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talknerdybookblog's review against another edition
3.0
3.5/5 stars
That Rouge Jack | 3 stars
• historical romance
• sweet romance
• friends-to-lovers
P.S I Love you | 3.5 stars
• angsty
• love triangle
• beauty and the beast trope
• mistaken identity
When I Met My Duchess | 3.5 stars
• insta-love
• strong female lead
• hero engaged to heroine's sister
• strong female lead > she's the black sheep of the family
That Rouge Jack | 3 stars
• historical romance
• sweet romance
• friends-to-lovers
P.S I Love you | 3.5 stars
• angsty
• love triangle
• beauty and the beast trope
• mistaken identity
When I Met My Duchess | 3.5 stars
• insta-love
• strong female lead
• hero engaged to heroine's sister
• strong female lead > she's the black sheep of the family
pamrosenthal's review
5.0
I love ensemble plots, most especially when point of view makes a shift, figure and ground trade places, and hitherto minor characters grab the reins of the narrative. You go, the small-d democrat in me exults: in fiction as in life, everybody ought to be hero or heroine of his or her story. Every life story has a place for romance; and there’s nowhere I’d rather be than in a world of simultaneous he-said/she-saids, bouncing off each other like electrons generating a magnetic field to set that world spinning.
The critic L.C. Barber wrote of a “green world,” the magical forests and groves of Shakespearean comedy, ill-assorted lovers careening through an enchanted space where true love finally binds to its right object. It’s no accident that Shakespeare scholar Eloisa James is so good with ensemble plots.
But by and large, the economics of romance publishing don’t encourage this sort of thing. Romance novels are mostly single-threaded: in the interest of conserving scarce resources, the hero’s dashing brother must be saved for the sequel. This is understandable: we all want more books; but what’s often sacrificed is depth, the positive irony of interlacing stories, the human truth that lives don't stop and start at the behest of a goddamn plot, our tacit, shared understanding that when lives interweave, plot becomes story and story mimics life.
How to square the circle, enjoy the imagined community of the extended romance series while avoiding the dreariness of prior couples reappearing in later books, the life drained out of them by perfect wedded bliss? How, moreover, to combine the depth of a lovingly and carefully configured fictional world with the energy of shorter forms like the novella? And finally, how to give the authors a chance to play? Shared genre expectations are romance’s bread and butter, but why not leaven the loaf with a sprinkling of off-market daring and originality?
It seems to me that that the four lady authoresses of At the Duke’s Wedding have accomplished all this and maybe a little more in this smart, self-published quartet of linked Regency novellas. A Rubik’s cube of smoothly moving parts, right-sized gratifications, and a shared, infectious sense of fun: at the two-week houseparty leading up to the Duke of Wessex’s wedding at Kingstag Castle, four sets of lovers find their happy endings while a whole materializes around them that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
The setting is grandly Arcadian: I thought “Midsummer Night’s Dream” from the very start. And I like to suppose that Maya Rodale was thinking along similar lines when she had the eponymous hero of her opening story, “That Rogue Jack,” drive up to Kingstag in a new high perch phaeton he has named Hippolyta. In this most conventional story of the group — Charming Rogue and Deserving, Penurious Young Lady are thrown together by Bawdy, Truth-telling Old Lady — Rodale makes graceful work of a lot of narrative heavy lifting while deftly keeping hold of her own McGuffin. A lost wedding ring must be found; as a ten-day countdown to the wedding ensues, not only do scatterbrained Jack and levelheaded Henrietta find their ways to each other, but their author introduces other characters and gives us a tour around the space they inhabit, both architectural and social.
Kingstag isn’t merely pretty period wall-paper; it’s kind of a map of Regency era beautiful-people-land, sex-segregated to provide space for beautiful (and also silly) male muscle-flexing. As the gentlemen guests make their ways to the stables to pay admiring respects to Hippolyta, a male sub-society arises; port and brandy, card tables and upholstered armchairs appear among bales of hay and against walls hung with tack. Like the giggly cohort of teenage girls who flit through the proceedings and peek in at the stable windows, the stories’ female readers are afforded a glimpse of a wildly sexy masculine world of manners and honor, linen and leather, and all that other good stuff. I’ve long contended that the sexiest f-word in historical romance is “fetish” and I’d hazard these authors think so too.
Within the world of Regency romancelandia, it’s not only clothes and accouterments that are fetishized; social relations are stylized, aestheticized. The pleasures and obligations of inherited wealth and position (all of which this small-d democrat confesses to swooning over) are matters of play as well as work. For men who derive power from the accident of birth, duels, betting, and the rest of it are the emotional toys for playing out the vagaries of this destiny. But if power is sexier when it dresses itself in hyper-masculinized symbol and ritual, it’s sexier still when triangulated, when male-male peer rivalry and loyalty and male-male generational duty are challenged by female calls to the rules of the heart.
The sex-segregated social geography that springs up at Kingstag sets the rules of the game. But after that it’s up to each couple to cut its own deal. If Jack and Henrietta are a relatively simple case of opposites attracting and fulfilling each other, Christian and Rosanne in Miranda Neville’s “P.S. I Love You” undertake the more challenging project of shared sensibility.
What is a “marriage of true minds” anyway? In this reworking of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” it begins in a delicious shower of literary reference and wordplay, and goes on to weigh them against loyalty and obligation. Needless to say the deal is also worked out in bed, but what I like and admire most about Neville’s contribution is that – true to the French roots of their story – this hero and heroine are just a bit snobbish about their intellects, un petit peu dismissive of those less quick than themselves.
I can easily imagine an overzealous editor hissing “make them nicer here, dammit.” Which makes me all the more grateful that this story was self-published, because for me it’s precisely their shared self-approbation that makes this couple so romantic. “When Rosanne smiled at the foolishness of the world, [Christian] wanted to love it as much as she did." Isn’t romance about an opportunity to fall in love with the world as seen through the eyes of a lover? As Mrs. Giggles might put it, at this point in the story, I’m a goner.
And as “P.S. I Love You” draws to a close, I’m ready to find out what’s up with the Duke and his story. Enough hints have been dropped that all is not well with the coming nuptials; the impatient reader is happy to turn to Caroline Linden’s “When I Met My Duchess,” which begins a few days earlier, when lightning struck, physically felling a ancient oak, and metaphorically… well, I needn’t tell a romance reader what it also meant, and so I’ll keep it to myself except to say that the moment, spanning a break between chapters, is beautifully executed, all of nature conspiring in the fortunes of this pair of lovers.
And that if the collection had ended here, I would have gone away happy. But the final story, Katherine Ashe’s time travel “How Angela Got Her Rogue Back,” made me more than happy. I haven’t read a lot of time travel; for me, I guess, the experience of reading historical romance is time-travel fantasy enough. But when Ashe’s twenty-first century heroine Angela Cowdrey is somehow suddenly, inexplicably transported from the history department at the University of Michigan to the Duke’s wedding at Kingstag, I recognized her as a kindred spirit. “She loved this era. No wonder she studied it.[…] She’d been looking for honor and decency in the nineteenth century for years.”
Like every Regency romance author I love and every Regency romance reader I identify with, I’m always looking for the hero who combines elegant manners with political and economic fairness, personal sensitivity. There’d have to be one among them, wouldn’t there — the guy who’s gentleman enough, strong and sexy enough, to be a man we can love and respect for his decency to the people around him and perforce dependent upon him. And so there always is, in my favorite stories of the genre.
Because even if (like Angela, who studies the British Empire) we know deep down that “there was nothing decent about” nineteenth century social and economic arrangements, we nonetheless love the symbols of honor and decency its male culture created for itself. And one of the ways we try to square the circle and make it come out right by injecting a smart, slightly outlandish woman rather like… well, our selves… into the mix. We always go a little meta when we read and write period romance, and that, imo, is what the time travel metaphor of Katherine Ashe’s story is for. To bring us closer to the slightly abashed truth of our fantasies. To delight and teach – which is to say to surprise through unexpected recognition. As this wonderful, surprising, self-published collection does, a feast of imagination meeting and surpassing expectations.
The critic L.C. Barber wrote of a “green world,” the magical forests and groves of Shakespearean comedy, ill-assorted lovers careening through an enchanted space where true love finally binds to its right object. It’s no accident that Shakespeare scholar Eloisa James is so good with ensemble plots.
But by and large, the economics of romance publishing don’t encourage this sort of thing. Romance novels are mostly single-threaded: in the interest of conserving scarce resources, the hero’s dashing brother must be saved for the sequel. This is understandable: we all want more books; but what’s often sacrificed is depth, the positive irony of interlacing stories, the human truth that lives don't stop and start at the behest of a goddamn plot, our tacit, shared understanding that when lives interweave, plot becomes story and story mimics life.
How to square the circle, enjoy the imagined community of the extended romance series while avoiding the dreariness of prior couples reappearing in later books, the life drained out of them by perfect wedded bliss? How, moreover, to combine the depth of a lovingly and carefully configured fictional world with the energy of shorter forms like the novella? And finally, how to give the authors a chance to play? Shared genre expectations are romance’s bread and butter, but why not leaven the loaf with a sprinkling of off-market daring and originality?
It seems to me that that the four lady authoresses of At the Duke’s Wedding have accomplished all this and maybe a little more in this smart, self-published quartet of linked Regency novellas. A Rubik’s cube of smoothly moving parts, right-sized gratifications, and a shared, infectious sense of fun: at the two-week houseparty leading up to the Duke of Wessex’s wedding at Kingstag Castle, four sets of lovers find their happy endings while a whole materializes around them that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
The setting is grandly Arcadian: I thought “Midsummer Night’s Dream” from the very start. And I like to suppose that Maya Rodale was thinking along similar lines when she had the eponymous hero of her opening story, “That Rogue Jack,” drive up to Kingstag in a new high perch phaeton he has named Hippolyta. In this most conventional story of the group — Charming Rogue and Deserving, Penurious Young Lady are thrown together by Bawdy, Truth-telling Old Lady — Rodale makes graceful work of a lot of narrative heavy lifting while deftly keeping hold of her own McGuffin. A lost wedding ring must be found; as a ten-day countdown to the wedding ensues, not only do scatterbrained Jack and levelheaded Henrietta find their ways to each other, but their author introduces other characters and gives us a tour around the space they inhabit, both architectural and social.
Kingstag isn’t merely pretty period wall-paper; it’s kind of a map of Regency era beautiful-people-land, sex-segregated to provide space for beautiful (and also silly) male muscle-flexing. As the gentlemen guests make their ways to the stables to pay admiring respects to Hippolyta, a male sub-society arises; port and brandy, card tables and upholstered armchairs appear among bales of hay and against walls hung with tack. Like the giggly cohort of teenage girls who flit through the proceedings and peek in at the stable windows, the stories’ female readers are afforded a glimpse of a wildly sexy masculine world of manners and honor, linen and leather, and all that other good stuff. I’ve long contended that the sexiest f-word in historical romance is “fetish” and I’d hazard these authors think so too.
Within the world of Regency romancelandia, it’s not only clothes and accouterments that are fetishized; social relations are stylized, aestheticized. The pleasures and obligations of inherited wealth and position (all of which this small-d democrat confesses to swooning over) are matters of play as well as work. For men who derive power from the accident of birth, duels, betting, and the rest of it are the emotional toys for playing out the vagaries of this destiny. But if power is sexier when it dresses itself in hyper-masculinized symbol and ritual, it’s sexier still when triangulated, when male-male peer rivalry and loyalty and male-male generational duty are challenged by female calls to the rules of the heart.
The sex-segregated social geography that springs up at Kingstag sets the rules of the game. But after that it’s up to each couple to cut its own deal. If Jack and Henrietta are a relatively simple case of opposites attracting and fulfilling each other, Christian and Rosanne in Miranda Neville’s “P.S. I Love You” undertake the more challenging project of shared sensibility.
What is a “marriage of true minds” anyway? In this reworking of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” it begins in a delicious shower of literary reference and wordplay, and goes on to weigh them against loyalty and obligation. Needless to say the deal is also worked out in bed, but what I like and admire most about Neville’s contribution is that – true to the French roots of their story – this hero and heroine are just a bit snobbish about their intellects, un petit peu dismissive of those less quick than themselves.
I can easily imagine an overzealous editor hissing “make them nicer here, dammit.” Which makes me all the more grateful that this story was self-published, because for me it’s precisely their shared self-approbation that makes this couple so romantic. “When Rosanne smiled at the foolishness of the world, [Christian] wanted to love it as much as she did." Isn’t romance about an opportunity to fall in love with the world as seen through the eyes of a lover? As Mrs. Giggles might put it, at this point in the story, I’m a goner.
And as “P.S. I Love You” draws to a close, I’m ready to find out what’s up with the Duke and his story. Enough hints have been dropped that all is not well with the coming nuptials; the impatient reader is happy to turn to Caroline Linden’s “When I Met My Duchess,” which begins a few days earlier, when lightning struck, physically felling a ancient oak, and metaphorically… well, I needn’t tell a romance reader what it also meant, and so I’ll keep it to myself except to say that the moment, spanning a break between chapters, is beautifully executed, all of nature conspiring in the fortunes of this pair of lovers.
And that if the collection had ended here, I would have gone away happy. But the final story, Katherine Ashe’s time travel “How Angela Got Her Rogue Back,” made me more than happy. I haven’t read a lot of time travel; for me, I guess, the experience of reading historical romance is time-travel fantasy enough. But when Ashe’s twenty-first century heroine Angela Cowdrey is somehow suddenly, inexplicably transported from the history department at the University of Michigan to the Duke’s wedding at Kingstag, I recognized her as a kindred spirit. “She loved this era. No wonder she studied it.[…] She’d been looking for honor and decency in the nineteenth century for years.”
Like every Regency romance author I love and every Regency romance reader I identify with, I’m always looking for the hero who combines elegant manners with political and economic fairness, personal sensitivity. There’d have to be one among them, wouldn’t there — the guy who’s gentleman enough, strong and sexy enough, to be a man we can love and respect for his decency to the people around him and perforce dependent upon him. And so there always is, in my favorite stories of the genre.
Because even if (like Angela, who studies the British Empire) we know deep down that “there was nothing decent about” nineteenth century social and economic arrangements, we nonetheless love the symbols of honor and decency its male culture created for itself. And one of the ways we try to square the circle and make it come out right by injecting a smart, slightly outlandish woman rather like… well, our selves… into the mix. We always go a little meta when we read and write period romance, and that, imo, is what the time travel metaphor of Katherine Ashe’s story is for. To bring us closer to the slightly abashed truth of our fantasies. To delight and teach – which is to say to surprise through unexpected recognition. As this wonderful, surprising, self-published collection does, a feast of imagination meeting and surpassing expectations.