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militantlyromantic's review
emotional
medium-paced
2.5
Fast forward some time, turns out she's managed to find a teaching position at a home for orphans run by a family who's helping Finlay with his political career. I will state, there's a fair amount of this book that felt confusing because I had not read the first in the series. I'm used to romance series being disconnected enough that not having read the first won't matter, I don't feel that's the case here. There's a WHOLE bunch of info that you sort of slowly figure out was learned in the first book, not the least of which is that Finlay is actually illegitimate, something not known to anyone but him and his sister--who is married to a Duke and was clearly the female lead of the first book--and that his dad cheated a whole bunch of people out of money and is Not A Good Dude.
The rest of the plot runs on essentially two lines: Finlay needing a high class marriage for his political career because of Daddy's rep, and Charlotte's ex-in-laws being fraudulent anti-Semitic douchecanoes who are trying to ruin her life.
Charlotte and Finlay are both reasonably engaging characters, they have chemistry, the romance works. All of the things that in a romance novel I would normally base my enjoyment or lackthereof on, are perfectly solid. I wouldn't call them standout, but both characters have their own stories, their own needs, motives, etc., there's not an undue amount of drama for drama's sake, overall, as a romance, this should rate somewhere as "interesting, looking forward to seeing growth from this author."
Why does it not, you ask?
For a few reasons. 1. As I said above, one of the first things we learn about Charlotte is that she was over in India, actively and happily engaging in colonization, which makes her a hard character for me to like. And sure, yup, it's historically accurate that people were colonizing asshats right then, but it wasn't historically accurate that they had good teeth and good body odor and married for love, so I REALLY give absolutely no craps. It's 2021. I don't want to read about people actively colonizing others without a thought in their mind to it and getting happy endings. 2. To add to this, it's made clear, several times over, that Finlay is making his money in sugar. That is, Finlay is making his money in slave labor. And I think we're supposed to find it attractive that he's actually in business and not caring that he has a title and all, which, okay. But also, no, because his business is owning slaves. So, automatically, both of these people are people who are committing significantly racist acts. 3. Remember when I said Charlotte was Jewish? Yeah, um. That seems to more of a "this makes Charlotte MORE undesirable" than any real attempt to have a Jewish character. I'm NOT suggesting the author is anti-Semitic, I'm legit not. But Charlotte only seems to be Jewish in ways that are useful for the plot.
Examples:
a. Charlotte was orphaned at a young age. She's from an area that had a pretty significant Jewish community (she's from the country, but contrary to popular belief, Jews existed in both rural and urban areas). If you look at the historical records, the specific area she mentions being from had a major synagogue. And yet, for reasons that are unclear, she's barely taken in by family, and nobody in the community seems to care about her/help her. That's...odd.
b. At a certain point in the book, she mentions going to shul regularly, but it's clear she has no community. Not a single Jewish friend. Again, super odd. Like, INCREDIBLY. It's hard to explain to non-Jews how odd that would be even today, but particularly in that day and age.
c. Her religion never seems to threaten her job or other things that, yeah, it would have. Jewish emancipation (e.g., making Jews citizens in the eyes of the law, etc.,) doesn't really happen in most of Western Europe until the mid-1800s and it's not SUPER popular at the time it does.
d. BUT her religion is used as a sort of bludgeon by her nasty ex-in-laws, who, quite frankly, could have been just as nasty to her on the basis of class. The British are pretty into class, as a general rule. They didn't really need the extra thing to be crappy about when it didn't add anything.
I have this whole thing about how because most of Western society basically sees and has seen for much of this era two types of Jews, those who are secular, and those who are haredi, and therefore completely cut off from everyone else, that there's this concept that being Jewish and living in society is really just the absence of being Christian/the lack of apparent religion. This is a completely incorrect way of understanding modern Judaism, let alone Judaism in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. But other than an epilogue that pays some VERY weird lip service to Charlotte's Judaism given that she has technically converted at that point to further her husband's political career and be legally allowed to marry him, Charlotte's Judaism is more of a prop in this book, than a legitimate element of her identity, culture, and personhood, and as a Jewish histrom reader, with VERY few choices in terms of Jewish main characters, that was deeply disappointing.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Antisemitism
Minor: Racism
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