Last year I rounded up with every half star, in the spirit of being kind of authors. Then I got to the end of the year and my four star ratings were numerous and some of the books I was confused about why they were in the four category*. So, I’ve come to a decision this year: rounding down.
Why am I talking about this?
Along with the overabundance of fours, I read an inordinate amount of historical romance last year* and it seems unlikely that I will stop this year. There is something about clever women and men who manipulate society just right to get what they want — namely the other person.
That Scandalous Summer doesn’t quite hit the mark on that. It starts out as the story of Michael de Grey trying to hide himself in the country, where he meets Elizabeth Chudderley, a ‘merry widow’, or rather a widow who goes around sleeping with people and generally taking advantage of the fact that she can without repercussions (except a little talk). This charade lasts until the middle of the book, and has been something that I have seen before (we are, after all, talking about romances, the home of tropes).
But then Duran did something unexpected, and half way through the book, she changed direction, running from the ‘man pretends to be something he’s not for his own reasons’ to ‘man tries to help woman he’s in love with find someone else to marry’. Now, I am a fan of both tropes, but the problem with this book is that it makes both halves of the book feel like they are two separate stories. And sadly, I really liked the second half much better than the first.
Even liking the second half better, I kept on getting distracted by other things while reading it, coming back and discovering that I had no idea what had happened and worse yet, it didn’t matter. I could keep reading without that information and it would effect the plot not at all. Now, I know, romances are trope heavy (and I don’t mind this), so yeah, maybe this is true in many other books, but not the good ones. In the good ones every word matters, and you can feel the energy pacing through it. In this one, I missed whole conversations and didn’t come out worse for wear (reminder that I listen to a lot of books, hence missing things is more probably).
In the end this book is ending up at a 3.5 — it wasn’t as bad as some romance I’ve read, but it’s also not the best romance I’ve ever read, and certainly has some technical issues that should have been dealt with better by Duran.
Now back to the beginning — so that means on goodreads, I’ll be rating it as a 3. Solid, but not the best. And I guess I’m kind of okay with that.
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Dany and I return next week to discuss The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. Spoiler alert: I loved it.
* Do I love stats too much? Answer: yes, probably way too much.
** 53 of them, though does The Dark Wife count as historical romance? I counted it, but it could be removed… literally the only one from the 53 books I read in the genre.
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