Abigail Barnette's Blog, page 29

Jealous Haters Book Club: The Mister chapter ten or, “E.L. James one-stars Albania”

IDK about the veracity of a tabloid, but apparently, E.L. James is pretending she’s just like everyone else and has cause to fear that her next book won’t be published. Yes. I’m sure that after writing the fastest-selling book in the U.K. and producing a movie franchise that grossed over a billion dollars, a publisher is going to turn down your manuscript.

In the meantime, The Mister debuts on the New York Times bestseller list…at #2. Great for most authors. Not for one whose previous books all debuted right on top. And as of writing this, James is ranked #79 among authors on Amazon, and The Mister is falling fast in the Kindle store, currently at #46. Again, astounding success for most authors. But one sitting on one of the biggest franchises of all time? Definitely not what most people expected, even with lowered expectations.

Now, as we get further into the story, there is a lot more about sex trafficking and exploitation and stuff, so just keep that in mind if you want a content warning. This is like, a blanket content warning here.

So, Moss is driving down the highway and Demelssia is crying.

How can women cry so quietly?

Years of practice.

I think it’s best if I leave her alone to gather her thoughts. Besides, it’s late, and I have to make some calls.

And he calls people on speakerphone while she’s sitting there crying. I burst out laughing. I’m sorry, but there is some mean little part of me that would find that situation so funny. Someone just being like, “hang on, I have to make a call,” while you’re sitting there sobbing.

Moss calls his estate to see what parts of it are rented out for the next two weeks. Basically, he’s making a reservation to stay at his own house, which I know is probably a thing because nobody can afford to keep one of those places up.

“I need two of the rooms made up and some of my clothes and toiletries brought over from the Hall.”

“You’ll not be staying at the Hall?”

“Not at the moment, no.”

“Two rooms, you say?”

I had hoped for one….

She just. Told you. She. Was. Sex trafficked.

She just told you she was sex trafficked.

SHE JUST TOLD YOU SHE WAS SEX TRAFFICKED.

She’s sitting there crying about her trauma and he’s like, oh, man, too bad I can’t bang her.

SHE JUST TOLD YOU SHE WAS SEX TRAFFICKED!

SEX.
TRAFFICKED.

He tells the woman on the phone, Danny, that he’ll need the piano tuned, as well, and she’s like, oh, they’re all already tuned, blah blah blah and I literally could not care even a pixie’s ass hair less about this detail.

I reflect on all my past interactions with Alessia in light of what she’s told me today. Now I understand why she’s been so reticent around me, and my heart is leaden. In my fantasies I’d imagined that when I was finally alone with her, she would be laughing and carefree, gazing at me with adoring doe eyes. The reality is different.

How different?

Very. Different.

I’m just in awe of how swiftly this character went from “reasonably redeemable asshole” to “Civil War battlefield hospital gangrenous leg pile” so quickly. Like, I’m sorry that your horny fantasy is ruined by the fact that the object of your affection was.

SEX TRAFFICKED.

And yet…I don’t mind. I want to be with her.

How noble of you.

He goes on about how much he wants to protect her and what horrible things must have happened to her. I’m glad that these are his second thoughts.

If I ever get hold of those men…

My rage is muderous.

What have they done to her? I want to know.

No. I don’t want to know.

I do.

I don’t.

Please, someone, get this joke. I’m old.

I want to ask her what she’s endured. What she’s seen. But now is not the right time. All my plans, all my fantasies will be for nothing if she can’t bear to be with a man…any man.

And I realize that I can’t touch her.

Fuck.

Bringing back a recap classic.

So, what’s Demelssia thinking while Moss is worried about putting it in her?

Can she trust the man sitting beside her? She has placed herself in his hands. Willingly. And she’s done that before–with Dante–and that didn’t turn out so well.

Yup. Another E.L. James book where once the hero and heroine actually get together, she’s afraid of him. Yeah, she was wary of him before, but she’s wary of all men. Now, she’s wondering if she can trust this particular guy and comparing him to the dude who wanted to sell her into slavery.

In the next paragraph, though, she acknowledges that she can trust him.

Now, someone in the comments on the last recap mentioned that they thought Demelssia might have started off as a Polish character, and since she explicitly says that Magda got Demelssia a job through a network of Polish women, it does seem plausible. I’m not saying that’s definitely what happened, just that it’s plausible.

Thinking of Dante reminds her of her nightmare journey to England. She doesn’t want to think about that. She never wants to think about it again. But it haunts her in moments of quiet and in her nightmares. What’s become of Bleriana, Vlora, Dorina, and the other girls?

So, she’s thinking she’s in a situation where maybe she can’t trust Moss, but she does trust him, that she’s afraid for Magda and afraid for the other girls she was with.

While Moss’s primary concern is how to heal her PTSD real quick so they can bone.

They stop at a travel plaza in Moss’s POV, and he wakes her up.

“Hey. It’s me. You’ve been asleep. I want something to eat, and I need the loo. Do you want to come with me?”

To the…to the bathroom?

She asks him not to leave her there, and he’s like, I didn’t intend to. She doesn’t want to go into the building.

“It was a place like this.” She looks around again.

“What? A motorway services?”

She nods. “They stopped. They wanted us to wash. To be clean. They were being…um…kind. Or so some of the girls thought. They made it seem like it was for our…um…What is the word? Our…um…good. Benefit. our benefit. But if we were cleaner, we would bring a higher price.”

Demelssia tells Moss that she overheard the men speaking in English. They didn’t know she could understand them, so she was able to tell the other women what was going on. Only three of them believed her, but she doesn’t know if they tried to escape the way she did. Moss hugs her, and she wants him to kiss her.

No.

Not now.

Not here.

Not after what she’s been through.

Not in a service area on the M5.

Yeah, that’s the problem with it. The setting isn’t romantic enough.

We hop back into Demelssia’s head, where the smells and sights of the travel plaza trigger her PTSD. She goes into the bathroom and other women are there.

Neither of them looks as if she’s beeen trafficked from Eastern Europe.

How would you be able to tell? That’s like…the whole way traffickers succeed.

Whatever. Demelssia notices a Starbucks and thinks about how she recognizes it from London. And you may think to yourself, “Albania is a modern country, of course they have Starbucks!” but as late as 2018 they were a country totally without Starbucks. According to the Starbucks website, they still are. I’m honestly and truly amazed at this information.

We all learned something today.

Moss wants to buy her something to eat, but she declines, so obviously, since this was written by E.L. James, he buys her something, anyway.

Oh, and of course, the woman at the counter tries to seduce him with her eyes because, again, E.L. James.

“I’ll bring them over,” the barista replies, directing a coquettish smile at Maxim.

“We’d like them to go.” Maxim hands her a twenty-pound note.

“Of course.” The barista bats her eyelashes at him.

“Great, thanks.” He doesn’t return her smile but turns his attention to Alessia.

This is an important scene to include because it is imperative that we know every woman wants him but they can’t have him because the pure and virginal reader heroine deserves him more.

Demelssia has a lot of questions.

She’d like to ask him, but it’s not her place to question a man.

Oh my god, I know a guy from another book who would be perfect for you.

So, are you ready to rage?

“You speak very good English,” he says.

“Do you think so?” Alessia flushes at the unexpected compliment.

“Yes, I do.”

“My grandmother was English.”

First of all, there is a thing called “citizenship by double descent.” This is the point where Maxim should immediately call his lawyer. If she establishes that, she wouldn’t have to worry about being deported back to Albania. Second, she learned English from her grandmother, a native speaker, when she was a child. But she started out the book with, “I am cleaner.” Okay, sure, whatever, I guess. And I suppose that explains why Demelssia’s grandma was a Christian in a predominately Muslim country. But it raises more questions. Does that mean Demelssia has family in England? Why wasn’t she going to stay with them, instead of her mother’s pen pal? And why, if her grandmother was English, did Demelssia’s mother raise her with super provincial values? Did her English mother hold those same values and encourage them?

Moss asks what her grandmother was doing in Albania:

“She visited in the 1960s with her friend Joan, who is Magda’s mother. As children Magda and my mother sent letters and became friends. They live in different countries but have remained very good friends, though they have never met.”

That doesn’t answer the question. Again, it just raises more. Did her grandmother stay in Albania? Why? What kept her there? Why did she visit her Polish friend in Albania? Or is Joan also English but somehow ended up in Poland? Why are there so many names in that paragraph? I don’t need a hellish six-degrees-of-separation from Magda, especially when it doesn’t answer the fucking question Moss asked.

They get their sandwiches and go to the car and Demelssia marvels at how clever Moss is because he knew all along that she really was hungry and oh my god, this is going to be “Have you eaten, Anastasia?” all over again.

He stops for gas and takes Demelssia inside with him to pay.

In the queue for the register, Alessia stands beside me, taking the occasional bit of her sandwich and gazing at the shelves in what looks like wonder.

“Do you want anything? Magazine? A snack? Something sweet?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “There is so much to buy here.”

She’s from Kukës. It’s a county seat and tourist destination. Google “supermarkets Kukës Albania” and you know what comes up? Grocery stores and convenience stores that are EXACTLY LIKE THE ONES IN AMERICA AND THE UK.

I laugh. “The shops aren’t tidy in Albania?”

“Not in Kukës. Not like this.”

At the register I slide my credit card into the chip and PIN machine, conscious that she’s watching my every move.

“Your card is magic,” Alessia says.

So, you know how E.L. James is like, I traveled to Albania, I know what I’m talking about?

This means she traveled to Albania…and decided that it was dirty and provincial and backward and the people were all bewildered peasants who’d never seen a fucking credit card and then she took the opportunity to depict it that way to the entire world.

No fucking wonder the Albanian ambassador to the UK is pissed off at her. This is the most needlessly detailed and condescending Trip Advisor review of all time.

Back in the car, she explains that in Albania, people shake their heads to mean “yes” and nod to mean “no” and Moss wonders if that caused confusion in their earlier conversations. She tells him about her hometown and how it’s so isolated and rural, and then she tells him more about her grandmother. She didn’t just visit the country with Joan. She went there as a missionary:

“Missionaries? In Europe?”

“Yes. The Communists banned religion. Albania was the first atheist nation.”

Albania was the only atheist nation.

“Oh, I had no idea.”

I did! It was in a bathroom book with weird facts that I used to read when pooping.

“She came to help the Catholics. She smuggled books into Albania from Kosovo. Bibles. You know. What she did, it was dangerous. She met an Albanian man and–” She pauses and her face softens. “They fell in love. And…how do you say it? The rest is history.”

God, this just gets worse and more patronizing. Don’t worry, everyone. Grandma and Joan are here to save your souls, you godless Communists.

I’m sorry. I’m not a fan of missionaries. That whole colonization thing really ruined their reputation.

We have to hear the backstory about how Joan went to Poland as a…Catholic…missionary…

Because, you know. There are no Catholics in Poland.

Now we hear again how Demelssia’s mother became friends with Magda and how Magda has been a good friend and protected her after her escape, etc.

Then they talk about how Moss is a DJ and she doesn’t know what that is, and she doesn’t know what a dance club is. I’m not going to Google this. I’m just going to build Albania up in my head as a paradise where there is no EDM.

How sheltered was this girl’s upbringing?

That’s what I’m wondering. Damn.

Moss thinks about how she was, you know, trafficked, and he’s like,

I hope, for her sake, that she managed to avoid any horror. But somehow I doubt it. The journey alone must have been a nightmare.

You think? What an insight! You’re a regular god damn Sherlock Holmes. We got a Miss Fisher solving cases all over the place. He unraveled the mystery of whether or not getting kidnapped is traumatic. Fucking Bill Nye the Obvious Guy over here.

They get to his estate. He’s taken her to “one of the luxury holiday homes” on his land because he doesn’t want to overwhelm her with the Hall. I don’t blame him. She’d probably be like, “Is this…how you say…building? In Communist Albania, building builds you!”

The truth is, I want her to myself.

There we go.

Demelssia is asleep, and he thinks about waking her with a kiss, then he’s like, damn my eyes, I have made a vow to never touch her! And he actually does use the word “vow,” which made me snort with laughter. He wakes her up by saying:

“Hello, beautiful. We’ve arrived.”

And the chapter is done.

 

My impression so far: Why is it that in E.L. James books, the heroes might be a little okay until they meet the heroine? Like, to be honest, Fifty Shades of Grey didn’t start out with Christian being a super stalker. He just met Ana at his office, then later had coffee with her. It was only after he got interested in her that he became a full-on predator. Maxim was, as I mentioned above, reasonably redeemable in his actions so far because people do weird things when they’re grieving and he decided to rescue his housekeeper from kidnappers. Then they get in the car together and bam. Oh, her PTSD is cockblocking me, woe, woe, angst and woe. It wouldn’t have been difficult at all to show him caring for her as a human being first and a fuck object a very, very distant second, but that’s not the path James chose. And I cannot fathom why she and millions of other women think that’s sexy.

I also don’t know why she assumed that human trafficking would be the perfect issue to explore in a romance novel, but here we fucking are.

On top of all that, what do you call the opposite of a tourism commercial? Because that’s what’s happening about Albania here. It’s absolutely ridiculous.

 

Jealous Hater Book Club: The Mister chapter nine or, “At least we learned the coffee thing.”

Aaaand we’re back! E.L. James is coyly hinting to the press that Hollywood is beating down her door to snap up The Mister. Which, you know. Makes a shit ton of sense. The Fifty Shades of Grey books grossed over a billion dollars. It would be madness for anyone to not buy them. Whether it would be worth it to make the film is a different story. While James obviously has a buttload of fans, many of them have been disappointed that the book isn’t like Fifty Shades of Grey, judging from online reviews. But there’s another interesting thing mentioned in this Metro article: James feels there’s a market for tie-in sex toys this time around, too.

This one doesn’t make as much sense to me. In Fifty Shades of Grey, sex toys featured prominently. Readers bought the toys because they were buying the fantasy of building their own Red Room in their bedside table drawer. The conflict of The Mister isn’t centered around what Maxim wants to put where in Alessia’s body. The plot is about sex trafficking. Will a line of sex toys branded around a book about human trafficking really…well. Of course, they’ll sell. People bought a line of sex toys inspired by an abusive relationship. But why would a company want to link their name to…you know what? Nevermind. Please enjoy this cheap plastic vibrator at a hundred dollar markup because it’s named Maxim. Try not to think about human trafficking while you’re getting off.

Demelssia runs down the fire escape because…then she’ll be outside with the guys looking for her? Because yeah, Moss was right: they are not immigration:

She had recognized Dante’s voice immediately, and all her suppressed memories had surfaced in a terrifying rush.

The dark.

The smell.

The fear.

The cold.

The smell.

Okay, we’re starting to–

Ugh. The smell.

No, we’ve got it. Thanks.

She’s worried that they may have attacked Moss and it’s all her fault. And then she realizes that if they found her at Moss’s house, they also probably know about Magda and Michal.

Magda.

Michal.

Mister…Maxim.

Is this a theater camp game? Are we supposed to keep the chain going? Mordechai. Margret. Mary. Marta. Maxwell. Moe. Marie. Mitchell.

Demelssia spends a paragraph vomiting in fear, then decides that she has to make sure “the Mister” is okay.

The first thing she has to do is check that the Mister is okay.

I would have thought that like, running away would have been a priority, but sure. Get captured by traffickers again to make sure your rich Earl boss is okay.

Taking a deep breath, she leaves her refuge between the dumpsters and makes her way back up the fire escape. She moves cautiously as a sense of self-preservation kicks in. She needs to know the coast is clear, but she cannot be seen by them. It’s six stories high, so by the time she reaches the fifth story, she’s winded.

No shit? She just ran down six stories of fire escape, puked vigorously, then ran back up? But I find it interesting that her sense of self-preservation kicks in when she’s…worried about someone else.

But why should words mean anything?

She looks through the window and sees Moss get something from his desk. Now that she knows he’s safe, she has to go check on Magda and Michal. She runs out of the back entrance.

Perhaps Dante and Ylli will be there waiting for her? They will be out front, surely?

Why? You don’t think they’re going to check alleys? Or like…fire escapes?

Same paragraph:

[…] there’s no sign of Dante and his sidekick, Ylli.

Why do we need their names twice, just a few lines apart? And why is Ylli being introduced as a sidekick in the second mention?

She keeps her head down and her hands in her pockets, and with each step she prays to her grandmother’s God to keep Magda and Michal safe.

I’m going to make fun of this because I’m a little shit. Her grandmother has her own personal God.

Now, the reason I’m making fun of it is that by the time I stopped reading ahead, this comment was never really explored. At the point I stopped reading, there hadn’t been a damn thing about whether or not Demelssia had lost her faith or something, which is the only reason a comment like this would have been interesting in the first place. Maybe it comes in later, but fuck it. I’m being petty and nobody can fight me because it’s too long a drive and I don’t go outside most days.

She says it over and over again, alternating between her native tongue and English.

Ruaji, Zot.

Ruaji, Zot.

God keep them safe.

I’m so glad E.L. James bought that dictionary so she could throw in such authentic Albanian touches as repeating “Zot” over and over in every chapter. According to Google translate, which, granted, can’t be relied on for most stuff, shows “God keep them safe,” as a much more complicated sentence. Maybe that’s not so. Maybe this was painstakingly researched.

In Moss’s POV, he’s understandably freaked out.

Where the fuck is she?

What the hell is she mixed up in?

What do I do?

How can she face those guys on her own?

Can I just say that it’s so fucking refreshing to see the male protagonist of this novel react decisively to a real threat? Not an imagined one he made up so he can gaslight her into believing that the world is too dangerous for her to roam without constant surveillance protection?

He decides to go after her and grabs his keys, then runs down to the garage and realizes he’s grabbed the wrong keys and has to take the Jaguar and not the Land Rover and this is an incredibly weird detail to include. Why does it matter to us why he took the Jaguar? I feel like James’s books are so pointlessly long because she includes all these little details we genuinely don’t need.

There’s a lot of traffic on the road, so he has time to think about the guys who came looking for Alessia:

They sounded Eastern European. They looked rough.

Behold, the second of the two flavors of immigrant in this book. You’re either infantile by virtue of not being from an English-speaking country, or you’re a criminal.

Moss considers for the first time that hey, maybe Demelssia is in the country illegally.

Demelssia is on the train, playing with her cross necklace.

It was her grandmother’s, and it’s the only possession she has that belonged to her dear nana.

The Albanian word for “grandma” is “gjyshi.” How you gettin’ “nana” out of that? I need some Albanians here. Common sense is telling me that “nana” could be due to the proximity of Albania and Italy and the fact that Italians say “nonna” but common sense and cultural and linguistic trends are not even remotely related. Of course, we learn something infuriating about said nana in the next chapter, so. But I’m picking it apart, anyway, because that’s why you’re here.

Anyway, she thinks about how her nana was religious and her parents weren’t, which, again, I guess sprinkle in info rather than dumping it in one huge clump later, but read the room. We’re in the middle of a tense escape sequence. We don’t need your family history. It’s slowing things down.

She devotes like four whole sentences to worrying about Magda and Michal before she starts thinking about Moss.

Maxim.

He kissed me.

Twice.

Twice!

You sure you don’t wanna tack on another “twice” there, for stylistic consistency?

He said lovely words. About her.

You’re beautiful.

You’re stunning.

And he kissed her!

That’s how I feel.

If circumstances were different, she would be ecstatic.

You mean circumstances like, if she wasn’t actively, right now, this very second, fleeing in terror from human traffickers? Look, I get it. I really do. It’s difficult to keep a story interesting when your characters are stuck in traffic or on a train. What are you supposed to do? Not show them in traffic and on a train? Jump ahead to when something actually happens? That way lies madness.

Anyway, she thinks about how Dante is gonna shatter her dreams again, and how awful it is that she accidentally led them to Maxim.

Zot! Her job.

She will be out of a job. Nobody wants trouble coming to their front door and criminals like Dante threatening them.

What will she do?

IDK, probably try to quit her job, but then Moss Troldark will ride up on his horse and bring her back despite people from her past making a violent attempt to kidnap her from his house? And then maybe Dante will like, IDK, find Jesus and come preach at the guests rudely at their baby’s christening.

That was a Poldark reference. I’m referencing Poldark because this is Poldark.

I speed down the A4, my mind hopping from Alessia to those men and then to Kit as I dodge through traffic.

Kit? What would you do?

Not slow down, apparently. I find it interesting that not a chapter has passed so far that Moss hasn’t thought about the way his brother died–in a motorcycle accident caused by reckless speed if I haven’t mentioned it before–but when he thinks about Kit while weaving in and out of traffic, he doesn’t think, oh, hey, maybe I should be more careful. Instead, he thinks about the vacation he and Kit took over the holidays.

And the day after New Year’s Day, Kit died.

Or killed himself.

There. I thought it.

My unspoken suspicion.

Damn it, Kit. You fucker.

WHOA, DOES THIS COME OUT OF LEFT FIELD. Suddenly, despite us being in his head through all this unfathomable grief, just now he’s mentioning that he thinks his brother committed suicide. Not, “I should slow down, this is how Kit died,” but “Kit probably killed himself.” There is literally still snow on the ground, we know that because it’s mentioned, and Moss is out there driving like an asshole thinking, “My brother died like this. Probably on purpose. I better not slow down.”

Because Moss has a horse car, he gets to Delmessia’s house before she does. He decides to intercept her on foot and runs to the train station, where he ignores a call from Elizaline while he waits.

Tiime suspends.

The doors open, and Alessia is first off the train.

Oh, thank fuck.

Relief nearly brings me to my knees, but just the sight of her calms me down.

Well, of course, your calmness was the thing I wondered most about. I was like, man, I hope he gets to her before the human traffickers do because I want him to be able to calm down.

We go into Delmessia’s POV for a preposterous three paragraphs.

When Alessia sees him, she stops short in complete astonishment. The other disembarking passengers stream past them as she and Maxim stare at each other, drinking each other in.

Then he says she left without saying goodbye, and we go back into his POV. Again, after three paragraphs. And to go find Magda and see if she’s safe. You’d think we would want to be in the POV of the character who has the highest stakes, right? But no, it’s far more important to be in Moss’s head so we can get all his thoughts about how shitty and small Magda’s house is and how much he hates instant coffee.

How does the coffee come up? Well, I’ll tell you. They go into Magda’s house, find that Magda and Michal aren’t there, so Demelssia makes coffee and tea.

She doesn’t freak out about her friends not being there. She doesn’t worry about what’s happened to them. Oh, hey, maybe she does, but we don’t know that because we’re not in her head and all we get to see is her returning to the only other place the traffickers associate with her to make coffee for her boss. And he doesn’t even like it. But I’m sure glad we have that information, which is far more crucial to the story than what’s happening with the person who is literally running for her life.

Moss asks her if she’s a failed asylum seeker (she isn’t), whether she’s in the country legally (she isn’t), and promises that he won’t tell the police about what’s going on. Finally, she tells him:

“The man who came to your apartment, his name is Dante.” Her voice is a pained whisper. “He brought me and some other girls from Albania to England.”

You know what would have been great? If we had an indication that maybe this was the first time she told someone, that she’s relieved to get it off her chest, that for some reason she can’t explain, she trusts Moss with this and feels it brings them closer together.

God, I’m glad we learned about the instant coffee thing, instead.

And everything about her falls into place.

Her reticence.

Her fear.

Of me.

Of men.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Rule of three!

Magda returns and they tell her what happened. You know, after we hear more about stuff that has nothing to do with the plot and the events that should be taking center stage:

The three of us are sitting at the table while Magda puffs on a brand of cigarette that is unfamiliar to me. I’ve declined her offer to try one. The last time I smoked a cigarette, it set off a chain of events that led to my explusion from school. I was thirteen and with a local girl in the grounds at Eton.

Again, I’m super glad we’re hearing about this instead of skipping right ahead to what’s going on with the traffickers. Also, I’m glad we all know that it was a lowly townie and not an Eton student who tempted him with nicotine. Now, what I want to know is, who got him into cocaine?

Oh, wait, no, I want to know what’s going on with the human trafficking. Sorry, it’s just so difficult to care when I’m not READING THE POV OF THE CHARACTER WHO ACTUALLY STANDS TO LOSE THE MOST.

Dante found Alessia via Facebook, where Michal posted a selfie of the two of them. She calls them, “the selfie” and “the Facebook” and Moss thinks it’s amusing, because who doesn’t find those endearing little quirks about their love interest while they’re talking about how they were tracked down by dangerous criminals?

Turns out, Magda is the one who sent the traffickers after Demelessia, after they threatened Michal. She gave them Moss’s address, even though she didn’t think they were really from immigration. Magda has no clue that Demelssia is on the run, but neither woman wants Moss to call the police. Which, like. You already promised you wouldn’t, Moss.

Moss decides that it’s not safe for anyone to stay at Magda’s house. Michal is already hiding with a friend. Moss doesn’t even want Demelssia to go look at the room she was interested in renting, because she could get kidnapped off the street.

We could all hole up in Trevelyan House in Cheyne Walk, but Caroline would ask questions, and I don’t want that–it’s too complicated. I could take Alessia back to my flat–but they’ve already been there. One of the other properties? Maryanne’s place? No.

Maybe you should take her to Cornwall. Where Poldark is set.

Perhaps I could take her to Cornwall. No one would find us there.

That’s right. Don’t fight your source material. Go with the flow.

Moss tells Demelssia that she’s going to come with him, and offers to put Magda and Michal up in a hotel or provide security. Magda is like, okay, but why are you doing this, and Moss thinks:

Because it’s the right thing to do?

No. I’m not that altruistic.

Because I want to be alone with Alessia? Yes. That’s the real reason.

Thanks for your honesty, I guess? I don’t find it particularly endearing to read about a hero who openly admits that he wouldn’t give a fuck if his housekeeper got kidnapped if he didn’t want to sleep with her.

In Alessia’s POV, she has every reaction we needed to see from inside her head while things were happening. For example, briefly touching on the fact that she’s never told anyone how she got to England. This is a throwaway sentence that isn’t explored further:

She’s a little in love with him–but she understands it’s a crush. And yet he’s the only person she’s told about how she came to England.

And that’s it. We not only missed her reaction in the moment, it’s not even momentous enough to get more than a line.

One of the things that bothers me about this section, too, is that Demelssia is like, well, Dante took my passport, so I’m stuck. It seems like the very first thing Moss should do is take her with him to the Albanian embassy and get a new passport. We know there’s an Albanian embassy in England because they want James to fuck off. And it seems like even though Moss is going, okay, I won’t call the police, he’s a rich white dude and he totally would call the police and flex his muscle to get her asylum. I feel like this plot is becoming very flimsy.

Magda doesn’t want Demelssia to go with Moss, but she also doesn’t know what Dante is after Demelssia for. Magda finally agrees to let Moss hire security for her and promises she won’t tell Demelssia’s mother about any of this. In Moss’s POV once more, he explains that his friend Tom set up a security company after he left the Army, and we get to see the whole phone call between them before Alessia says a tearful goodbye to Magda. Then Moss talks to the security guard who has already somehow arrived, and Alessia and Moss depart…

for Cornwall.

My impression so far: This entire chapter could have been so much shorter. And I think that’s the problem. I feel like it was a big problem with all of E.L. James’s books, so far. She’s not getting paid by the word, so I don’t understand the need to walk us through every painstaking detail of things we don’t need to know, like what the backstory is on Moss refusing a cigarette or why he drove one care instead of the other. The incessant head-hopping is made all the more infuriating when the hopping is always done into the wrong head at the wrong time. And now, we’re going to Cornwall, to a seaside retreat, where I’m sure things will not be at all like Poldark.

In other news, if you’re new here and you’ve been enjoying these recaps, feel free to throw a little something into my Kofi account if you are so moved (check out the top of the sidebar for the link). Blogging ain’t exactly the high-paying, glamorous field it appears to be at first glance. If you don’t have anything to spare, don’t feel bad, but maybe recommend Abigail Barnette books to your reader friends. That would be fucking rad, too!

No The Mister Recap Today

I’m taking the day off from The Mister to get Where We Land ready for publication. There’ll be a new recap on Monday. In the meantime, watch Poldark or something. You’ll get a general idea.

Jealous Hater Book Club: The Mister chapter eight or, “We have decided to stan Albania. We’ll never be sick of its hoe ass.”

You ever wake up and find out that one of the strangers in your top ten strangers who annoy the ever-loving shit out of you is having the kind of day where an ENTIRE FUCKING COUNTRY IS MAD AT THEM?

You would think this would make me happy.

But it is so infuriating. There are a few things that I haven’t mentioned yet because we haven’t gotten to them, and they’re mentioned in the article (you have to register to read it), so I’ll just touch on two of them: remember the seatbelts? Well, she doesn’t know what a smartphone is, either. Or a credit card.

No shit, she thinks his credit card is magical.

But it’s okay. E.L. James knows what she’s talking about:

In an interview with the New York Times to mark the book’s publication, James said she did extensive research on the former Communist country, visiting twice and buying an Albanian dictionary and a book about organized crime. She added that her husband had learned to make Albanian stews.

Reader, I tried to rip my smartphone, whoops, I mean, “clever phone” in half. Imagine if someone decided to write a book set in the UK and the only research material they bought was about bad dental hygiene. I’m not so sure Erika and her mindless cult of sycophants would be pleased about that.

Watching Taken and learning how to make soup doesn’t make you qualified to write about a country. Read on for details.

We pick up chapter eight right where we left chapter seven, moving into Demelssia’s POV. She’s arriving home to find out that immigration officers came looking for her while she was at work. A neighbor intercepted them, but Alessia won’t be safe once she’s homeless again when Magda leaves.

You know what I’m a little confused about? And honestly, this isn’t something that’s necessarily wrong with the book, it’s just something I think is an odd choice. Magda is Delmessia’s mother’s pen pal (this was revealed in the last chapter), and that’s how Demelssia ended up living with her. But like, there are a lot of Albanian people in the UK. So, why send her to live with Polish immigrants? I guess I’m not getting why James made this narrative choice when Poland really didn’t need to be involved in the story at all and she could have gone to live with a friend or a sympathetic family member who speaks her language. Unless, you know. All Albanians are sex traffickers.

But surely this book couldn’t be written in such a way as to suggest that.

Anyway, Demelssia knows that if she’s caught in the country illegally, she’ll be deported. Does the UK deny asylum to human trafficking victims? I feel like they absolutely could have a policy like that, considering the attitudes toward immigrants in the UK and the attitude toward immigrants in the US are like peas in a pod.

Vhat ees dis “peas pod”? Ees how you say, wegetable?

Ugh, seriously, still so furious.

Demelssia lays awake that night, thinking about how she will barely be able to afford rent on the room she found. She does so freezingly, because she is a poor, wretched urchin.

She turns over to escape the shaft of light and snuggles up in the thin duvet to preserve as much warmth as she can. Thoughts swirl in her head, overwhelming her. She wants them to stop.

Don’t think about Albania.

What is, “thing E.L. James is probably repeating in her head this very morning?” That is correct!

Don’t think about this journey.

Your writer sure didn’t.

Don’t think about other girls…about Bleriana.

She closes her eyes and immediately she sees the Mister asleep on the sofa, his hair a mess, his lips parted.

Come on, now. She’s thinking of the other girls who were human trafficked and then immediately jumps to the sexy thoughts? Ah, the misunderstanding of trauma is as thick as a sewer fatberg.

She thinks about how she could ask the Mister for help but knows this is her own mess to get out of. She’s for sure not going back home:

He’s shaking me hard. Stop this. Stop this now.

No. Don’t think of him!

He’s the reason she’s in England. She has put as many miles as she can between them.

Think of the Mister. Only the Mister.

Her hand travels down her body.

Think only of him…

Yeah, if you’re not thinking of one man, what else are you going to think of? Something that isn’t a man? Pfff.

What had he called her? What is it called?

A cleaning lady?

Synethesia…She repeats the name over and over and over while her hand moves and takes her higher and higher.

I, too, masturbate while thinking of wacky neurological phenomenon.

In the morning, we hear about how Demelssia is going to go clean for a lonely little old lady and that most of the clothes Demelssia owns are hand-me-downs from Michal. She takes a sad shower with bad water pressure to create a parallel when we jump into Moss’s POV.

My hands are braced on the shower wall. I’m panting while steaming hot water cascades over me. I’ve been reduced to jerking off in the shower…again.

You live alone. Jerk off wherever you want. But congrats on being able to do it with no hands.

I don’t understand the attitude toward masturbation in some books. Not just this one. I’m fine with scenes of heroes and heroines masturbating while thinking of each other. It’s when masturbation is depicted as a sad alternative to sex with a partner that I get all pissed off. Masturbation is awesome. There’s no reason you have to stop doing it just because you can have sex with someone else. You can do both! It’s totally free!

Once again, he thinks about how he can’t possibly fuck her because she’s his housekeeper, but he can’t stop fantasizing about her huge underpants.

Wait, were those a hand-me-down from Michal, too? No judgment here, just wondering. I’m not a fan of second-hand underpants.

After a section break, we meet Joe and Tom, Moss’s creatively named friends. They rib Moss about not knowing whether they should refer to him as his earl name or his regular name.

Joseph Diallo andd Thomas Alexander are my oldest and closest friends.

Did James just totally forget that Elizaline is in this book? Because she’s been referred to as Moss’s closest friend for like…a while now. But there I go, futilely searching for consistency.

After I’d been expelled from Eaton, my father sent me to Bedales. There I met Joe, Tom, and Caroline. We boys bonded over our love of music and, at the time, our lust for Caroline. We formed a band, and Caroline…well, she’d eventually chosen my brother.

Maybe she didn’t like being the token sex object of your little group?

Let’s find out about Moss’s friends:

“How are you holding up, mate?” Joe asks, tossing his shoulder-length dreads to one side. Joe, as well as being an excellent swordsman, has a promising career as a men’s fashion designer. His father, an émigré from Senegal, is one of the most successful hedge-fund managers in the UK.

And Tom:

Red-haired and amber-eyed, Tom is the third son of a baronet, who followed family tradition by joining the army. As a lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards, he did a couple of tours of duty in Afghanistan and saw too many of his comrades fall. Two years ago he was invalided out of the army from wounds inflicted two years prior by an IED in Kabul.

Wow, two years ago he got wounded two years ago? That’s fucking wild.

Tom has PTSD and is described as “belligerent” and “pugnacious.” Which, you know. Okay. That happens. Not unrealistic. But it’s annoying to see someone with a common mental illness described as violent when he’s a minor character whose backstory doesn’t need to be that extensive.

On top of that, Tom is dating a woman he hasn’t proposed to yet, and this is how the situation is described:

Henrietta is a saint. She nursed Tom through the trauma of his injuries, and she put up with all of his bullshit, his PTSD, his temper. He could do a lot worse.

Excuse me. Exfuckingcuse the entire shit out of me. If someone stays with their disabled partner after they become disabled, they are not a saint. They are not owed. They do not get some kind of trophy for not running away.

It’s like E.L. James went, “Well, I fixed the consent issue. Now how am I going to be as terrible as possible? AHA! We’ll just use stereotypes about every marginalized group and praise people for dealing with them.

Moss thinks about how he can’t remember when he had sex last then there’s some stuff about how Maryanne is in lurve with a CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST IN SEATTLE. I’m really confused because James has been coy about a connection between this and Fifty Shades of Grey, but it’s kind of hard to play the maybe-they’re-connected game when you make it this obvious.

Something I might not have touched on yet is how often the phrase, “heir and a spare” comes up in the book. Nine times. Some variation of the phrase comes up nine times. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but when it’s used in nearly identical context over and over again, it really sticks out. Spare is apparently some kind of cruel childhood nickname Kit came up with, too.

So, Kit, the guy who was so amazing and everyone loved him, made up a nickname taunting his brother over the fact that he was the less-important child?

Moss misses him…why?

As they leave the bar, Moss asks Tom if he can walk home and Tom is like, I’m running a 5K, and Moss is like:

I keep forgetting that physically he’s mended….

Can I just express how deeply, truly pleased I am that a sensitive subject like mental illness is being handled by a wordsmith as devoted to her craft as E.L. James? And given such importance in the story. I’m sure that our hero will learn a poignant lesson about trauma and recovery from knowing his friend and his soon to be bangette, Delmessia.

Speak of the devil, she shows up after a section break and finds that Moss has company.

Closing the door, she’s surprised by the smell. The apartment reeks of stale alcohol.

I’m honestly shocked that it hasn’t before.

Joe is there, walking around in his boxers amid a bunch of pizza boxes and empty beer bottles. Before we can find out what he’s doing there, we have to go with her to change into her work clothes. She overhears Joe and Moss talking about her.

“I just frightened your barefoot help. You tapped that yet? She’s hot.”

“Fuck off, Joe. And I’m not surprised you frightened her. Put some clothes on, you fucking exhibitionist.”

At the end of their conversation, Joe sees Demelssia watching them. And he flirts with her in the most cringe-worthy way.

“Good morning, Alessia. Please excuse my state of undress.” Joe gives her a theatrical bow, and when he’s upright, he has a wicked, amused glint in his dark eyes.

WATCH OUT, I THINK WE’VE GOT A M’LADY GUY.

Then Tom comes out in his boxer shorts and Alessia runs the hell out of there because she’s, you know, afraid of men and there are three half-naked, presumably drunk men in this apartment.

Ha ha, no. She thinks about how handsome she is and stares at his scars, giving him a chance to be the moody, disturbed veteran. Then she goes to the laundry room.

Tom asks who she is and Moss tells him she’s the daily.

Tom nods with lascivious approval. I’m glad she’s gone back into her lair, away from Tom’s and Joe’s prying eyes. Their reaction makes me uneasy. Suddenly, surprisingly, I feel proprietary. I don’t want my friends ogling her. She’s mine. Well, she’s my employee.

Their reaction makes me uneasy, too. But we need every male character in the book to uncontrollably stroke themselves off at the very sight of her, or else how would we know how beautiful she is?

Demelssia pretty much hides until the dudes leave.

His bedroom is now tidy, and she was surprised and delighted to note there were still no used condoms in the wastebasket.

Again, how is that any indication that there wasn’t some hard bareback three-way man action happening? It isn’t. So that is what I choose to believe went down. Lord knows we’re not going to get any queer rep in an E.L. James book if we don’t put it there ourselves.

So, then Demelssia gets caught sniffing Moss’s shirt out of pure erotic curiosity. And then he walks in, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

“I was looking for a sweater. It’s a bright day, but cold. Are you warm enough?” he asks.

Thanks for the weather report, Moss. Now, it’s back to Ted with sports.

He laments the state of his closet (Moss. Not Ted the sportscaster):

“I’m pathologically untidy.”

“Path-o-log–”

“Pathological.”

“I do not know this word.”

“Oh…um…it refers to an extreme behavior.”

“I see,” Alessia responds, and she looks down at the clothes again and nods. “Yes. Pathological.”

Look. It’s okay for people to not know words when they’re learning a language. The real problem here is that instead of asking what a word means, she sounds it out, like a perplexed child stumbling through a vocabulary lesson. It’s infantilizing and weird as it’s written, especially when it’s every single time it comes up. She could just say, “I do not know this word,” or “What is that?” and not be made to sound however she’s meant to sound here.

Anyway, Moss “accidentally” brushes up against Demelssia when he’s reaching for his sweater, she vapor locks, and he retreats.

And he caught her sniffing his shirt. She covers her face. He must think she’s a complete idiot.

Or he thinks you were trying to see if it needed washing.

Let’s check in with Moss:

I can’t keep my hands off her. Any excuse.

Leave her alone, dude.

And if I touch her, she freezes.

Yes. Leave her alone. A woman freezing up if you touch her is not a sign to keep trying.

But he’s not going to do that, obviously. He’s going to ask her to go for “a decent meal” with him. Because that isn’t a patronizing assumption. Why not just leave a trail of impressive and modern English chocolates in a trail to your dick in the hopes of enticing her. You know. Since she’s a starving urchin.

He goes to the window to gaze out upon…

[…]the Peace Pagoda[…]

My God. He might not mention the Thames by name.

He gets up the nerve to ask her out, and when he finds her, she’s looking at the door to the FORBIDDEN ROOM.

Here we go! Here comes the kink!

“It’s a darkroom,” I say as I stride toward her.

OH MY GOD I’M SO RELIEVED! MY INNER GODDESS SINGS WITH GLADNESS TO THE LORD!

But, you know. Because there are no new ideas, he asks if she wants to see his secret room. We go into her POV.

Alessia enters the small room. It glows with red light and smells of mysterious chemicals and the stale air of inactivity.

Doesn’t smell like furniture polish, is still red.

They talk about how photography is his hobby. He takes out a camera and we launch right back into his POV.

Holding up the camera to my eye, I study Alessia through the lense. She is all dark eyes, long lashes, high cheekbones, and full, parted lips.

She is an Eldritch horror, pulling herself toward me on the pulsating brushes of her lashes, her full lips parting further to speak the language of madness and cast terrible judgment from the multitudes of her dark eyes.

He tells her she’s beautiful and takes pictures of her, then shows her the picture to prove it.

“See,” I murmur. “You’re stunning.” Reaching forward, I tip up her chin and, leaning down, inching closer and closer so she has a chance to move away, I brush my lips against hers. She gasps, and as I pull back, she touches her fingers to her mouth, her eyes growing rounder.

“That’s how I feel,” I whisper, my heart pounding.

Will she slap me? Will she flee?

Does she have a choice? You’re her employer?

An etheral vision in the muted light, she tentatively raises her hand and traces my lips with her fingertips. I freeze, closing my eyes as her tender touch reverberates through my body.

This would be such an erotic, tense moment, and I truly, truly mean that, if we had any indication of chemistry between the characters and at least some semblance of a power balance.

Everything about their interactions so far have been preposterously forced. She’s afraid of him. He’s obsessed with her. They’ve only talked about casual topics like piano playing and photography. This can’t be effectively heart-stopping unless we’ve sensed a connection between them that goes beyond her cleaning his house and stealing a few glances at him and both of them masturbating at the thought of their super hot interactions involving outwear and cleaning the apartment.

But they kiss.

She tastes of warmth and grace and sweet seduction. Her tongue hesitant and faltering against mine. It’s captivating.

What, the kiss or the fact that you can’t think in complete sentences?

I have to hold myself back. I want nothing more than to bury myself in this girl–but I don’t think she’ll let me.

No, generally it might take a little more than just kissing someone out of nowhere to get them to spread. I mean, if they do, great, but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable expectation that they might not.

“What’s my name?” I murmur against her lips.

Oh god, the chemicals! Turn the vent fan on! You’re incoherent and you can’t even remember your own name!

Then immigration shows up.

No shit. Not kidding at all. She says his name all breathless and limp in the passion of his embrace, and immigration is beating on the outside door.

Through the peephole in the front door, I assess the two men outside. One is short, the other is tall, and both are dressed in cheap gray suits and black parkas. They don’t look particularly official. I pause, debating whether or not to ansswer. But I should find out why they’re here and if it’s anything to do with Alessia.

Huh. I wonder if immigration being here has anything to do with the mysterious immigrant girl who showed up at my house out of blue and doesn’t want to talk about her past and whom I pay in cash under the table, Moss thought, still reeling and confused from the chemicals.

 

He has a distinct Eastern European accent.

Uh-oh. I’m beginning to think these guys might not be immigration.

Moss tells them that there’s no girl there, and if they’re going to search his house, they need a warrant.

How the hell did those thugs find out that Alessia was here? Why are they chasing her? What has she done? There’s no “immigration” department. It’s called Border Force and has been for years.

Whoa, that’s a fucking superhero ass name if I ever heard one. Please, nobody tell the sentient spray tan running my country, or he’ll rename ICE.

The men leave, and Moss goes back to assure Demelssia that everything is okay.

But she has fled.

My impression so far: It astounds me how catastrophically everything went off the rails in the last two chapters. Was there some kind of editing clause where they could only ask for developmental edits on the first six chapters of the book? Because it was actually better than Fifty Shades of Grey, then suddenly it’s like, have some ableism, have some Eastern European gansters, up the hero’s creep factor, let’s just go fucking wild!

I guess I’ll just take some medication for this rage headache and move along with my day.

Jealous Haters Book Club: The Mister chapter seven or, “You can hear the theme music from here.”

We have officially reached the part of recapping where I’m slightly behind. I’m trying to do a post a day so these get finished before I go into my annual week of seclusion on the Keweenaw Peninsula to write Neil and Sophie and El-Mudad’s next book. But I’m also in the middle of intense rehearsals for War Paint at the Kalamazoo Civic Theater (if anyone is going to use that info to find me and murder me, please do so after the final performance, but before strike) and a pretty intense running program to get in shape for the Mackinac 8 Mile.

Why yes, I am in full, 100% denial of time and my physical disabilities.

Anyway, if I miss a day or two in the next two weeks, fear not! I haven’t given up. I might just be in a coma.

Quick note: I’ve made hybrids of the characters’ names with the names of characters from Poldark in many cases. It never occurred to me that someone might read these out of order, but I’ve actually had a few people mention the names this week and I wanted to clear that up.

Also, CW: we’re gonna talk about rape and rape trauma response.

Before we begin, we need to set the mood for the opening description with a little music. Ah, this should work…

 

Now you’re ready.

It’s a cold and gloomy Tuesday afternoon. Exhausted, I lean against the chimney stack of the old tin mine and stare out toward the sea. The sky is dark and ominous, and a bitter Cornish wind slices through me. A storm is brewing, and the sea rages and crashes against the cliffs beneath, the sound booming and echoing through the ruined building. The first freezing spots of sleet froom the coming storm splatters my face.

Moss goes on to think about his childhood in the Cornish countryside playing with Kit and Maryanne. His visit to Cornwall hasn’t been all memories and brooding Poldarkly on the cliffs. He’s also learned to trust Oliver as a business manager (so, I guess he’s not a Warleggan, after all) and the estates are doing well. He’s peopled out, though, from meeting all the staff who work to keep the estates running.

Then there’s more about his idyllic Cornish childhood from the eighteen god blessed hundreds:

I gaze at the path that leads down to the sea and think of Kit and me as two young boys racing to the soft, sandy beach below. Kit always won…always. But then he was four years older than me. And then in late August, armed with bowls and buckets and anything else that would hold them, we three children would pick blackberries from brambles that lined the path, and our cook, Jessie, would make blackberry-and-apple crumble for supper, Kit’s favorite.

Kit. Kit. Kit.

Uh-oh. Thrice Kit.

Why race through the icy lanes on a freezing night?

Why? Why? Why?

And then Kit’s Irish Setters come bounding up and Moss thinks about how they’re not good gundogs and I think about where the fuck you find a gun-shy Irish Setter, especially if you’re as into game shooting as Kit apparently was.

I want to be back in London.

I want to be back near her.

My thoughts keep returning to my sweet daily, with her dark eyes, her beautiful face, and her extraordinary musical talent.

But not her personality, because they’ve yet to have any one-on-one conversation that wasn’t as employer and subordinate.

We jump into Demelssia’s POV, where she finds that The Mister is back early. First, we have to go through the endless repetition of arrival. The alarm is off. She’s happy about it. She takes off her boots. She goes to the laundry room (and it’s referred to as the laundry room several times in the book, I know some of you said that was an American term, but now I’m just confused as to why if there’s a laundry room, she was ironing in the scullery) and changes into her work clothes, etc. Every. Single Time. we have to read this same process over and over. Do they pay E.L. James by the word or something?

Anyway, she goes to dust and finds:

The Mister is here. Propped up on the L-shaped couch. Eyes closed, lips parted, hair mussed and standing on end, he’s fast asleep. He is fully dressed and still wearing his overcoat, though it’s open, revealing his sweater and jeans. His filthy boots are planted firmly on the rug. In the white light that swirls through the glass wall, Alessia spies the tell-tale trail of dried mud all the way back to the door.

How did she not notice this when she came in? I guess there’s a separate service entrance? But it’s never mentioned. And I’m sorry, but he tracked mud into the house and onto his rug? Who does that? Who does that? Ugh, this dude is filthy. Where did he get the mud from? Did he walk here from Cornwall?

She stares at him, enthralled, and moves closer, drinking him in. His face is relaxed but a little pale, his jaw is rough with stubble, and his full lips quiver with each breath. He looks younger and not quite as unattainable as he sleeps. If she dared, she could reach down and stroke the stubble on his cheek.

She’s looming over him, staring, and then he wakes up.

“There you are,” he mumbles, and his sleepy smile galvanizes her into action. She thinks he wants help to come to his feet, so she steps forward and takes his hand. All at once he tugs her down onto the sofa, kissing her quickly and curling his arm around her so that she’s resting on top of him, her head on his chest. He mutters something unintelligible, and she realizes he must still be asleep. “I missed you,” he murmurs, and his hand grazes her waist, then rests on her hip, holding her to him.

Is he asleep?

She lies paralyzed on top of him, her legs between his, her heart beating an insane rhythm, one hand still clutching the window-cleaning fluid and the cloth.

Now, here’s where I kind of held my breath, like, okay, she’s a trafficking survivor, we know she has been kidnapped, we know she’s afraid of men, this better not be played off as a cute scene.

She lies stiff and unyeilding on top of him, terrified and fascinated at the same time. But what if…? What if he…? All manner of horrible scenarios suddenly run through her mind and she closes her eyes to bring her anxiety under control.

So far, so good, right? She’s having a panicked reaction to her male employer grabbing her and pulling her into an intimate position.

Isn’t this what she wants? What she has been longing for in her dreams? What she secretly desires in her private moments?

Aaaaand bam. There it is. From “what if he rapes me?” to “wouldn’t that be okay since it’s what I want?”

Here’s the thing. I don’t believe that James writes stuff like this and thinks to herself, ah, I’ll make it sound like the heroine thinks about wanting to be raped. I think what happens is that she knows what she wants to put in a scene, but she doesn’t see the holes she’s leaving on the page. All she had to do to make it not sound like her heroine is thinking it would be okay to be raped because the dude is hot would have been to simply have Demelssia think something along the lines of how she feels she can trust him never to hurt her or that she’s shocked that she’s not as afraid of him as she would be of someone else, then maybe a thought about what she would do if he tried to make a move on her consensually. Something to reassure the reader and put distance between her wondering if he’s going to rape her and thinking, well, wouldn’t I like it? James is clearly a writer who reads what’s in her head and not what she’s written on the page. Everyone does that, to an extent, but it’s an editor’s job to catch it. If there were any editorial control, this probably wouldn’t have been an issue, but the reins are clearly off.

What makes it worse is that, without any thought as to why she feels comfortable or safe doing so, she continues to lay in his arms, captivated by a glimpse of his chest hair and his “familiar scent”, and kisses his skin. Words like, “thrilling” and “provocative,” and “delights” are all used to describe the feelings of this woman who only a page ago fleetingly worried that she might be raped. Considering she’s in a situation where she absolutely could be raped, that she’s already wary of men as a result of her kidnapping, there just needs to be more conflict here for it to be believable.

She wakes him up so he’ll let her go:

“Shit!” He sits up and gapes at her in utter dismay as she scrambles off him. But before she can run, he grabs her hand.

“Alessia!”

“No!” she shouts.

And he lets go immediately.

So, again, there’s some reaction here, some acknowledgment of her past trauma. He apologizes for his actions while asleep, and she keeps a distance between them. We’re whiplashing back and forth between, ooh, this is so sexy and romantic and aw, she’s so traumatized, but we’re touching more on on the sexy than the trauma.

Moss tells her he’s been driving all night and apologizes, too, for tracking in the mud. Instead of being annoyed that she’s going to have to clean mud out of a rug, Demelssia thinks about how he gave her that umbrella and helped her with her coat. So, she kneels down and takes off his muddy boots for him.

“You sleep now,” she says, and grasping his boots in one hand, she holds out the other to help him up.

He glances from her eyes to her fingers, his hesitation unmistakable. After a beat, he takes her hand, and she hauls him off the sofa. Gently she leads him down the hallway and into his bedroom. There she releases him, draws back the duvet from his bed, and points. “You sleep,” she says, and walks around him to the door.

Then she goes out into the hallway and has to lean against a wall to get her composure.

She’s gone from uncertainty and confusion to delight and wonder to compassion and assertiveness in the space of a few minutes.

Yes. We know. We were there.

She’s like well, you know, he was dreaming so he probably didn’t mean to grab me, and goes off to clean while we check in with Moss.

I stare at the closed bedroom door, feeling every shade of stupid known to man.

Oh? Are there perhaps…FIFTY of them?

E.L. James can never use the word “shades” again in any of her writing. It’s always going to make people think of Fifty Shades of Grey. She cursed herself there. It would be like Dan Brown writing a book about the Enigma Machine. It would be impossible. Readers would insert, “Da Vinci” every time he used the word “code.”

Oh my god. I just thought of what it would be like for E.L. James to get her nails done and I felt a deep and true stab of sympathy for her.

Anyway, Moss feels real, real bad about what he did to Demelssia. He thinks about how caring she was toward him, and he can’t remember any other time a woman did that.

I don’t remember any woman putting me to bed and leaving me….

And I frightened her.

So, he feels bad about that. But then he gets into bed and thinks:

As I shut my eyes, I find myself wishing she had undressed me completely and joined me…here.

Thanks for specifying the location.

Going from, “I scared her,” to “I wish she’d decided to fuck me after I scared her,” ain’t a great look, Moss.

There’s a section break to indicate time passage and Moss wakes “with a start.” I swear to Christ, nobody can just wake up in one of James’s books. They’re in a constant state of alarm, just from opening their eyes. He’s missed a call from Caroline and finds his wallet and a condom on the bedside table and he’s like:

Fuck. A. Duck.

The phrase so nice, she had to use it twice.

Just kidding! It’s a phrase so nice, she has to use it…thrice. It shows up one more time, later.

He notices she cleaned up the clothes he left on the floor and doesn’t have a thought about how that meant she was in his room while he was naked. Just that he doesn’t like the idea of her emptying anyone else’s pockets, so maybe he should hire her full time.

Ah, the possessiveness. I knew it. I knew it would be back.

I wonder what time it is. There are no shimmers on the ceiling. Glancing out the window, I see nothing but a wall of white.

OH GOD THE THAMES HAS BEEN ERASED.

Nah, it’s a blizzard. So, it’s like 1:45 in the afternoon and Demelssia is still there cleaning. He goes out and finds her and apologizes again, and asks how she’s going to get home in the snow. The trains to West London probably aren’t running, he tells her and then checks to make sure.

“They’ve suspended all services.”

“Sus-pen-ded?” Her brow creases.

Oh, she doesn’t understand.

“The trains aren’t running.”

“Oh.” She frowns again, and I think I hear her say “suspended” several times under her breath, her lips forming the word.

The rage builds inside of Jenny like pressure in an Instant Pot. She cannot wait to hit the release valve.

Moss offers to let her stay at his apartment and she’s like, no, I have to go home. He asks her how she plans to get there, and she says she’ll walk. He tells her he’ll drive her, and he won’t take “no” for an answer.

We go to Demelssia’s POV while Moss goes to get his shoes on.

She will be alone in a car with him.

Is this okay?

What would her mother say?

A vision of her mother with her arms crossed and her face etched in meek disapproval comes to her mind.

And her father?

Instinctively she cups her cheek.

No. Her father would not approve.

Her father had approved of only one man.

A cruel man.

No. Do not think of him.

So, her father was abusive, too. The abusive situations are stacking up in such a way that it’s going to take a lot more skill than the author has to pull off a believable trust between the protagonists.

Moss told her she could play the piano while he gets dressed, so she sits down and does so.

Her memories of her father, her six days of homelessness, and her mother’s disapproval are lost in the whirling, icy colors of the music.

Then we go to Moss’s POV, where once again he’s watching her and being mesmerized by her, etc., then imagines her naked with her hair unbraided. I’m skimming a lot of this because the descriptions and interactions aren’t all that different from what we’ve seen before, including once again being in awe that she, an accomplished pianist, is able to memorize music, which is, you know. Part of being an accomplished pianist.

She stands, and it’s the first time I’ve seen her out of that hideous housecoat. My mouth dries. She’s slimmer than I’d thought, but her delicate curves are all woman.

Just say she has curves in all the right places. This is already fanfic.

“How old are you?” I ask in a sudden panic.

“I have twenty-three years.”

Old enough. Good.

For what? Old enough for what? She’s not having sex with you. She’s never implied that she wants to have sex with you.

As they go down to the garage, Moss thinks about how Demelssia doesn’t trust him, blah blah, but he’s all overwhelmed with lust for her, too. We find out he drives an F-Type Jaguar, which I’m on board with, but he also has a Land Rover, which I’m less on board with but grateful that he chooses it instead of the Jaguar for the blizzardy weather. The interior is a total wreck, which I am also on board with. I swear to Christ, my car had ants once. #TeamMessyCar

He has to instruct her to use a seatbelt.

“Oh.” She’s surprised. “We don’t wear these where I come from.”

Albania has a seatbelt law. I looked it up.

So, obviously, he thinks she doesn’t get to ride in cars much.

You know. Because she’s from rural Eastern Europe. Hey, that makes zero sense! People in rural areas are more likely to own cars than people in cities with mass transportation! Like, I realize that after the fall of communism in the region, Albania went a little bit in reverse, but Jesus Christ. People have cars and seatbelts.

As they drive, Moss asks Demelssia what brought her to London and she shuts the fuck down.

Something is off. Way off.

He doesn’t press the issue and changes the subject to the piano:

“I wanted to ask you, how do you remember each piece so well?”

In the article I linked in an earlier recap, James said she gives her characters the ability to play piano because she never learned and wished she had. I wish she would have done basic research about it.

Demelssia tells him that she sees the music in colors and that helps her remember.

I’ve heard of this. “Synesthesia.”

“Syn-a-thee–” She stops, unable to pronounce the word.

“Synesthesia.”

She tries again, with a little more success. “What is this?” she asks.

“You see musical notes as colors.”

She is a musician.

She has to have heard of synesthesia before.

The word for synesthesia is practically the same in Albanian as in English.

She would be able to pronounce it.

There’s a section break and they arrive at Magda’s house, where Moss sees Michal and asks if it’s Demelssia’s boyfriend. She’s like, no, he’s Magda’s fourteen-year-old son. Moss apologizes for grabbing her again, and she’s like, no prob, you were dreaming. Then she invites him in for tea:

“Do you want to come in and drink a cup of tea?”

and when he turns her down, she says:

“We have some coffee,”

So, she’s suddenly okay with articles and sentence order out of nowhere. I love the consistency.

But Moss still declines and tells her he’ll see her on Friday, and Michal frowns at him and that’s the end of the chapter.

My impression so far: Fuck. A. Duck.

Jealous Haters Book Club: The Mister chapter six or, “I am clearly stuck in a Groundhog Day-style time loop please send help.”

Sorry for the lateness of today’s recap. I chose self-care over work and took a nap and ate macaroni and cheese instead. Also, I started reading some Poldark recaps while researching a plot detail for this recap. They’re by Meghan O’Keefe and holy shit I’ve been laughing myself sick over the first two.

Oh, and shout out to all the Polish people in my comments. There are a lot of you!

Chapter six opens in Demelssia’s POV. Unlike every other day so far, she’s fucking thrilled to find that Moss is home.

Last night in her narrow bed, she’d dreamed of him again–malachite-green eyes, shining smile, and that expressive face–engrossed in his music as he played the piano. She’s woken breathless and full of desire.

Why is she so hot for him all of a sudden, when she was scared of him the first time they met?

He lent her that umbrella.

She’d not received much kindness since she came to London, except from Magda, of course, so his gesture meant that much more.

Look. I have never been a stranger in a strange land in any kind of permanent situation. So, I can’t state with absolute certainty that if someone gave me an umbrella, it wouldn’t make me fall deeply in love with them despite having no substantial interaction with them. But it does seem like she’s just a teensy bit too tragic if the kindness of lending her an umbrella is all it takes to get her circus-tent-sized panties to drop.

Again, this is a place where I can’t tell if it’s a true parallel or if I’m looking for things to liken to Poldark, but remember when Ross bought Demelza a cloak in the Masterpiece Theater version (the only version I know) and she was like, thanks, now I’m beholden to serve you forever?

Yeah. That. But an umbrella.

Hey, wanna see an arrangement of words that sums up everything E.L. James has ever written?

Oh, no!

A blond woman

There’s more to that sentence, explaining that the evil blonde temptress is in the kitchen making coffee wearing only a man’s shirt. The only way to deal with this shock that her employer who runs through a wastebasket-full of johnnies every night might have had sex with a woman is to abuse the fuck out of some italics.

Who is this woman with big blue eyes?

Why is she wearing his shirt?  A shirt Alessia had ironed for him only last week.

This woman is with him. She must be. Why else is she wandering around wearing his shirt? She must know him intimately.

Intimately.

I’m as shocked as you are that there wasn’t a third “intimately” tacked on there.

She realizes that he will never be interested in a woman like her.

This is her place. This is what she was raised to do: keep house and look after a man.

 

Now it’s time to go to Moss Troldark’s POV. In a poem I guess.

Alessia  stands in the doorway. A vision in blue.

Slowly she removes her scarf and lets

her plait swing free.

Shake your hair out for me.

She smiles.

Come in. Lie with me. I want you.

But she turns, and she’s in my drawing

room. Polishing the piano. Studying my score.

She’s wearing nothing but pink panties.

I reach over to touch her, but she disap-

pears.

She’s standing in the hall. Eyes wide.

Clutching a broom.

Naked.

She has long legs. I want them wrapped

around my waist.

I shit you not, it’s formatted with weird ass tabs in the middle of sentences. WordPress fucks with the line spacing, but I swear to everything that’s holy, the first lines of the paragraphs start like five spaces before the lines that follow. This is the worst poem ever. He could have summed it up better like,

Roses are red

Demelssia’s blue

I hate being an Earl

I’m gonna go out and do cocaine and fuck somebody probably.

Elizaline wakes Moss up with the promise of coffee and suggests they should go get breakfast or have her butler bring some over. She mentions that she met the new maid and that she’s very young. Then Elizaline tries to get Moss to have sex with her. She accuses him of hating her body, of finding someone else, and Moss is like, I thought you were on your period? You know, since you’re suddenly not pregnant. And Elizaline is like, you told me you don’t mind having sex when someone is on their period and this is the one credit I have to give E.L. James. So far, both of her heroes have been all about the period sex.

But Moss isn’t thrilled that Elizaline remembered that because he’s trying to politely decline sex with her and she is pushy as hell. She starts crying about how she and Kit wanted a baby and had been trying for two years and now, she has nothing.

Hey, Moss? You need to make sure your dick isn’t even in the same room as Elizaline. She’s already made a crack about how you’re too careful not to get anyone pregnant, now she’s aggressively trying to mount you and crying about wanting a baby. Is she even unpregnant? Was she not pregnant in the first place? I will not be surprised in the slightest if she turns out to be scheming a way into inheriting the estates or whatever via entrapment. She’s blonde, and this is an E.L. James novel.

Moss tells Elizaline that their days of grief-nookie are over. He’s like, you haven’t lost everything. You have enough money. I’m letting you stay in the house. I can give you a job.

“You’ll always have me, but not as a diversion, Caro–as a friend and a brother-in-law.”

Caroline sniffs and wipes her nose. She leans back and gazes at me with heartbreaking, watery blue eyes.

“It’s because I chose him, isn’t it?”

Um. Yeah. It’s…because you married his late brother. That’s kind of a big deal.

Elizaline demands to know who the new woman is who’s captured Moss’s attention because obviously, he doesn’t want to fuck her due to another woman and not because he came to his senses and went, huh, you know, I don’t think having sex with my dead brother’s wife just hours after his death was such a great choice, after all.

Moss takes a shower and gets ready to go to breakfast with Elizaline, but he’s super excited about seeing Demelssia before he goes.

She isn’t in the kitchen, so I venture to the scullery, where she’s ironing one of my shirts.

Is “scullery” even a term you guys use across the pond anymore? There are so damn many weird-ass, archaic words. Wastrel. Whoring. Plait instead of braid, scullery instead of the laundry room. How was this not a Poldark modern AU fanfic?!

Moss tells Demelssia to change the sheets in the guest room and that the woman in the house is his sister-in-law. He even introduces them. Elizaline is basically like, why the hell are you introducing me to your housekeeper, but she’s polite and asks where Demelssia is from. And then Moss asks why Demelssia is in London and Elizaline is like, let’s go. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be, “Let’s go,” because she’s callous about the poors or, “Let’s go,” because Demelssia clearly doesn’t want to answer him, but they leave.

In Demelssia’s POV, she thinks,

Sister-in-law.

Kunata.

As she returns to the ironing, she says the words out loud in English and Albanian, and the sound and meaning make her smile.

Remember for later that she’s practicing basic words like names for family members. Trust me. Rage is coming. No, seriously, it doesn’t matter how difficult the language is to grasp. You will rage.

She does her chores and is psyched that the spare bed actually was used. She’s also super extra-psyched to find there are no condoms in the wastebasket. But like. That really doesn’t rule out the possibility that he might have rawed his brother’s wife all over the house.

In Moss’s POV again (just a few paragraphs later), Moss and Elizaline are in a cab. She asks him point blank if the new woman he’s with is Demelssia. Moss denies it and asks Elizaline why her butler, who arranged the first housekeeper for Moss, didn’t tell him there would be a new one, but Elizaline is just like, stop being so fucking weird about your housekeeper.

What I really want is information about Alessia Demachi. I process what I know. Fact one, she’s Albanian, not Polish. I know very little about Albania. What brings her to the UK? How old is she? Where does she live? Does she travel far each morning? Does she live alone?

I could follow her home.

Nope.

Stalker!

I could ask her.

There you go, buddy.

Moss finally admits to himself that he wants to bang his housekeeper, but he knows he can’t, specifically because she’s his housekeeper. Only, he doesn’t think he wants to bang her, he thinks he wants to “bed” her and then I assume he adjusts his tricorn hat. He decides that Demelssia just doesn’t like him, and Caroline agrees:

“She seems terrified of you,” Caroline observes.

So, we have outside confirmation here that Demelssia seems terrified. Not in her POV anymore, for some reason, but she’s still telegraphing terror.

Elizaline is all, she’s got the hots for you, that’s why she doesn’t want to be around you, and again, maybe I’m looking for shit to compare to Poldark, but the first time Elizabeth meets Demelza, it’s the same kind of stilted, oh no, he’s into her, I have to leave this room immediately kind of moment.

In other reasons to dislike Elizaline, she scolds Moss for giving too large a tip to the cab driver.

Inside the restaurant, Elizaline complains about being expected to work for a living, which makes no fucking sense since we already know that she’s rich and has a free house. They talk about how it’s only been two weeks since Kit was buried and Elizaline isn’t ready to have a job yet, and we jump forward to Moss coming home.

I’ll give you negative-six guesses as to what he’s going to find.

Quietly I close the door, but as I stand in the hallway, it becomes apparent that the music is not coming from the sound system. It’s from my piano. Bach. Light and fluid, played with a deftness and understanding I’ve only heard from concert-standard performers.

Alessia?

No, it’s the Ivory Tickling Bandit. He’s been on the loose in London, breaking into people’s houses and giving unsolicited concerts.

She is seated at the piano in her housecoat and scarf, swaying a little, completely lost in the music, her eyes closed in concentration as her hands move with graceful dexterity across the keys. The music flows through her, echoing off the walls and ceiling in a flawless performance worthy of any concert pianist. I watch her in awe as she plays, her head bowed.

She is brilliant.

In every way.

Then she goes from the prelude to the fugue and he’s like, holy shit, she’s not even reading this off of sheet music, she’s doing this from memory.

Good God. She’s a fucking virtuoso.

Concert pianists memorize their repertoire. It’s literally part of the job. Every concert pianist is expected to.

He’s embarrassed that she plays so well and she read his composition. Then he thinks:

What the fuck is she doing cleaning when she plays like this?

IDK, Moss, why do immigrants with medical degrees end up sprinkling sawdust on puke in elementary schools? Oh, wait, ID-do-K. Xenophobia. Not to mention the fact that it’s not like music is a wide open field with paying jobs falling from the trees.

Oliver shows up and rings the doorbell, so Moss is totally caught spying. Demelssia panics and starts tearfully apologizing. She’s so upset, she can’t put her coat on.

“Hey, it’s okay. Here, let me help you with that.” My tone is gentle as I take hold of her coat. It’s every bit as cheap, thin, and nasty as it looks.

Maybe you should buy her a cloak.

The name Michal Janeczek is sewed into the collar. Michal Janeczek? Her boyfriend? My scalp prickles as little hairs on the back of my neck rise. Maybe this is why she doesn’t want to talk to me. She has a boyfriend.

Fuck. The disappointment is real.

I slip her jacket over her arms and shoulders.

Or maybe she simply doesn’t like me.

Good lord. I have my old diaries from middle school and high school and I guarantee I used the phrase, “Maybe he doesn’t like me” about ten thousand times less than Moss says it about Demelssia.

Demelssia vows she’ll never play the piano again, and Moss is like, you can play it any time you want.

She stares at the floor, and I can’t resist. Stepping forward, I reach out and gently tilt her chin so that I can see her face.

“I mean it,” I say. “Anytime. You play so well.” And before I can stop myself, I let my thumb trace her full bottom lip.

And then his body “responds” and he’s like, this is a mistake. Then she runs off and leaves her boots behind and he gets all distressed that they’re falling apart.

She must be penniless if this is what she’s wearing.

Isn’t it a step up from the not-having-shoes thing you thought in the last chapter? Like, did you think she was doing financially fine at that point?

Moss meets with Oliver, who’s like, uh, we don’t have any employment record for that girl. So, you know we’re going to find out she’s in the country illegally.

“Yes. How do you pay her? With cash?”

What the fuck is he implying?

“Yes. Cash,” I snap.

Oliver shakes his head. “You’re the Earl of Trevethick now. She’ll need to go on the payroll.”

“Why?”

Because taxes, dummy. Oliver basically says this, but in much more official terms like, “Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs,” and “work permit,” which I feel like literally, any human being over the age of twenty would already know, whether they went to college or not. “Don’t pay employees cash under the table, and especially don’t employ people illegally if they don’t have the right immigration status,” is pretty fucking basic stuff.

In Delmessia’s POV, she freaks out about the fact that he touched her and she got caught playing the piano and she left her boots behind and I’m basically skipping the entire section because it is 150% just Demelssia going, “Wow, this thing happened, and then this thing, and this thing, and that’s how I feel about it, yup!” because James couldn’t be bothered to write the scene from POV of the character who would have had the most dramatic reaction to it. But we do learn that soon, Magda and her son, Michal, will be moving to Canada, and Demelssia will be homeless. There’s also a mention of Michal’s Instagram and the selfies they took together, so, you know. Big Misunderstanding in three, two, one…

Back in Moss’s POV, we learn that he has to go visit the estates he’s just inherited and inspect them. And then there’s a fucking ton of repetition about how awful and social climbing his mother is, how devoted and good Kit was, and how Moss was not. More stuff about Kit being the favorite and Moss’s mom not loving her two other kids as much, etc. But if he goes away, he won’t get to see Delmessia, so he gets all spoiled about it and takes it out on Oliver.

And nobody ever mentions being able to see the Thames, so now I have no fucking clue where Moss lives.

My impression so far: Now we’re at the point where I realized the chapters were going to make me weary. So, so weary. If the story would just move along without all the repetition, it wouldn’t be so bad. But every chapter has the characters doing the exact same things:

Alessia:

Enters the apartment and notes whether or not the alarm is on.
Puts on her housecoat and scarf.
Does laundry.
Cleans his bedroom and notes whether or not there are condoms in the trash.
Gets freaked out by Maxim.
Plays the piano.

Meanwhile, Maxim:

Wakes up.
Thinks about how much he hates his new responsibilities.
Thinks about how great Kit was.
Thinks about how shitty he is, himself.
Meets with Oliver.
Turns down Caroline’s obvious attempts to seduce him.
Gets drunk.
Plays the piano.

It’s so boring because it just rolls on and on in the same way. At least the next chapter takes place at his mines in Cornwall.

No. I’m not joking.

Jealous Haters Book Club: The Mister, chapter five or, “The Song Remains The Same”

This was a longer chapter, so this is also a longer recap. I’m glad to see the grand tradition of wildly varying chapter lengths lives on.

P.S. Did you know that I’m actually tagging these entries like a good person? POSITIVELY REINFORCE ME WITH YOUR PRAISE FOR A THING I SHOULD HAVE BEEN DOING THE WHOLE TIME I’VE HAD A BLOG.

We open with Demelssia returning to the apartment the next day. When she finds that the alarm is disabled, she knows that Moss is home.

I’m not clear on the alarm being off meaning that he’s not home, but I’ve never been rich enough to live somewhere with an alarm. I got three dogs, that’s alarming enough. I guess if I were a rich person with an alarm, I would probably keep it armed when I was sleeping, just in case.

He has invaded her dreams ever since she’d seen him sprawled naked on his bed.

Wait, why are we going from present to past-perfect? Wouldn’t it be, “He has invaded her dreams ever since she saw him sprawled naked on his bed?”

Demelssia was so intimidated and thrilled by her sexy, shirtless employer, he’s all she’s got on her mind. It would be super unfortunate if something that’s supposed to be sexy happens today.

Her jeans are soaked from the torrential rain, too.

Oh no.

She shivers as she removes them and struggles into her housecoat, grateful that the plastic bag has kept it dry. The hem falls to below her knees, so that she’s not immodest without her jeans.

Yup. She was just soaked to the bone and had to take off her clothes and clean in a bathrobe today. Tee hee. Hope The Mister doesn’t see anything! Tee hee.

Zot! Turns out Moss is awake and he’s calling for her from the kitchen.

His smile is dazzling, lighting up his handsome face and his emerald eyes. She looks away, blinded by his good looks and embarrassed by her creeping blush.

She observes that he was “cross” when she saw him in the last chapter. Which…didn’t come across at all. I mean, I know she’s skittish of men due to her background, but their whole conversation seemed pretty cordial to me. Maybe if we’d seen the interaction in her POV, rather than his, this wouldn’t feel like an authorial “trust me, this is totally what you read” moment.

Why did Moss need to talk to her?

“Alessia?” he says again.

“Yes, Mister,” she answers, keeping her eyes lowered. At least he is dressed this time.

“I just wanted to say hi.”

And then he waits for her to say hi, and she does, and he walks out, straight into his own POV, dragging us along with him. Again, we get just the tiniest, inconsequential sliver of Demelssia’s POV before we move back to Moss.

Moss is kicking himself for being a nerd in front of her. He’s worried that since her feet are bare, she walked to his house barefoot. Like. I don’t want to be that person, but maybe examine how much you’re paying the people who work for you if you see one of them barefoot and think they must have walked shoeless through the pouring rain for want of shoes. Like, how little is she making cleaning this slob’s house that he’s not like, “Oh, her shoes were probably wet?” He jumps straight to, well, guess she can’t afford shoes. The people who work for you should be getting paid enough to afford shoes! That shouldn’t be a question that even enters your mind!

He realizes he makes her uncomfortable.

Is it me or is it men in general?

It’s a troubling thought. Maybe I’m the one who’s uncomfortable.

I wish James would have extrapolated more here. Imagine how likable Moss would have become if he had gone further with, “It’s a troubling thought,” and acknowledged that it’s not something he often thinks about because he’s a man and he doesn’t have to. Or he could have wondered, wow, what horrible past experience made her so afraid?

Instead, he leaps directly to his own discomfort.

After all, she chased me out of the flat last week and the idea that I fled to avoid her is disconcerting.

Okay, that didn’t happen, but I guess it’s too much work to scroll back up your Word .doc and make it happen. This makes it sound like they had some kind of confrontation that forced him to run away, but literally, the only exchange between them was him being like, who are you, why are you in my house, oh, you’re the housekeeper? Okay.

The lives of these characters must be so exhausting with this amount of manufactured drama coming from every simple interaction.

Moss goes on to talk about how much that exchange with Demelssia inspired him. He’s spent the whole weekend in seclusion, ignoring everyone and every obligation, just to compose. He wrote three piano pieces in one weekend. I need to get me a Demelssia, because holy cow, I could use that kind of break-neck productivity this week.

When he goes to his bedroom, he finally sees it the way other humans see it.

Bloody hell, I’m a slob.

I’ve been wondering why his dates haven’t noticed this, frankly. In the second chapter, his closet is described as basically just having clothes thrown everywhere. And what if he brings a woman back to his apartment on a day one of his dailies hasn’t been there? Do they just not notice that the floor is absolutely covered with clothes and junk?

In the grand tradition of people everywhere, he makes his bed before the cleaning lady can see it. Then he passes her in the hallway.

I regard her retreating figure in the shapeless housecoat: long pale legs, a gentle sway of slim hips…are those bright pink underpants I can see through the nylon? From beneath the headscarf a rich brunette plait snakes down her back to just above the line of her pink underwear, and it swings from side to side as she walks. I know I should look away, but I’m distracted by her underwear. They cover her backside and come up to her waist. They are possibly the largest knickers I’ve ever seen on a woman. And my body stirs like I’m a thirteen-year-old boy.

I love how one of the requirements for being the largest knickers he’s ever seen is that they cover her whole ass. It explains why they turn him on. He’s used to women in thongs, so this is something new and exciting.

We go back to Alessia’s POV now. And in case you were worried that yet another chapter might go by without mentioning that you can see the Thames from his apartment, fear not:

She opens the curtains fully and stares out at the river. “Thames.” She whispers the word aloud, her voice wavering a little.

She thinks about how different Albania was. She lived in an extremely rural area, with “fertile countryside and snow-capped mountains.” London is too crowded and urban for her, which makes sense; the population of London is larger than the population of the entire country of Albania. Like, over twice the size. And she misses her home, so this passage at least gives her a little more personality and conflict. She’s not in London because she wants to be.

This bothered me back when I was still enjoying reading the book:

She wonders if he’s going to be here all day, and the thought that he might bothers her. His presence will keep her from playing her favorite pieces.

But on the plus side, she gets to see him.

The man who’s been dominating her dreams.

What annoys me about this is that just a chapter ago, she was aching to play. She was willing to risk her employment to do so. Playing the piano is a part of her soul or something. And now there’s a hot guy and she’s like, well, just so long as I get to be around this man, I’m fine losing the rare chance I have to do the only thing that’s left from the life I miss desperately.

When Demelssia cleans the bathroom, the smell of his soap or cologne or whatever is clinging to the air and it gives her sexy thoughts that must be denied in triplicate:

Stop! Stop! Stop!

She finds the wastebasket is condom-free and that makes her happy. Then she checks out the photos he took of two sexy nude women. One of them is described as pale with blonde hair, so I’m wondering if we’ll find out that it’s a photo of Elizaline or something.

In Moss’s POV, he expresses dismay that he doesn’t know how to manage a farm, and I express my dismay that he doesn’t just hire someone who specializes in that shit. It’s not like these people don’t exist.

Kit had been reading economics at the LSE when our father died. Ever the dutiful son, he’d dropped out of the LSE and enrolled in the Duchy of Cornwall’s university to study farming and estate management. With thirty thousand acres to oversee, now I understand that it was a sensible decision.

I did the math. That means they own a whopping .01% of England. That’s not sarcastic. I’m saying that’s a lot. And way too much for one dude to keep track of, no matter where he went to school. That’s why people hire other people to oversee their shit.

You know what I wonder? I wonder if he can see the Thames from his apartment.

I stand and walk over to look at the view. On the river there are a couple of barges heading in opposite directions, a police lauch cruising east, and the river bus heading to Cadogan Pier.

Oh, thank god. I’m so glad he can see the Thames from his apartment. That question has been weighing on me.

He thinks about how he always wanted to go on the river bus, but his mother would never take him. IDK, dude, you live right by the river and you have a shit ton of money. Just go do it and heal your bullshit childhood wound.

I mean, that said, I prefer his bullshit childhood wound of not getting to go on a boat ride to the childhood wounds of his cousin Christian. Which, by the way, is what I decided. I decided that Chedward Grullen is Moss Troldark’s cousin on the maternal side. Anyway, I don’t think Moss is going to date someone who looks like his mother just so he can “beat the shit out of” her by proxy for never instructing his nanny to take him on a boat.

Moss sits down at the piano to play his compositions from the weekend, and we jump into Demelssia’s POV so we can, you know, see her react to Moss before jumping back into his head right away. But first, she thinks about how much nicer and cleaner and better his rich people kitchen is compared to her parents’ poor people kitchen. Then we get her reaction to the piano playing.

It’s from the manuscript she’s seen so many times on his piano, but the melody goes further than she’s read, the notes soft and sad, falling in mournful blues and grays around her.

Okay, I know someone will probably complain that her synesthesia matches up to the colors he thought about when he was writing the piece and all, but I demand we suspend disbelief for that point because it’s actually pretty romantic and I am grasping at straws to find anything original and interesting.

Cut to someone in the comments pointing out that it’s from some other, well-established piece of media, probably.

As she watches him–his brow furrowed, head tilted, lips parted–he takes her breath away.

She’s captivated.

By him.

Thanks for clearing that up.

By the music.

Oh.

He’s talented.

Can we move on?

She thinks about how he’s the most handsome man she’s ever seen, then remembers another man, one with ice-blue eyes, and it’s a painful memory she doesn’t want to revisit. But now she has to clean the living room, where Moss still is. He’s stopped playing and is sitting at his computer when she comes in, so now that he’s not at the piano with his eyes closed, you know what that means.

It’s time to go back to his head.

Moss can’t concentrate at all with Demelssia there in her provocative housecoat and Hanes-Her-Way underpants.

She moves to plump the black scatter cushions on the couch, and her housecoat swings forward and stretches out across her backside, betraying the pink underwear beneath.

My breathing shallows, and I have to surpress a groan.

I’m a fucking pervert.

Pretty much, if you’re sitting there watching your cleaner, who you already know is kind of unsettled by you, and getting turned on. This scene would have been so much more important in Demelssia’s POV. In the next POV switch, we learn that she was aware he was watching her, and we get her thoughts on it, but getting those thoughts in the moment is more important than hearing about how Moss gets an erection watching her polish the piano:

With a deliberate and even pace, she works her way around the piano, bufffing and polishing, her breathing becoming faster and harder with the exertion. It’s agonizing. I close my eyes and imagine how I could elicit the same response from her.

She looks at his sheet music and he wonders if she knows how to read it, and then she sees him watching her and he sees that she sees and she licks her lip and it’s all supposed to be unbearably erotic except, you know, I keep coming back to the fact that she’s literally your cleaning lady who has do these things in front of you while you sexualize them and you think she’s doing it for so little pay that she can’t afford shoes.

He gets a phone call and steps out of the room, thinking:

Hell, I promised myself that I wouldn’t let her chase me out again.

But…that isn’t…is my copy of the book missing key sentences or something? You got a phone call and left the room, you didn’t run away or get chased out.

Now that the piano polishing scene is over, we get the instant replay from Demelssia. She acknowledges that Moss had been watching her, but she doesn’t have any sort of response to it besides thinking that he must have been making sure she was cleaning correctly because he certainly couldn’t have been looking at her for any other reason. She, however, is all hot and bothered.

You know.

The way women are when they’re alone in a house with a man who is creepily watching them and also signs their paycheck. And they’re already afraid of men in the first place.

I mean, okay, I guess I have to suspend disbelief on this point because yeah, she’s the love interest and they’re going to be in love, but the idea that she’s unsettled by his presence isn’t nearly as effective as would be some kind of indication that his presence makes her feel safe or something.

Let me divert just a second here for a quick romance writing suggestion: if you give your characters needs that can only be filled by each other, it works better than trying to force two characters together who don’t fulfill each other’s needs. We saw this in Fifty Shades, that Ana fulfilled Christian’s need to…cause pain to women who looked like his mom, gross, but he didn’t fulfill any of her needs. When she explicitly expressed them to him, he gave excuses as to why he would not meet her needs based on his own personal wants and desires. We were supposed to be happy that Ana’s love saved Christian, but we were never supposed to examine the part where Ana had to overcome her fear of Christian to do so. That book could have been saved from so many pitfalls if Ana simply had felt safe with Christian, or if he had fulfilled some other need that made the relationship worth staying in, but there was nothing. No incentive at all for her. Here, with Demelssia, it would be so much more poignant and her attraction would be so much more believable if he was the only man she’d met in London who didn’t make her afraid, rather than, “I’m so afraid of him and he’s so hot, I can’t stop thinking of him.”

Demelssia thinks about how her mom would be scandalized at the idea of her daughter ogling a sexy guy. Moss has to go out, so he tells Demelssia that her money is on the table, and she’s like, yes, finally, I get to play the piano. But it’s still raining so Moss offers to loan her an umbrella.

“You’re welcome to borrow this. It’s still raining cats and dogs outside.”

Cats and dogs?

This stopped me. Why wouldn’t she be able to get from the context that it’s an idiom? Why is she confused, rather than going, “Huh, what a weird expression?” There’s a saying I heard in France years ago, that I had to take from context. It was something like being in the salad, and it was like, I heard it and went, “Oh, okay, that’s telling a lie, what a weird way to say it.” I always think it’s weird when we choose to show ESL speaking people being confused by idioms or figurative speech as if the concept doesn’t exist in any other language. And again, as we go on we’ll get even more enraged about Demelssia’s Amelia Bedelia approach to English.

As soon as Moss leaves, Demelssia sits at the piano and we whip right back into Moss’s head, where he congratulates himself on loaning her an umbrella.

I am ridiculously pleased with myself. I’m finally able to help her with this small gesture. I’m not accustomed to doing good deeds–though I probably have an ulterior motive for my kindness, a motive I don’t want to analyze too deeply right now, as it might confirm I’m the shallow fucking bastard I think I am.

Like, as the book goes on, I find Moss less and less likable, specifically for things like this. Before, he thought she didn’t have any shoes. So he lent her an umbrella. And now he’s patting himself on the back about how he did this wonderful thing for her. Bro, you thought she didn’t have any SHOES.

There’s a section break and he’s done with his meeting. Walking with Oliver through the construction on the building project Moss just inherited, he’s dismayed that Oliver won’t refer to him by his first name.

“Oliver. It’s Maxim. Please use my name. You used to. Before.”

“Very good, my lord.”

Remember when this same author wrote an entire five-book series in which the hero refused to call the heroine the name she specifically asked him to call her until she finally gave up trying? And it was endearing and romantic? Weird how when it’s a guy doing it to another guy, it’s a real issue.

Moss suggests that Elizaline could do the interior designing for the model apartment, and Oliver is kind of cagey on the idea, so Moss says he’ll consider some other people, too. Then he goes home and plays the piano and thinks of Demelssia more.

Who would have thought I’d be so attracted to a woman in a nylon housecoat and large pink panties?

The panties are quickly becoming the Thames of her ass, they’re mentioned so often.

How could she have worked her way under my skin in such a short time? I know nothing about her, except she’s unlike any woman I’ve ever met. The women in my life are bold and confident and know what they want and how to ask for it. She’s not like that.

Because she’s working for you. She can’t be “bold” and ask for what she wants. What she wants is to keep her job, and boldness and confidence are like, antithetical to keeping a job as a domestic. He thinks yet again that maybe she knows how to read music…like at this point, it’s basically a complete recap of the boring, over-long scenes we’ve just read. We get it. Let’s move on.

To Demelssia’s POV. She sleeps on a folding cot in a teensy room at Magda’s house, much in the way Demelza slept in a cupboard in Ross’s house but WHATEVER. She starts thinking sexy thoughts and touching herself.

She gasps, embracing her fantasy, and her hand moves farther down, and she imagines that it’s his hand on her.

Touching her.

Here.

I’m sorry, I think you meant, “down there.”

She thinks of him as her body builds.

Climbing.

Higher.

His face.

His back.

 

I’m sorry. Please still love me.

Anyway, she thinks of him in such erotic terms as “behind” that she comes and falls asleep.

In Moss-vision, he’s having a sexy dream about Demelssia polishing the piano in only her panties. This is a little…

Okay, I know I’m supposed to have a huge problem with the power imbalance of an employer-employee relationship, but I really love that trope. Like, I love it so much. The issue I have with this one is like…she’s a human trafficking survivor (spoiler alert, sorry) who doesn’t speak the language of the country she’s in, is tragically impoverished, and is terrified of losing her job. I feel like if we removed even one of those, I would be able to enjoy the romance more. For example, off the top of my head, the human trafficking part, which becomes a very euuurgh situation as the book progresses. I’m trying to not get ahead of us here, but anyway. I just feel like the power imbalance way, way too wide for him to be having sex dreams (and then beating off to them) about his housekeeper doing her housekeeping job. It stretches the appeal of the trope way too far.

So, now let’s get into “Jenny is super fucking confused and wonders if she missed something, or if this is just classic E.L. James.” The next day, Moss goes to the office where the estates are managed. He calls it, “our offices,” and mentions that he’s trying to concentrate, but:

[…]I’m concious that the door to Kit’s office is ajar. It’s distracting. I cannot bring myself to work in there yet. I can almost hear him talking on the phone or laughing at one of my poor jokes berating Oliver about some transgression. I half expect him to bound in off the street. He was so at ease in this world and in charge of his domain.

So, maybe I’m just misreading it, but it sounds like these are things that happened often, and that’s why Moss remembers them? Or is there something I’m just not getting? Because it sounds like Moss straight up has an office in this building and used to hear his brother talking on the phone or laughing and there was this rapport that’s now missing in the office setting?

I stand over Kit’s lifeless, fractured body with the A&E doctor.

Yes, this is him, I confirm.

Thank you, Lord Trevethick, she murmurs.

It’s the first time anyone had used the title.

Now look. I’ve checked in with several people who are from honest-to-God England. And they have reasonably assured me that a random doctor in an emergency room isn’t going to be so well-versed with the peerage that they would immediately title switch. This isn’t like the dude is the crown prince and the king just died. And according to two of the people I polled, nobody even gives a shit who is an earl or not anymore.

Moss and Oliver talk about the estates and how most of the nobility is poor now, but not them. He talks about the ways the various properties make money, and this is one of them:

Tyok in Northumberland is rented out lock, stock, and barrel to a rich American who fancies himself a lord.

I will go to my grave believing this person is Chedward Grullen and his lovely wife Anabella.

While they talk about business, Moss thinks about Demelssia until he gets a text from Elizaline. It reads, I shit you not:

I’m not pregnant. :'(

I have nothing of Kit’s.

Not even his child.

Reader, I died laughing at that crying face.

Moss immediately cancels the workday and texts Elizaline to tell her he’s on his way over, but she wants to go out to a club, instead. Not like, you know. A dance club. A private club where you have to be a member and all that. He meets her and she’s in a real state, wearing Kit’s sweater and walking around with puffy eyes and messy hair. She asks Moss why she hasn’t seen him over the weekend and asks if he’s met someone. Moss denies it, but Elizaline sees through him, especially when he tells her that he spent the whole weekend alone. He finally confesses:

“There is someone. But she doesn’t know I exist.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes. Seriously. It’s nothing. Just a flight of fancy.”

Caroline frowns. “This is not like you. You’re never distracted by one of your, um…conquests.”

I can’t help my hollow laugh. “She’s not a conquest–not by any stretch of the imagination.”

Then they decide to get food, and they raise their glasses to toast Kit.

There’s a section break and we rejoin them as they drunkenly arrive at Moss’s apartment. Elizaline asks for cocaine and Moss is like, I don’t have any, which makes me wonder what quantity he’s buying in, because didn’t he just have some earlier in the week that nobody wanted to do with him? Like, IDK, Moss, but maybe it wasn’t your housekeeper that inspired you to such heights of productivity over the weekend.

Elizaline asks Moss to take her to bed and he’s like, sure, the guest room is open. Which is not what she wants to hear.

“Don’t. Please don’t cry.” I pull her back into my embrace. “We can’t do this anymore.”

Since when have scruples stopped me fucking?

 

Earlier in the book, it seemed like they might, at least where Elizaline was concerned. You were trying not to have sex with her when you picked up Leticia.

There’s a section break again and it’s the middle of the night. Elizaline won’t take no for an answer and gets into bed with Moss, but he’s still like, hard pass. He lets her sleep in his bed, though, so you can guess where chapter six is going.

My impression so far: At this point, I was getting a little tired of the repetition. Nothing is really happening aside from Maxim doing earl things, playing piano, and watching Alessia clean. All Alessia does is explain what she’s doing so that we can go back to Maxim’s POV and see him experience the thing she’s doing, then we pop back to Alessia thinking about how hot it was when Maxim experienced the thing. It’s like she’s only there to set up Maxim’s attraction to her, then swiftly step out of the way. The further we go in the story, the less I feel connected to Alessia. She’s beginning to feel like an annoying, boring distraction from the story going on with Maxim. Sadly, it kind of seems like the author felt the same way.

JEALOUS HATERS Book Club: The Mister, Chapter Four or “Demelssia Vision”

Entertainment Weekly interviewed E.L. James about The Mister. And boy o’howdy, it’s really something else.

Entertainment Weekly: 50 Shades rather famously began as fan-fiction. Was there a particular work of pop culture or literature that inspired The Mister?

No, not really. The only inspiration I can say about this work is the hundreds of historical romances that I read over the years. […] There’s no direct inspiration. It’s a story that’s been hanging around in my head for a wee while. […]

There are a lot of gems in this interview, including James saying that she categorizes The Mister as an erotic romance because the sex scenes are descriptive and the “darkness” doesn’t come from within the characters (it’s not an erotic romance and that’s not what the definition of erotic romance is in the first place), and how she doesn’t want to be a part of conversations about on-page consent or our cultural treatment of women’s entertainment, but this was my favorite part:

Why do you think people love to hate on your work? Is there an element of they just can’t stand seeing a woman be so successful?

I think there’s an element of that yeah. I did it in my spare time, having fun, writing for myself. And I think that really pisses people off sometimes.

So, there you have it. Jealous Haters. I hereby remove The Mister from the Second Chance Book Club and rename it an emergency selection of the Jealous Haters Book Club.

Gavel noise.

The chapter opens with a “Dios mio!” No, sorry. A “Zot!” Demelssia interprets Moss’s confusion as anger. Through her eyes, we get another description of how hot Moss is:

Alessia freezes as his blazing green eyes meet her. Tall, lean, and half-naked, he towers over her. His hair is an unruly chestnut mess with gold highlights that glint beneath the chandelier in the hallway. He is as broad-shouldered as she remembers, but the tattoo on his upper arm is far more intricate than she recalls; all she can distinguish is a wing. A smattering of hair on his chest tapers down over a toned stomach. Then resumes beneath his navel and travels farther down into his jeans. The tight black denim is ripped at the knee. But it’s the hard line of his full lips and his eyes, the color of spring, in a handsome, unshaven face that make her look away.

First of all, I shared this passage with Bronwyn Green yesterday and her immediate response was, “Aidan Turner doesn’t have green eyes.” This was an incredibly on-brand remark for her to make. But here’s where I’m going to nitpick, from a craft perspective. Demelssia already knows how hot his body is. The reader already knows because we saw him through Demelssia’s POV. What we needed here was some comparison from Demelssia about how he looks awake vs. how he looks when he’s asleep. Are his eyes more intense? Is his expression harder? Does he seem so much bigger and more overwhelming when he’s standing in front of her, as opposed to when he’s lying in his bed? There’s nothing wrong with throwing in how hot a character is, but do it in a way that actually engages the reader beyond, “This guy was sexy two days ago and he’s still sexy now.”

Further proof that this little scene is there solely to remind the reader that they’re supposed to feel some sort of sexual tension between the characters with minimal authorial effort? Demelssia then thinks how attractive he is, worries he’s mad that she’s woken him up, and then worries she’ll get fired. That’s it, and we jump back into Moss’s POV. Which is a huge mistake; we haven’t hardly spent any time with her. We’ve been in Moss’s head for a while, so we can already kind of anticipate his reaction to finding her there. She can’t anticipate his reaction, therefore, her POV is going to be far more interesting and create way more tension than his.

Get out your Fifty Shades of Grey bingo cards:

Who the hell is this timid creature standing in my hallway? I’m completely bemused.

Don’t worry, all your old favorites are going to be here, I promise.

Let’s find out what Demelssia looks like:

An image from a forgotten dream developes like a Polaroid in my memory, an angel in blue hovering at my bedside. But that was days ago. Could it have been her? And now she’s here, rooted to the hallway floor, her impish face pale, her eyes downcast.

And:

Wide eyes, the color of a fine espresso and framed by the longest lashes I’ve ever seen, look up at me, then back at the floor.

Shit!

Even though I was still enjoying this book at this part, I did laugh at this. Who’s like, “Oh, that person has pretty eyes. Shit!” What is this extreme negative reaction about?

She’s at least a head shorter than me, perhaps five feet five to my six feet two. Her features are delicate: high cheekbones, an upturned nose, fair skin, pale lips. She looks like she needs a few days in the sun and a good hearty meal.

That last part is definitely something a person would say if they were a modern human being in this Year of Our Lord 2019 and not in, like, early 19th century Cornwall.

Her even white teeth chew at her upper lip as she refuses to meet my gaze.

Her upper lip? Sorry, this is all I’m seeing:

 

My whole body tightens in a hot, heavy rush as desire hits me like a demolition ball.

Fuck a duck!

No, you read that right. Yes, it’s in the book like that. No, I didn’t leave anything out in between those lines. Absolutely, the hero of this novel said “Fuck a duck!” because he got turned on. That is a real thing a human person wrote.

Anyway, he figures that she must be related to his cleaning lady, since she’s there, cleaning, and obviously, if she’s cleaning the house, she probably can’t speak English and I guess all immigrants apparently must be related. No shit, here’s what happens in his head:

Krystyna’s mastery of English extended to the words “yes” and “here,” which often meant lots of gesticulating on my part when I needed her to undertake tasks that went beyond her usual cleaning routine. This girl is probably Polish, too.

“I am cleaner, Mister,” she whispers, her eyes still downcast and her eyelashes fanned out above her luminous cheeks.

So, he sees a woman with a broom in her hand, assumes she’s foreign, and then she’s like, hey, let me throw some stilted English at you to confirm it. And I bring this up because we’re going to monitor her English as we go forward here. There is going to be a moment, not today, not this week, but soon, soon enough that you’ll regret it, that her speech patterns will be cause for such rage that your fury could heat the forges of a thousand dwarven mines.

Demelssia tells Moss that Krystyna went back to Poland, that Demelssia has been in England “since three weeks,” and, when prompted, that she speaks English:

“Yes. I speak English. My name is Alessia Demachi. I have been in your apartment since ten o’clock this morning.”

Wow. She really does speak English.

If you’re that impressed, Moss, wait until you hear what language you speak!

I’m skipping quite a few chunks of him talking about how entrancing her eyes are in between asking questions and getting aroused over and over. It falls into this clunky face-expletive-arousal combo that gets caught on a loop. No, seriously. Backtracking a moment:

[…]regarding me with large, liquid brown eyes. Eyes I could drown in. My mouth dries as my body comes to attention again.

Fuck!

And then:

Her lips are now rosy, her bottom lip plumper than her top, and she licks the upper one again.

Hell!

I’m aroused once more.

He’s so confused and disturbed by his incomprehensible horniness over her that he introduces himself as Maxim instead of Trevethick or Trevelyan, then announces that he’s going to the gym. As he walks away, we jump back into Demelssia’s POV, so that we can see him walking away.

She watches the flex and pull of the muscles on his back–right down to the two dimples that show just above the waistband of his jeans. It’s a distracting sight–very distracting.

The hits keep coming. It’s [adjective]. Very [adjective].

Demelssia, still interpreting Moss’s overwhelming passion for anger, is worried she’ll be fired and then she won’t be able to play the piano. I know that some of you have said in the comments that you hate that she plays his piano because it’s unprofessional or you’d hate someone touching your instruments, which I get, but this is really something I don’t find all that egregious. Demelssia is a musician with no instrument and I understand what that temptation would be so strong that she would risk everything just to play again. And I’m happy that she has at least something she cares about that makes her seem like a person; Ana never cared about anything passionately enough to focus on it as a character trait.

Just for funsies, let’s take a minute to tally up the things we know about both our hero and our heroine at this point:

Moss Troldark:

Tall, dark, and handsome
Newly-made earl
Uses sex as a workout
Uses workouts to escape his own head
Has at least one friend, Tom
Lost his virginity to his sister-in-law
Loved and envied his brother
Has a mom and a sister (this was in chapter three but I didn’t mention it)
Plays piano, guitar, and DJs
Is also a model and photographer
Has a tattoo
Can see the Thames from his apartment

Demelssia Carmachi:

Is fleeing a horrible past
Plays piano
Has synesthesia
Knows somebody named Magda
Speaks English
Knows were the old housekeeper went, I guess

Demelssia is basically just here to describe how hot Moss is and to worry that maybe she won’t get to play his piano anymore.

After Moss leaves, Demelssia goes to his room to clean:

She wonders why there’s a wide silk ribbon tied to the headboard but unwinds it and places it on his nightstand next to the cuffs.

Is this…is this Mrs. Jones’s origin story?

After Demelssia wonders what the cuffs are for, we whiplash back to Moss’s POV. And he’s so mad, he has to curse in threes:

Bugger. Bugger. Bugger.

He can’t stop thinking of the intriguing young woman in his apartment and his body “clenches” a lot. IDK about anyone else, but when my “body clenches” on the treadmill, it means I need to move my workout to the bathroom if you catch my drift. Maybe that’s the case with Moss, too, because he stops the treadmill and moves on to weights, where he blames his attraction to the new housekeeper on his grief and stress.

And then we’re back in Demellsia’s POV. She’s in the laundry room, doing the ironing, when she hears Moss come back and leave again. Now, everyone needs to understand something, if you’re just joining us here at Trout Nation for the first time: I am a mother of two. My son is sixteen. My daughter is ten. What happens next made my blood boil. BOIL.

Once done, she goes to check his bedroom to see if he has left it in a mess. Sure enough, his gym clothes are scattered on the floor.

Are. You. Kidding. Me.

He knows she just cleaned his bedroom because earlier in the chapter he tells her she can start there. Plus, you know, he’d have come back to a clean bedroom. And he just throws his shit on the floor? Knowing that someone was just there and just cleaned it?

I’ll tell you another story. When I was a teenager, my mom used to pay a local lady to clean our house once a week. She was a short, round woman with long, dyed-red hair cut into a magnificently feathered mullet that reached her waist in the back. She enjoyed renaissance fairs and smoking Newport 100s while she cleaned. There was a tattoo on her hand. When I, all of twelve years old, asked her about the tattoo, she said, “Hell if I know! I had to have another party the next weekend just to find out how I got the damn thing!” She said this with her ever-present cigarette defying gravity on her bottom lip. The ash was at least an inch long. This woman would have, without any doubt, taken those sweaty gym clothes and crammed them into the fucking piano, then set it on fire.

That’s what Alessia should do.

But obviously, she does not. Because she wants to keep her job and she likes the piano. So, she sits down and plays it and we jump back to Moss’s POV. He’s going to lunch with his mother and his sister, Maryanne. They hug and almost cry before they get a table. And because this is an E.L. James novel, every unnamed female character must immediately make obvious her desire to spread for the hero:

“Two Bloody Marys,” I say to the hostess as she hands us each a menu and gives me a coy look, which I don’t return. She might have a fine arse and a cute smile, but I’m not in the mood to play.

I wonder what weird alternate reality E.L. James lives in where women just working their normal jobs outrageously and overtly flirt with every male in their path. This happened consistently in all the Fifty Shades books. No matter where Ana and Christian went together, a woman in tight clothing or wearing “too much” of some kind of makeup provided customer service that was a little too friendly, giving Ana a moment of triumph every time their sleazy seduction attempts failed to entice where her purity and shyness succeeded. And yes, while I usually warn against inferring things about a writer’s personality based on their fiction alone…it kind of seems like you wouldn’t want to be a pretty young woman waiting on James and her husband at a restaurant.

Oh, and like every single interaction with unnamed female characters in the service industry in the Fifty Shades series, this hostess “leaves with a disappointed pout.”

Moss’s sister has just returned from Cornwall (cue theme music) and he asks how the “Dowager” is. It’s what they call their mother, for some reason, even though she hates it. Maryanne says it’s difficult to tell what’s going on with their mother, but it seems like she’s hiding something. Maryanne, we learn, is a doctor.

She had followed her vocation, a calling that was born the day our father suffered a massive coronary and died from a heart attack. She was fifteen years old–and she wanted to save him. Our father’s death rocked each of us differently, and Kit most of all, given that he’d had to drop out of college and assume the earldom.

Maybe at this point, I’m just looking for similarities between these characters and Poldark characters, but Ross Poldark’s cousin, Verity, nurses her father after the heart attack that leaves Francis (Kit) the heir to Trenwith. This is one of those things where it would be a reach if “heart attack” and “female relative” were the only things this book had in common with the material it ripped off, but also doesn’t feel strong enough to include with all the other details, either, for fear of watering down the other similarities with accusations of nitpicking.

Their mother, Rowena, Countess of Trevethick, is a model-turned-magazine editor who jets between London and New York frequently and married the late Earl for his money and title. He loved her, she left him, the divorce caused his heart attack. There is not a lot of love between Moss and his mom as a result. I get it. She does not come off loveable or warm or motherly. When she finds out that Caroline isn’t getting anything in the will, Rowena says:

“You can’t let the poor girl starve. On the other hand, she has her trust fund, and when her father shuffles off his mortal coil, she’ll inherit a fortune. Kit chose wisely in that regard.”

Wait, Caroline already has a bunch of money? And she’s worried she’s going to be on the street because why?

Rowena suggests that Moss hire Elizabeth–sorry, I meant Caroline, obviously–to work on a housing development Kit had been overseeing when he died. Moss is like, hey, why don’t we let Caroline run her own life? And we find out that his name is actually Maximilian. So, when someone had to pick a short form of his name, rather than “Max” they went with…

Okay.

There’s apparently going to be a memorial service for Kit, and Rowena wants to hire one of her staff writers to come up with a eulogy, but Maryanne offers to do it. I’m on chapter seven and this memorial hasn’t happened yet and doesn’t seem like it’s going to be happening. I’ll be shocked if this isn’t one of those weird conversations we don’t really need to see.

Finally, we get to the meat and potatoes. He tells them that Elizaline might be pregnant, and when Rowena makes a snide comment about not having grandchildren, Moss makes a snide comment right back about how young Rowena’s boyfriends are. We get the overall sense from this scene that Rowena likes to control every move the family makes, so it’ll be interesting to see how much a part of the plot she actually is.

One Kindle Search Later: This is the only time we see Rowena on the page.

Moss goes out, gets drunk, comes home, and lays on his couch thinking about Demelssia and wondering if she’s too young. Then he gets a text from Caroline with a weird comment about how if he gets married, she’ll be “the dowager.” She asks if she can come over and he lies and says he’s not alone. She accuses him of “whoring,” because terms like “dowager” and “whoring” and “wastrel” are super common in modern speech. Restless, he sits down at his piano to compose. And of course, to think of Demelssia.

The notes ring out through the room. Evocative. Melancholic. Stirring me. Inspiring me.

I am cleaner, Mister.

Yes. I speak English. My name is Alessia Demachi.

Ah, yes, the heights of passion those words would inspire in anyone. How can he contain his bittersweet lust when she whispered such sensual secrets as what her job is and that she speaks English? Love like this, fiery yet tender, can be expressed only through song.

It’s complete. I’ve written a whole piece, and I am overwhelmed with a sense of achievement. How long have I been trying to do this? And all it took was meeting my new daily.

Wow, just think of the creative heights you could reach if you hired an exterminator.

This is where the chapter ends and where I leave you, my beautiful ones, until Monday.

My impression so far: At this point, I was starting to find the story a little eye-roll worthy. Mostly because it feels like the book should have been written in Maxim’s POV alone. We don’t get anywhere near equal time in Alessia’s head, and fifty percent of the time we do spend with her, we only learn things about him. It becomes clear pretty early on here that she’s not the person James wanted to be writing about at all.

Second Chance Book Club: The Mister, Chapter Three or “Deja View”

In the grand tradition of renaming characters to reflect where E.L. James nabbed them from, Maxim Trevelyan is now Moss Troldark. Alessia is now Demelssia Carmachi.

And the author is still a real piece of work.

Honestly, as a reader, I feel cheated. I went into this with every intention of being open-minded. And I sat here like, wow, I’m really enjoying this! Sure, the writing isn’t great, but I can ignore terrible writing for a story this gripping!

I should have known the story wasn’t hers.

And what really gets me, deep, deep down, is that she clearly did so much differently from Fifty Shades of Grey based on what critical reviews dinged her for. There’s emphasis on consent, the hero isn’t an abusive and irredeemable douchebag, it just was reading like she understood the reasons people hated her first series and tried to make this some kind of example that yes, she can really write, yes, she can really learn.

The only lesson she didn’t take away from the experience was the part where people were like, “Hey, maybe don’t steal people’s shit.”

So, Moss Troldark gets a phone call while he’s in a cab at the beginning of chapter three. It’s his friend, Joe, whom he fences with, and they have a short conversation about how Moss can’t go fencing that day because now he’s an earl and has to do, quote, “Earl shit.” Moss grumbles to himself about not being able to do whatever he wants anymore, then blames his dead brother.

After a section break, we’re at Loulou’s, the bar where Moss has gone to find a “warm, willing body,” after a long day of work with the guy described as Kit’s “Chief Operating Officer.” Again, I’m not familiar with the peerage or whatever, being from humble swamp stock as I am, but the idea of someone being the CEO of someone else is hilarious because you could yell, “YOU’RE NOT THE CEO OF ME!” at them.

Oliver is slight, with a shock of unruly blond hair and eyes of an indeterminate color that miss nothing. I have never warmed to him. He’s ruthless and ambitious, but he knows his way around a balance sheet and can deal with the numerous personnel who answer to the Earl of Trevethick.

So, write him down as the potential George Warleggan of this story, I guess.

[…] I wonder if Oliver’s loyalty will extend to me or if he might take advantage of my naïveté while I try to come to terms with all my new responsibilities. I just don’t know. But the fact is, I don’t trust him, and I make a mental note to stay circumspect in my dealings with him.

Add another tick to that Warleggan column.

Moss is at least relieved to be able to quit modeling. Because this is an E.L. James book, he refers to his modeling agent, who is a woman, as an “old gorgon.” He says modeling can be boring and he’s not sure he’ll miss it, except for the chance to meet, “hot, skinny women.”

That’s what I want now: a hot, willing woman, skinny or otherwise.

See, it’s okay to put the emphasis on thinness, so long as you make it clear that the hero is DTF a woman who isn’t thin. He’s not going to, okay? It’s just enough that he might.

He spots a woman described as having hazel eyes and long brown glossy hair. She’s doing shots, which is something I’ll bring up later. I mean, it’s already kind of…eh. He’s going to pick up a drunk chick. Her name is Leticia and he takes her back to his place, where she’s extremely sexually aggressive:

“Let’s go to bed, Posh Boy,” she whispers, and kisses me. Hard. No preliminaries. Her coat is still in my hands, and I have to steady myself against the wall to stop us both from falling. Her attack takes me by surprise. Perhaps she’s more pissed than I thought. She tastes of lipstick and Jäggermeister–an intriguing combination.

So, this woman was doing shots of Jäggermeister and he’s like, oh, maybe she’s drunker than I thought. Is that going to stop him from having sex with her? Nope.

There go all the hopes I had for consent in this book.

On the other hand, maybe it’s still a step up, considering he didn’t force her to drink with the goal of gaining consent.

I bet you’re wondering when we were going to hear about the fact that you can see the Thames from his apartment:

“Do you act, too? Great view, by the way,” she says as she glances through the wall of glass that looks out over the Thames.

She asks him if he ever fucked on his piano and he thinks:

Lord, she has a foul mouth.

Like, dude. You have spent the whole book so far fucking everything you catch in a rabbit snare and you’re worried about the woman you brought back to your house using the word that describes exactly the reason you brought her there?

So, yadda yadda yadda, they start getting down and Leticia is rough, bossy, and she uses her nails a lot, so he decides to tie her to the bed. Here’s my thing with this: she’s drunk. Drunker than he expected her to be. And he’s going to tie her up? Here’s a pro-tip: if a woman is drunk enough that she will let you, a man she has never met before, tie her up in your bedroom? She’s too drunk to consent.

“I won’t hurt you,” I reassure her. That’s not my scene. “I’ll just keep you in line.” But the truth is, I’m worried she’s going to hurt me.

I’m torn about this scene because when you read it all in one sitting, it’s actually funny. She’s enthusiastic with her fingernails and when she gets to his fly, he panics and that’s when he’s like, hey, ha ha, just kidding, let’s tie you up. At the same time, she’s drunk. He is at least tipsy, I presume. So, they shouldn’t be having sex, but they definitely shouldn’t be tying any knots.

But obviously, they do.

I tie the silk around her left wrist and thread it through the slats of the bed’s headboard, and then, taking her right hand, I deftly tie her right wrist to the other end of the restraint.

There are some pretty jarring breaks in here. Like, it’s clear that James wants to write a sex scene, but maybe she got bored and wandered away and forgot to go back and fill stuff in? I’m not kidding. Check this out:

She quirms. “Will you spank me?” Her voice is less than a whisper.

“If you play nice.”

Oh, this is going to be fun.

 

She comes quickly and loudly. Screaming and straining against the silken straps.

I sit up between her thighs, my mouth slick and wet, and I flip her over and slap her arse.

Okay, so first of all, this “flipping someone over when their bodies are restrained in such a way that you would actually dislocate their joints” talk really takes me back to our Fifty Shades of Grey days. But more importantly…where is the stuff that happens between him tying up her hands and her coming? Like, seriously, what is the point of writing just this part of the scene? This section ends with him thrusting into her, and then suddenly there’s another break and he’s watching her sleep. It honestly reads like she planned to go back and fill this stuff in. It’s such a weird stylistic choice. Either you want us to see Moss fuck, or you don’t.

Hey, did you miss characters waking up in a state of panic?

I wake with a start.

He was having a dream about chasing something blue before falling into an abyss, and it scared him awake. It’s a good thing he can see the Thames from his apartment:

The pallid winter sun seeps through the windows as reflections from the Thames play on the ceiling.

I’m glad this detail gets thrown in so often, because I keep mentally shifting the setting to early-19th century Cornwall.

Though Moss thinks Leticia has left, he hears a noise from somewhere in the apartment and he’s like, oh great, now I have to people, which like, honestly? I don’t blame him. Finding out you have to people when you didn’t expect you’d have to people is exhausting, even if you just woke up. I need at least forty-eight hours warning before all human interaction.

So, he puts on his jeans and leaves his room, shirtless, and you guys know what happens.

I’m expecting to see Leticia, but a slight young woman stands in the hallway staring at me. Her eyes are large and dark, reminding me of a startled doe, but she’s dressed in a ghastly blue housecoat, cheap overwashed jeans, old trainers, and a blue headscarf that conceals her hair.

Thank you for explaining what a headscarf does, Moss.

Anyway, he asks her who the hell she is, and the chapter ends.

My impression so far: Before I learned about the Poldark connection, I got to this point and was kind of expecting Alessia would find him with the woman. So, I was kind of surprised when that didn’t happen. It made that whole scene totally pointless. But I wasn’t surprised at all that he was shirtless when he and Alessia met. This chapter was really tiresome because I felt like, okay, we didn’t need to meet a friend who wasn’t even going to end up doing anything in this chapter. We didn’t need to see Moss bring home yet another woman. We didn’t need to hear again about how he never worked and now things have changed. It was just a super repetitive chapter full of stuff we already knew.

And I’m still pissed off about the Poldark thing, especially when I started rewatching Poldark and realized that the one-night-stand from the last chapter was the equivalent of the tavern girl who says mysterious things to Ross and sleeps with him in the first few episodes of season one.

Second Chance Book Club: The Mister, Chapter Two or, “Oh, now I know why I was enjoying this so much.”

I was devouring this book. Devouring it. I was astonished at how much better the plot of this book was, how much she’d grown as a writer.

And then commenter Sushi pointed out that it’s Poldark.

No. Really.

E.L. James just rewrote Poldark.

Maxim is the only male relative of the Earl of Trevethick. Ross is the only male relative of the Master of Trenwith.
The Earldom includes an estate in Cornwall. Trenwith includes ownership of an estate in Cornwall.
Maxim is captivated by his young housekeeper who has escaped an abusive past. Ross is captivated by his young housekeeper who has escaped an abusive past.
Maxim’s captivating young housekeeper has an uncanny talent at the piano. Ross’s captivating young housekeeper has an uncanny talent for singing.
Maxim’s brother and closest male relative married Maxim’s first love and childhood best friend. Ross’s cousin and closest male relative married Ross’s first love and childhood best friend.
Maxim stands to inherit the Earldom until Caroline reveals she’s pregnant with her late husband’s heir (spoiler alert). Ross stands to inherit Trenwith until Elizabeth produces an heir before her husband dies.

And for extra fuckery? Ross Poldark owns mines in Cornwall. Trevethick is the real-life name of a famous Cornish mining engineer.

I shit you not. She did it again. She took someone else’s work and she did it again.

Now, lest you go, “Oh, well, it’s like when people remake Jane Austen novels,” Winston Graham’s final Poldark novel came out in 2002. We’re not talking, oh, this is so old and out of copyright and nobody alive even owns it anymore. This is quite literally Fifty Shades of Twilight all over again. And the poor dude can’t fight her because he’s dead.

So, yesterday we didn’t see much of the heroine aside from her “Go Dog Go!” impersonation. Now, she opens chapter two.

In third person, present tense.

I don’t have an issue with tense hopping. I really do not. But third person present is so clunky. Not just from my own personal position where I could never write in it. So many readers hate first person present tense, but third person present is nearly unthinkable. It would take a writer of immense technical skill to pull it off and…E.L. James isn’t exactly lauded for her grasp of flowing prose. No matter how gripping this story is, the third person POV comes off as omniscient narration:

In spite of the weather, she’s feeling a sense of achievement because she’s survived the cramped and crowded train journey without her usual anxiety. She’s beginning to understand that this is what London is like.

It’s also frustrating because we know from the back cover copy that she has a Big Secret, and that you can’t keep a Big Secret when you’re inside someone’s head in first person. So, right off the bat it feels like a choice made as a lazy cop-out.

Alessia, our heroine, is on her way to her cleaning job, a big, fancy apartment she’s taken over from her coworker, Krystyna. And what’s a morning commute without some subtle misogyny and a confusing slip into past perfect, express route, no local?

That morning Alessia had been lucky enough to find a seat on the train, but the woman beside her had spent much of the journey shrieking into her phone about her unsuccessful date the night before. Alessia had ignored her and read the free newspaper to improve her English, but she’d wished she could listen to music through headphones and not this woman’s loud whining.

What’s frustrating about this is that it shows how much smoother and more immersive Alessia’s POV could be if it were just written in past tense. Plus, Alessia focuses on her past a lot; she’s an immigrant far from home, without her family. Writing her in past tense while writing Maxim in first person present tense due to his self-centered lifestyle and unchecked id would have been a brilliant move. This is a real missed opportunity.

Oh, and the part where if another woman is in a scene with the heroine, she must be obnoxious. That could have been changed, as well.

Alessia also loves to play the piano, and she has synesthesia, which is a very cool character detail. She sees music in colors. She also hasn’t played in a long time, so she’s psyched that there’s a piano in Maxim’s apartment.

For a few hours on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, this wonderful place with its large airy rooms, dark wooden floors, and baby grand piano is all hers.

I just said yesterday that I wasn’t going to be happy if dailies didn’t come every day and now I choose to interpret this line as a personal attack.

When Alessia goes into the apartment, she’s afraid someone might be home (he is), and, like José’s epic “Dios Mio!” before, she thinks:

Mirë.

No. “Good.” Think in English.

So, Alessia is Albanian. Prepare for numerous exclamations in Albanian. Which I don’t remember from the widely-published excerpt. Were they…not wanting people to know she was an immigrant? That’s kind of…

Looking at Maxim through Alessia’s eyes before she’s met him, she thinks he’s a slob. She dresses for cleaning in a housecoat and blue headscarf–this detail will be important later. Then, the scene from the famous excerpt happens:

He’s here.

The man!

Fast asleep facedown and sprawled naked across the large bed. She stands, shocked and fascinated at once, her feet rooted to the wooden floor as she stares. He’s stretched across the length of the bed, tangled in his duvet but naked…very naked.

How, pray, can one be “a little” naked?

But I deconstructed this section on Twitter already. And yes, they did cut all the Albanian out of the first public excerpt. I find that extremely sketchy.

His back is sun-kissed with a tan that fades as his hips narrow to dimples and to a pale, taut backside.

Backside.

He’s naked!

Lakuriq!

Zot!

Lakuriq, by the way, is Albanian for nude.

I also just learned that Zot is Albanian for God, and that my favorite candy is no shit called “Gods!” in Albanian.

So, he kind of wakes up but then he goes back to sleep and she runs off to do laundry and hide until he hopefully leaves or she can sneak out without interacting with him. She’s not so much overcome with lust for his gorgeous “backside” as she continues to call it (backside is gonna become the “down there” of this book. I can feel it) as she is disappointed that she won’t get a chance to play the piano.

Okay, fine, she also can’t help but think of this guy, the first naked man she’s ever seen. But that leads to other thoughts, about another guy she’s afraid of. So, Alessia isn’t just afraid of getting fired. It’s directly stated that she’s uneasy around men, too, and he’s her only male client.

He does eventually leave without actually seeing her, so he thinks she’s Krystyna. There’s a mention of finding a “customary” condom in the pocket of his jeans, and the staggering number of condoms she finds in his wastebasket:

She tries to avoid looking at the used condoms as she dumps the contents into a black plastic trash bag. It was a shock the first time she did this, and it’s still a shock now. How can one man use so many?

How…how many condoms are we talking here? His “daily” comes every other day to ruin my life. If he brings home a woman every night, how many condoms is he running through? They must be switching out V to A, if you catch my drift. I mean, obviously you’re going to switch out A to V, but I bet he’s doing the reverse, as well.

Hey, look. A hero who actually uses condoms.

Alessia moves through the rest of the apartment, cleaning, dusting, and polishing, but avoiding the one room she’s not allowed to enter. Fleetingly, she wonders what’s behind the closed door,

Yes. He is kinky. I haven’t gotten to the part where that’s his sex room yet, but at least she doesn’t have to clean it or, presumably, the butt plugs. I mean, I only guess that he’s got a sex room based on the fact that he ties someone up later.

Once her cleaning is done, Alessia sits down and plays the piano for the first time since she went on the run or whatever, and it’s a good moment for her. And then:

Gently, she pushes down the keys, sounding an E-minor chord. The sound rings clear and strong, a bold and verdant green, the color of the Mister’s eyes, and Alessia’s heart fills with hope.

So, now we know the title of the book comes from Alessia’s label for Maxim. And they said the name of the thing in the thing!

Even though Alessia is the heroine of the book, that’s all the time she gets for now. We cut to Maxim walking up to his brother’s house, which he now owns and Caroline lives in. It, too, overlooks the Thames.

A better title for this book would have been, The Reflection from the Thames. It would have sounded like. Suspensefulish.

The butler greets Maxim with a “Lord Trevethick,” and asks to speak to Caroline. And she’s upstairs, gazing out a window crying. Oh, and she’s gazing out at the Thames, which is again mentioned as being viewable from the house.

Caroline wants to know whey he hasn’t called her, and even though he doesn’t tell her, she knows he’s been with other women. She calls him a whore and apparently has a whole catalog of insults about his sexual pursuits that she uses a lot. He notes that she still slept with him, though.

Besides being pissed off that Maxim has too much sex with people who aren’t her, Caroline wants to know if it’s true that her husband left her penniless. When she finds out that the will named Maxim sole heir, she’s super upset.

“I loved him,” she says, her voice small and quiet, like a child’s.

“I know. We both did.” Though I know she also loved Kit’s title and his wealth.

Okay. Here is where I’m starting to get nervous. Ever since the text messages, I’ve thought maybe Caroline was being set up to be TEH EVOL BLOND, and with Maxim thinking stuff like this, I’m getting more and more concerned that James is going to fall back on old patterns.

Caroline is like, you shan’t cast me out into the streets! You mustn’t! Okay, not really, but she does ask if he’s going to evict her from the house. I’m still not 100% sure this isn’t a Regency romance rewritten as a contemporary romantic suspense or whatever this genre is.

Anyway, at one point in the Caroline scene, Maxim remembers seeing Alessia that morning. But he doesn’t think it’s Alessia. He, no shit, no foolin’, thinks he saw the Virgin Mary:

[…] recalling a fragment from a dream I had last night–or was it this morning? A young woman, an angel? Possibly the Virgin Mary or a nun in blue standing my bedroom doorway watching over me as I slept?

Then, Caroline just up and announces that she might be pregnant.

“Kit. Not you. You’re too bloody careful.”

Also, they only just fucked a few days before. She wouldn’t even know by then. So, the baby has to be Kit’s. But it’s weird that Caroline says he’s careful like it’s a bad thing. Was she wanting to get knocked up by him or something? And if he’s constantly having tons of near-anonymous sex, why would she think being careful was negative?

But what does this pregnancy mean? Kit might indeed have an heir to the title of Earl. And he doesn’t know how to feel about that, because now that he’s got the title, he kind of wants to keep it.

My impression so far: I’m still reading it. And I’m still invested in the story. It’s interesting and it hooks you right away. I’m just concerned about how quickly the small incidences of misogyny are starting to snowball, the way they did in Fifty Shades of Grey, and I’m concerned about the way Caroline’s character is evolving. Still, while the writing is bad and some stuff is eye-roll worthy, it’s not a bad book.

Note on the above: Now that Sush pointed out that this is a Poldark rip off? Fuck this book, let’s shred it to pieces.