for low pay. Catching a young man is seen as a good move for a young teen with no future. There are few men on the street. Appearance, church clothes and community are all mentioned multiple times. Everything about this codes to me as white expectation of what black life is. It was a strange fit, this fictional world that was so busy not seeing color even as it cued positive stereotypes up for the reader.

Calla and Jazleen become involved in a literacy program through Landry's urging and discover common ground to build a relationship on. Along the way we discover that Calla is (of course) an accomplished cook. Thanksgiving is thrown as a veritable block party and all is right in their worlds come Easter. I appreciated a late book twist that added much needed and realistic motivation to Jazleen's character but found her personality switches extreme. (She is so self aware by the close of the book that I expected her to suddenly be in her thirties.) Calla and Landry both error on the side of saintly. Calla's son, Nathan, is barely there. He's more of a plot motivation device than a true character.

Daffodils In Spring is an informercial for book clubs that fails to rise above it's mission. It's appropriately priced as a freebie and worth reading as a look at Morsi's style bumped out of her comfort lane. With a little more conflict and a lot more at stake, Morsi could've had something special here. As it stands, it's a good palate cleanser if nothing in the TBR is working out.

DNF Review: Sins of a Virgin by Anna Randol

Maybe I've burnt out.

Each reviewer has their own personal ARC policy. Mine is that I will review your book if I accept it, but the review might not be to your liking. I will make every effort to finish your book and reserve DNF reviews for purchased items. I try to get all ARC's reviewed within a week of the publication date. I have failed Sins of a Virgin as completely as it failed me. I don't think this one is necessarily Randol's fault. I've been trying to read SOAV for close to a year. I keep stalling out very early in the book. I'm not even really reviewing SOAV. I'm using it to talk about reader reaction.

Madeline is a Secretly Chaste Courtesan who has decided to sell herself to the highest bidder. She hires Gabriel to ensure that the bidder she selects will be able to pay her fee. Gabriel is a Bow Street Runner looking for his sister's killer, some of whom are bidding on Madeline. On paper, this should be a good read for me. I'm okay with the Secretly Chaste Courtesan set up because Madeline is up front about her status (hello, book title!) and her reasons for the auction make sense. Except they don't. This coupled with Gabriel's super moral disapproval derailed me fast and kept me from getting far into the novel.

Madeline has spent ten years working as a government spy because reasons. Despite her service to the government, she is left unable to establish herself properly and therefore makes the choice to auction herself off. Here my reader reaction stops the story from moving forward. How are all these heroines pretending to work in the sex trade without ever suffering a sexual assault? In an age where rape was so common and so hard to prosecute, how are they navigating these men while keeping body and soul intact? How has Madeline worked as a fake courtesan without being tested? This myth that these girls can be trained in seduction, live among men and pass as purchasable goods without being assaulted seems so much in line with the Hermetically Sealed Heroine that I can't turn my mind off. What are we reading when we read about these women? Often (as in another recent DNF read but not this one) the hero is busy obsessing over what a durty durty hurr the heroine is while his employees are inexplicably reacting to her as if she is their better. When the hero realizes she is not a durty hurr and falls to his feet in tearful apology we are supposed to feel... something. Something besides impatience.

On the surface the message of the SCC or HSH is one of redemption. You have misjudged me, you have wronged me, I was not the durty hurr you assumed, but the lost daughter of aristocrats, meant for better things than I have had. As an apology, you may elevate me to my proper status. I shall play Lady Bountiful for your people, who saw what you could not. (If it's true that we read to escape into our privileges, then perhaps my recent problems with these romances has been a misalignment of needs.) I cut my teeth on the romances of the 70's, where a woman wandering alone was a woman moments from a gang rape. While I don't miss the days where love meant a disco floor and an act of violence, I do miss the message that the woman was still loved. At the end of whatever happened to her, she was still worthy. She had value. The hero wanted to be with her for her. She was, as is the core message of romance, enough. So often these days I feel that while the heroine has gotten smarter, stronger, more capable, her actual worth has diminished. He wants her even if she is a durty hurr, but it's ok, because secretly she's not. Even if she's been married before the odds are very good he was gay or impotent or drunk. Even if half the men in town claim to have banged her like a townie against a dumpster, it's all a lie. She is too good for that.

If she's good, what are the rest of us? If the message of the 70's and 80's was Stand By Your Man and As Long As He Loves Me, what is the message of the 90's and 00's? Is Madeline a virgin because she's more deserving than the other girls? Because she's smarter, as though being clever can provide safety from predators? What made her immune from being used in every way a tool is used in a time when she would have been so very disposable? I give Madeline credit for honesty - she has decided to exchange her body for money. She will do whatever she is required to do to meet the goal she's set for herself. I'd like to stick around long enough for Gabriel to tell her to tun off the red light, but I haven't been able to. My brain won't stop asking questions the book can't possibly answer.

DNF Review: When You Give a Duke a Diamond by Shana Galen

I've been doing a lot of DNF reading lately. Sometimes I set a book aside and try again. Sometimes I soldier on, carried aloft by the wave of hate reading. It's pretty rare that I hit a book two, three, four times and just say forget it. (2013 has not been a good year for me.) Lord & Lady Spy was the first Galen I abandoned. When You Give a Duke a Diamond is the second.

Meet Juliette. She's famous for being famous. She plays men off each other, collecting their offerings of wealth. She has a scandalous protector who is actually, um, something that gets revealed in the part of the book I didn't read. In the first half he's off the page. Apparently she and two other women are pretending to be his lover. He sets them up with the cash and the flash and they're going to find aristocratic husbands. Because that is the natural outcome of life at the high end of the sex trade. (If the Hermetically Sealed Heroine had a cousin, she'd be the Secretly Chaste Courtesan.) Juliette is divorced yet oddly eager to reenter the matrimonial state. Given that Juliette's ex husband is a scary abusive creep I would've expected her to have some reluctance. Perhaps, with her gift for social climbing, she might have considered actually becoming a courtesan. In that life she would have an escape hatch. But this is a tale where abuse issues are excuses for bonding. Or bondage. We'll get to that.

Juliette meets William in a series of nonsensical events. They aren't just tedious to follow, they don't pass the logic test. William leaves his fiancee on the balcony. When he returns she is missing. Juliette claims the woman has been murdered. There is a bullet in the wall and no sign of dead fiancee. Since dead fiancee has been having extramarital sex (unlike Juliette) no one but her parents worry much about this. William wavers between believing Juliette and repudiating her. They engage in some public scenes where neither of them are terribly lucid. Juliette runs to William (whom she barely knows) for protection from a known threat rather than the men she already has on the string. Once forced into his life, she challenges him at every step with such stunningly tone deaf antisocial behavior that my sympathy began shifting to her ex husband. Juliette wears entitlement like a perfume. Bravado or not, it's shocking when William begins craving her company. Of course, William is a Duke. And Juliette is known as The Duchess, one of the Three Diamonds who are the alleged lovers of the Earl of Sin.

I just typed that. With my fingers. I could insert a lecture on the mine cut diamonds of the pre-1900 era and the frequency of foil backing as a method to improve their appearance, but I will just bow to the De Beers machine and move on.

William has OCD from his abusive father's questionable parenting methods. Rather than act like almost every formerly abused child I've ever known (and I've known plenty) William acts like the Abused Child of Fiction. He cannot be free. He lives his life, despite unimaginable access to power and resources, in the narrow constraints his father dictated. He upholds the order bequeathed to him without question. Having been unloved, he does not form attachments. He is a stern and rigid man. He and Juliette bond over tales of - what is the word for dog murder? Is there such a word? Canineicide? Anyway, they had a puppy and then they didn't and it was their fault for being such bad, bad boys and girls. (Take a moment here to wonder why William didn't buy a litter of puppies to piss on his father's grave daily.) Dead dogs mean I love you. Or something. Soon Juliette is introducing Surprise Bondage to their lives and trying my nerves in new and inventive ways. Someone attempts to rape her. Is it the guy who killed William's forgotten fiancee? Is it Juliette's ex husband? (She not only dismisses that possibility she fails to share  the thought.) I suddenly realized I didn't care. I was more interested in the dead fiancee than either of the people pretending to look for her.

Review: The Magic Mirror And The Seventh Dwarf by Tia Nevitt

Tia Nevitt has a lot of promise. I liked (but couldn't quite love) her debut. When Dear Author featured this second tale as a Daily Deal I snatched it up. Nevitt writes with an easy style that put me in mind of Gregory Maguire at his least cumbersome. She has a fresh eye for familiar fairy tales. Taking her characters from the sidelines, Nevitt world builds like a master. I'm definitely in for her third tale and probably the one after that. Something about this author intrigues me. And yet I lack the love. The passion isn't there. I want Nevitt to take just one step further from the comfort zone.The Magic Mirror And The Seventh Dwarf (Accidental Enchantments) has a title which tells you most of what's wrong with the story. There are too many elements vying for your attention. I get that Nevitt's concept is to intertwine a slightly different version of a familiar tale with a completely new one. The difficulty she faces is making both tales equally compelling and in that she failed.

In Gretchen the dwarf Nevitt has a great character she mostly abandons for the side tale of Snow White. We all know everything we care to know about Snow White. The minor changes here don't compel me as a reader. Gretchen starts out so strong but then she fades. When we meet Gretchen she is strong, pragmatic, confident and determined to improve her life. She's a savvy commentator on the motivations of others, adept at reading faces and vocal tones. By the time we leave Gretchen she's no longer steering her own course. Gretchen has become almost tediously like our standard heroine, interested primarily in other's opinions of her. I didn't buy the lessons the author felt Gretchen needed to learn. Snow White is a complete bore. She's too good to be true and too bravely heroic to tolerate. Snow is absurdly trusting. Someone may try to rape her, someone may try to kill her, but Snow just keeps trucking. Snow's only weakness is not having friends. She's too pretty to make friends. Snow talks about being valued only for her beauty. Snow has real problems she could absolutely focus on so her insistence that beauty has been her obstacle rings false. She's the borderline anorexic girl who complains for hours about her fast metabolism keeping her from gaining weight while ignoring the laxative in her purse. Snow is used as a club to beat home the message the author wants Gretchen to learn. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Whatever. Snow is also painfully dim. When the mirror presents a solution to her problems (a completely obvious one at that) Snow seems to have never considered it.

Gretchen was a dream until she met Snow. Soon she's repeatedly obsessing about her looks while beating herself up for prejudging beautiful women. It might have been more tolerable if there was real conflict about who Gretchen would pair off with but there isn't. He's going to be short and he's going to be the only short character the author spends much time on. Then there is the melodramatic villain. He's blinded by his own (comparative) beauty. He's a bully and an attempted rapist. I'm not sure what the point of that is. On the one hand, the author argues that Snow's near assault is a result of her beauty. On the other Gretchen's is about thwarted power and anger. Does a short need two such events? Does it need dual motivations? Rape is rape. Is it supposed to shock us that it would happen to anyone? It happens to 101 year old women. Is Mr. Bad Dwarf's bullying and violence just not enough? It serves little story purpose to have Gretchen experience the assault and the ease with which she (and Snow) shake it off bothered me.

Reading TMMATSDAE I thought of a dozen turns Nevitt could have taken. There were so many paths open to her once the character of Gretchen was established. I was sad that we wasted them on the conventional path of visually dissimilar women becoming friends. I was sorry that the burden to overcome assumptive bias was primarily on Gretchen. I was bored that Gretchen ended up with the most predictable partner possible. I think Tia Nevitt has some great books in her. I'm hoping in her next outing she sticks to her instinct for reinvention. If anyone could make dwarf romance a genre, she could.

Spoileriffic Review: One Good Earl Deserves A Lover by Sarah MacLean

*Since we're diving deeper into the book I thought the step back would be a more fitting graphic than the cover. 

A few days ago I suggested you preorder Once Good Earl Deserves A Lover, read it at midnight and meet me back here to discuss where I thought it fell apart. I can only show you the path, I can't make you walk it. If you're reading this without having finished One Good Earl  that's on you, kitten.

With everything I loved about OGEDaL this is not a cliche free book. MacLean deals with the logistics of a girl who wears glasses so well that I forgave that girl being an intellectual. (The details of Pippa trying to tie a mask to her face won me over.) While I'd love to read about vision impaired heroines without their defective eyes conferring intellectual power, I get that this stereotype is hardly negative. But still. Smartacles. The magic of myopia.

With all the Pippa Middleton / Prince Harry shipping in the zeitgeist it took me a moment to get past our leads being Pippa and a tall charming redhead. It certainly didn't hurt that Cross was also an intellectual. (Say what you will about Harry but he's never been known for scholarly prowess.) I appreciated how Pippa dominated the book. Cross was well represented but it's Pippa that drives the story and dictates the action. She never becomes a passive passenger in her own story. The human relationships were (with some exceptions) well defined and realistic. I believed the divide between Cross and his family, as well as the interactions between Cross and his partners. I appreciated MacLean leaving Cross and his sister estranged. It was truthful and appropriate. What was neither was the distance of Bourne. I found his exclusion completely implausible. It's one thing for Cross to conspire with Pippa, it is another thing for his partners to do so. Events escalate to the point that the partners spend 19 million in company funds (300,000 plus pounds converted to modern pounds) without consulting or informing him. (The 19 million spent made little sense. This was a feel good resolution that didn't hold logically. It also put the owners - and thus Bourne -  into business with men they didn't wish to entertain.) Aside from the financial aspect, Bourne is invisible in his own family life. He is a prop used to support the HEA from a prior book instead of a realistic character.  This is Bourne, he likes to bang Penny now - as though there is no other purpose to his existence. Send your prior characters on a tour of Europe if you're going to write them out of their own lives.

Cross and Pippa have a nemesis in rival club owner Knight. Of course Knight has a daughter. Since Pippa has two men on her string you know we're going to end with one of them marrying the girl. It's unlikely, unrealistic and unbelievable. It weakens the overall story when characters not destined to be sequel bait pair off like animals on an ark. There is no need for Knight (or his daughter) to bag an aristocrat. Late in the book events also weaken the portrayal of our extra earl. It's understandable that Pippa would build a plan requiring the full cooperation of a recently rejected lover. It's less understandable that he would comply. Marrying him off to Knight's daughter undermines the only simple explanation for his eager compliance. We needed more characterization of his friendship with Pippa to understand what appears to be an inexplicable willingness to comply with her desires. "Hi, I'm not going to marry you. It's really sweet of you to offer to marry me even if I'm pregnant or just desperate, and I totally adore how you're keeping the offer on the table, but would you come help me win the man I want instead?" What makes him agree? Nothing but the needs of the plot.

One aspect of the book I I really enjoyed was Pippa's frank acceptance of human sexuality and lack of disdain for sex workers. Pippa struggles to understand who would choose such a life (and if they would). I felt MacLean was having it both ways when Pippa tells a prostitute that there is no shame in the word, then tells the hero she cannot condone the life. On the one hand, a heroine refreshingly free of slut shaming. On the other, nod to conservative reader expectation. When the prostitute flips on Pippa she has a wonderful defense of her actions that again, is adjusted to reader expectation by her regret at having wronged our Pipster. I'm conflicted in my feelings about this aspect of the book.

I'm not at all conflicted about the final pages. Cross has his last minute revelation. He runs down the street to make the church on time where he finds Pippa in the foyer instead of walking down the aisle. A public proposal follows, and a babylouge ties it off in a bow. This part of the story couldn't be more cliched if it starred Hugh Grant. Pippa has called off her wedding. Why is she at the church? If not Pippa then at least her family is aware she has jilted an earl and will be subject to extreme public scrutiny. Pippa is sporting a bruised face and a blackened eye. Someone around her (oh, I don't know, Bourne?) might have feelings about her appearance. Someone might suggest (her mother?) that society is going to assume the earl beat her and thus she canceled the wedding or that her father beat her for canceling the wedding. Either way, bare faced Pippa hanging out at the church is going to create unwarranted and unsavory rumors for someone. I didn't believe that she'd appear or that she'd hang out in the lobby. Far more likely that Pippa would be at home or at the wedding breakfast (where her appearance could possibly be explained). Pippa is in the church only to facilitate the cinematic staging of her proposal. In a book so deeply concerned with logic and intellect it doesn't hold together. Plus, babylouge. So, so sick of babylouges.

I still loved One Good Earl Deserves A Lover. Books, like people, don't need perfection to be worthy of affection. We can embrace them and see their flaws simultaneously. MacLean owns me for her next release and probably two or three after that. If there's an author / reader version of reality show immunity, she's got it.