First please indulge me as I spend a paragraph or two hating on the cover illustration. I have read SO MANY romance novels and know all about their silly covers but for some reason THIS one bothers me. Mostly, it's this horrible dress she's wearing. It looks so uncomfortable! The scratchy-looking lace on the neckline is digging into her breasts, but if she lowered her arm, the bodice would fall right off. Her posture may be physically possible (although who knows what she's doing with her right arm that's mostly out of the frame), but it evokes the attitude of someone who really, really has to pee. I'm not quite certain that people got French manicures in the 1890s, but if they did, wouldn't they get them on all of their fingers? And I've been sick of covers that cut off bits of people's heads (usually women's heads), but this one really gets to me. I think her mouth is supposed to look sultry, but what I see is someone gasping for breath because her ill-sewn bodice is cutting into her ribcage and THE COVER DESIGNER HAS REMOVED HER NOSE.

The main character is supposed to be almost supernaturally beautiful; if the illustrator (Gregg Gulbronson; the designer's name is George Long) didn't feel up to that, couldn't he have just done a nice floral pattern instead? Frankly, what would really have attracted me (had I been buying this book based on the cover, rather than Sherry Thomas's name on the cover) would have been a picture of a dinosaur skeleton. That would definitely have been truer to the story than this uncomfortable lady who's lost her shoes and stockings.

***

Thanks, I feel better now.

So, the story! You know, if someone had told me that the next Sherry Thomas book would involve two people who grow affectionate towards one another thanks to their shared love of paleontology, I would have been ecstatic.

Then, if someone had told me that it was going to have one of those plots that I'm a bit sick of -- the kind where the hero tricks the heroine into falling in love with him because he actually hates her (or someone close to her) and he's just using her emotions to get revenge -- except with the gender roles swapped, I would have been cautiously intrigued.

What I actually knew is the beginning of the back cover blurb: Duke blahdiblah meets mysterious Baroness soandso while traveling, hot passionate affair, then she disappears because she's secretly "a proper young widow," YAWN. Good job I already love Sherry Thomas's writing!

Despite the dinosaurs, however, I did not love this book. Well, I loved the dinosaurs (look, in this story, the act of sending a massively heavy set of fossilized dinosaur footprints to the other person is highly fraught with emotional significance), and Thomas as always has her moments of very beautiful prose. But it's hard to really get into a romance if you dislike the people who are having the romance.

It turns out that switching the gender roles doesn't really make me like revenge plots anymore. The basic idea is supposed to be that Vengeful falls in love with Object of Revenge and repents of faking being in love and using Object; when Object finds out about the revenge, Object feels anguish but finally forgives Vengeful and then they're happy together. The problem for me is that tricking someone to fall in love with you (whether or not there's sex) is a completely horrible thing to do. When the characters are happily excusing this action because of the circumstances that led to it, I'm wondering whether Vengeful, having been capable of this action regardless of the circumstances, can possibly be a trustworthy person.

It didn't help that when we meet the heroine, she's traveling with her unmarried sister and her sister-in-law because the heroine and the sister-in-law have learned from another person that the unmarried sister is having an affair, and they've decided to trick the sister into traveling in order to distract her and break up the affair. Yes, I know it's 1896; no, that doesn't make this 21st-century reader any happier to read about women policing other women's sexuality, especially when there's so little trust among these supposedly close relatives that they never even talk to the sister about any of it. Then the heroine is massively distracted by the plot of this book, and never bothers even to think about what a hypocrite she's become by having her own secret affair.

(It's pretty clear that the sister and the sister-in-law will get their own books; I'm afraid of what could happen in the sister's book, but the sister-in-law's, which will be published in July, looks like my cup of tea despite its terrible title -- Ravishing the Heiress -- ugh. By the way, in Beguiling the Beauty, the beauty does all of the beguiling herself. Anyway, I think that some of the annoyances in the last paragraph are the unfortunate byproducts of trying too hard to set up for Books 2 and 3 in the middle of Book 1.)

So that's why I don't really like the heroine. Normally in a revenge story the Object of Revenge seems more sympathetic, but in this case -- while I don't think he deserved to be fucked under false pretenses*, of course -- I couldn't pity him at all because I disliked him even more than the heroine.

Here is why: When the hero and heroine were about 18 or 19 years old, and the heroine was married to her emotionally abusive first husband, the hero caught a glimpse of the heroine across a playing field and "fell in love." No, I can't get rid of the scare quotes, even though he thinks his feelings are totally genuine. There is nothing wrong with being powerfully attracted to a beautiful someone whose character is a total mystery to you, but I want to take the idea that this can be Love, and that it can and should be important to the attracted person, and that this experience can and should be a life-changing event, and crumple it into a tiny ball and bite it and jump on it and then set it on fire. Okay?

And guess what -- the hero then goes on to illustrate one of the very best reasons why I hate that idea so much. Because (having mooned after the mysterious beautiful lady for a long time without ever meeting or speaking to her or learning anything about her character, even the fact that she likes paleontology too) the very first information he gets about her character is told to him by her abusive husband, who is out to make his wife look bad even in the eyes of people who don't matter to him or her. The hero believes what he's told, and he's totally miserable! Because this woman whom he only loved for her face, and yet whom he regards as having transformed his life, is apparently shallow and greedy and heartless.

When you nurse a pretty fantasy until it's gigantic and dominates your heart -- even when every single action and desire that caused this domination are yours -- it can turn so easily into a nightmare.

Our hero, when he first sees the heroine, is surprised to learn that she's married. At first, he felt entitled to a chance at courting her, because he saw her and found her so beautiful. He still feels entitled, even when he knows he'll never "have" her, to fantasize about her -- to use her face like a mask over his own ideals. So when he can't do that anymore, he's angry -- at her. Even though she owes him nothing at all, even though she has no idea who he is, he still thinks of her as having the power to make him miserable. He doesn't stop obsessing about her; now he "loves" her and "hates" her too, and the scare quotes are there because she's still an imaginary woman to him. He doesn't know her at all.

And then, to make matters even worse, he uses (this is really eyerollingly terrible) evolutionary psychology to make himself feel better. He likes to think about how the real purpose of beauty is only to promote reproduction, and it has nothing to do with character whatsoever. And then -- and this is where the plot really starts -- she attends a lecture in which he's asked to explain this theory further, and he repeats what her husband had told him. That's why she decides to get revenge.

I wish she had simply left him alone to ferment in his own ego.

You see, the part of the book when she's in disguise, and he falls in love with her without seeing her face -- this part of the book solves his problem, in the way best aligned with his fantasies. Unbiased by her face and all its imaginary associations, he learns her character, her history, her desires, and they are all exactly what he loves. Fate has given him his ideal, and she has that face.

It's more complicated than that, of course. But at the heart, it's the happy fulfillment of a wish whose realistic consequences are bitter misogyny.




* Somewhat ironically, apart from the revenge and deception (ha ha? sigh), the sex scenes on board ship are actually a rather good model for consent! The heroine is scared and tense and she really wants to have sex with the hero; Thomas's dialogue captures perfectly how she tests her freedom and he reassures her of it:

"Where is the door?" she asked [the room is dark] ... "Five paces behind you. ... Would you like me to walk you there?"

"No," she said. "Take me in the opposite direction."

And later, as she undresses, and as they are actually fucking, she checks: "Can I still leave?" and the answer's always yes. Thank you, Sherry Thomas, for no bullshit about the point of no return. This is one of the many reasons why I love your books and will keep buying them despite not loving this particular book.