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meganbmoore) wrote2011-12-19 11:07 pm
meganbmoore) wrote2011-12-19 11:07 pm
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var. romance novels by Mary Balogh
Various Baloghs, mostly older books. Read over several months and comments jotted down as I read them. All decent-to-good except for one book that I'm trying to forget exists.
Dark Angel: Like many Baloghs, this is a case of a book I like despite using a plot trope I dislike A LOT. The hero's stepmother was seduced, impregnated and abandoned by the heroine's fiance. To protect her from his father, the hero, Gabriel, (who is older than his stepmother and seems to view her more as a younger sister) takes her to Europe, and so everyone assumes that he's the one she had an affair with. When he returns to England, he decides to get revenge on the villain, Kersey, by seducing Kersey's fiancee, Jennifer, and having her dump and humiliate him. Excerpt Gabriel is pretty much wallowing in self-hatred before he even does anything, and hasn't really proceeded beyond flirting and an accidentally-public kiss before Kersey, who was already working on seducing Jennifer's cousin, Samantha, as part of a ploy to get out of his engagement, formulates proof of an affair between them and publicly exposes it to completely ruin and humiliate Jennifer and make himself the victim. (And people have apparently been wanting this guy to be "redeemed" and get his own book for years.) It's far from perfect and not my favorite Balogh, and like a lot of Balogh's books, it's largely saved because Balogh does a good job of making the reader have a need for the heroine to be happy (and in this case, Gabriel remains a pretty decent person in spite of his best attempts to be otherwise) and I liked it more than the plot led me to believe.
Lord Carew's Bride: Set six years after Dark Angel, this is about Jennifer's cousin, Samantha, who has sworn off falling in love (she believes in it, just doesn't think it's for her) after the events in Dank Angel. And then she meets and befriends Jennifer's neighbor's gardener, who forgets to tell her that actually, he isn't a well-educated gardener, but a lord. Whoops? I liked that Samantha fell in love with him because he was nice and she was comfortable around him and developed a sexual interest only after a comfortable friendship was established, instead of the normal "Confusing feelings! Tense situations! Denials!" before they really knew each other, though I think Hartley should have told who he was much earlier in the story. Balogh did have her react appropriately, though, and held him accountable. Kersey shows up again and decides it will be fun to try to seduce Samantha and tell Hartley all about their (mostly fictional and what was real was based on deceit on his part) epic love affair. And he and Hartley are cousins and he tried to kill Hartley when he was 10 and Hartley was 6. (This guy just gets more and more charming. I see why many readers apparently can't understand why Balogh won't give him his own book.) There was some Drama later on that I thought was a bit much, but it was largely a nice, comfortable read.
A Matter of Class: Aristocratic young lady of swiftly-becoming-bankrupt family runs away with coachman, gets caught, is ruined. Philandering, drinking, gambling son of ridiculously rich tradesman is given ultimatum of settling down, behaving and getting married, or getting cut off. Daddies hate each other and merchant daddy decides to stick it to aristocrat daddy by offering to bail him out IF he befouls his bloodlines by having their kids get married. kids appear to hate each other. All of which is pretty generic Regency, save that it isn't what's going on at all. Half the book is flashbacks to the leads' childhoods, and half is set in the present. I thought the "twist" was easy to guess from the start, but this isn't a book where knowing what the author is leading up to affects enjoyment. I had a few problems with the plot, but Balogh had the same problems and addressed them, and all was well. I liked this one a lot.
Dancing With Clara: OMG THIS BOOK. This book made me question everything positive I think about Balogh. Our heroine, Clara, is a plain but rich woman who has not been able to walk since she was 6. She marries a fortune hunter knowing that he's marrying her for her money, but sees it as buying a pretty face and charming company. Also, she's quite curious about sex and I REALLY liked that her disability didn't affect her sexdrive at all. So, so far, we're good. Except that the so-called hero is an emotionally abusive cretin who undermines her intelligence for the first half of the book and later deliberately tries to completely destroy her self esteem, then tries to blame his actions on someone else. Oh, and after going out of his way to be as cruel as he could be to his wife, he apparently went out and abused a teenaged prostitute and later accused a woman (who, in the book that this is a sequel to, he abducted with the intent to rape) of deliberately hurting his wife when, in fact, not only had she not done but even if she had, it wouldn't have begun to compare to what he'd done to her. And throughout he's wallowing in self-pity and GUILT about how he treats her, but only gets worse until the end. This book is like the antithesis of everything I like about Balogh. I half wonder if she was trying to show what that kind of person was/is really like. But, while that's not a bad thing, it doesn't make for a good story (romance or otherwise) when you're meant to root for that person and want him to win the love of a person who is essentially his victim. (Also, Balogh DID do that with this kind of character successfully in Dark Angel and Lord Carew's Bride and all 3 books came out in 1994.)
Irresistible: Old friends meet again after not seeing each other for a couple years, spontaneously have sex. A bit much Drama about "but we can't actually BE together..." because...it's dramatic? and a subplot where she's being blackmailed with her late husband’s secrets that dictated the plot more than it really should have, including a lot of the "but we can't actually BE together..." Nothing really stand out or noteworthy in this one, but it was a good one to recover from Dancing With Clara with.
Truly: This one centers around the Rebecca Riots in Wales in the 1840s. I liked that most of the characters were "commoners" instead of everyone being gentry, but I think I would have liked it even more if the hero hadn't been a lord, even if he didn't identify as English nobility at all, really, and still identified as a Welsh commoner. (His father was a lord and he's the product of a secret marriage between him andthe Welsh governess, which wasn't discovered until he was 12. Heroine is a childhood friend.) I think the actual romance took a backseat to the social issues in this one, and the book was a bit closer to historical fiction than a straight romance at times. The one issue I had was how long it took for the heroine to learn that he was Rebecca (aka, the masked hero) and I don't feel she really had enough time to process and deal with it by the end.
The Famous Heroine: The third book in the Dark Angel series. This is probably the closest thing to a stright-up romantic comedy I've encountered from Balogh. The heroine is a voluptuous and gauche merchant's daughter who is taken under the wing of a duchess after she saves the duchess's grandson from drowning. The hero is the dandy rejected by the heroine of Lord Carew's Bride. He thinks she's adorable, she thinks he's gay. Because of his clothes. She also spends the book rushing headlong into one farce or disaster or another, which should bother me, I think, but doesn't, since we aren't meant to see Cora as anyone but a good hearted person with a lot of exuberance, or to think there would have been anything wrong with him if he was gay (and it doesn't affect her opinion of him outside of deciding that he wouldn't be one to "ravish" her or anything.) She also seems to thing she's the conquering hero and he's the damsel in distress. This was very fun, but didn't have the OOMPH of a lot of Baloghs.
The Plumed Bonnet: Another Dark Angel series book, but unless I stumble across the other 2 at a UBS, my last until the next omnibus comes out. In this one, the hero has sworn off love and marriageable women altogether, thinking all his friends have been cruelly forced into marriages they didn't want (despite regularly visiting them and their overly happy families) but stops to give a woman he mistakes for an actress a ride across the country. The woman claims to be a governess who has just inherited a fortune, but was robbed on the road. He decides that she's playing a game to get a free ride. Except that whoops, she was telling the truth the whole time, and now she's compromised! I'm a bit "meh" on the plot and wish there had been more focus on her suddenly drastically changing social class (first by inheritance, then again by marriage) and dealing with that, but it was enjoyable anyway, and I like how he immediately owned up to himself that the entire situation was 100% his fault and she'd completely acted in good faith and been honest the whole time. I wish, though, that he had owned up to her about the mistake more quickly.
A Precious Jewel: This is a very interesting but also rather uncomfortable book. It's also one of the few where the prostitute heroine actually is a prostitute and still has sexual relations with other men after her relationship with the hero begins (and multiple before him). Of course, early in the book (but 2 months after he becomes her regular customer) she becomes his mistress, and so he her exclusive sexual partner. Balogh's portrayal of a prostitute's life and treatment by others, and how she's viewed, is much more honest than what you find in most romance novels (though still somewhat on the nicified side). It was refreshing in a way, but also often depressing and uncomfortable, especially as much of the conflict is the hero's coming to terms with the idea of his seeing her as anything else. This is, I think, one of those where you only really want them together because you want her to be happy and he's what she wants.
Dark Angel: Like many Baloghs, this is a case of a book I like despite using a plot trope I dislike A LOT. The hero's stepmother was seduced, impregnated and abandoned by the heroine's fiance. To protect her from his father, the hero, Gabriel, (who is older than his stepmother and seems to view her more as a younger sister) takes her to Europe, and so everyone assumes that he's the one she had an affair with. When he returns to England, he decides to get revenge on the villain, Kersey, by seducing Kersey's fiancee, Jennifer, and having her dump and humiliate him. Excerpt Gabriel is pretty much wallowing in self-hatred before he even does anything, and hasn't really proceeded beyond flirting and an accidentally-public kiss before Kersey, who was already working on seducing Jennifer's cousin, Samantha, as part of a ploy to get out of his engagement, formulates proof of an affair between them and publicly exposes it to completely ruin and humiliate Jennifer and make himself the victim. (And people have apparently been wanting this guy to be "redeemed" and get his own book for years.) It's far from perfect and not my favorite Balogh, and like a lot of Balogh's books, it's largely saved because Balogh does a good job of making the reader have a need for the heroine to be happy (and in this case, Gabriel remains a pretty decent person in spite of his best attempts to be otherwise) and I liked it more than the plot led me to believe.
Lord Carew's Bride: Set six years after Dark Angel, this is about Jennifer's cousin, Samantha, who has sworn off falling in love (she believes in it, just doesn't think it's for her) after the events in Dank Angel. And then she meets and befriends Jennifer's neighbor's gardener, who forgets to tell her that actually, he isn't a well-educated gardener, but a lord. Whoops? I liked that Samantha fell in love with him because he was nice and she was comfortable around him and developed a sexual interest only after a comfortable friendship was established, instead of the normal "Confusing feelings! Tense situations! Denials!" before they really knew each other, though I think Hartley should have told who he was much earlier in the story. Balogh did have her react appropriately, though, and held him accountable. Kersey shows up again and decides it will be fun to try to seduce Samantha and tell Hartley all about their (mostly fictional and what was real was based on deceit on his part) epic love affair. And he and Hartley are cousins and he tried to kill Hartley when he was 10 and Hartley was 6. (This guy just gets more and more charming. I see why many readers apparently can't understand why Balogh won't give him his own book.) There was some Drama later on that I thought was a bit much, but it was largely a nice, comfortable read.
A Matter of Class: Aristocratic young lady of swiftly-becoming-bankrupt family runs away with coachman, gets caught, is ruined. Philandering, drinking, gambling son of ridiculously rich tradesman is given ultimatum of settling down, behaving and getting married, or getting cut off. Daddies hate each other and merchant daddy decides to stick it to aristocrat daddy by offering to bail him out IF he befouls his bloodlines by having their kids get married. kids appear to hate each other. All of which is pretty generic Regency, save that it isn't what's going on at all. Half the book is flashbacks to the leads' childhoods, and half is set in the present. I thought the "twist" was easy to guess from the start, but this isn't a book where knowing what the author is leading up to affects enjoyment. I had a few problems with the plot, but Balogh had the same problems and addressed them, and all was well. I liked this one a lot.
Dancing With Clara: OMG THIS BOOK. This book made me question everything positive I think about Balogh. Our heroine, Clara, is a plain but rich woman who has not been able to walk since she was 6. She marries a fortune hunter knowing that he's marrying her for her money, but sees it as buying a pretty face and charming company. Also, she's quite curious about sex and I REALLY liked that her disability didn't affect her sexdrive at all. So, so far, we're good. Except that the so-called hero is an emotionally abusive cretin who undermines her intelligence for the first half of the book and later deliberately tries to completely destroy her self esteem, then tries to blame his actions on someone else. Oh, and after going out of his way to be as cruel as he could be to his wife, he apparently went out and abused a teenaged prostitute and later accused a woman (who, in the book that this is a sequel to, he abducted with the intent to rape) of deliberately hurting his wife when, in fact, not only had she not done but even if she had, it wouldn't have begun to compare to what he'd done to her. And throughout he's wallowing in self-pity and GUILT about how he treats her, but only gets worse until the end. This book is like the antithesis of everything I like about Balogh. I half wonder if she was trying to show what that kind of person was/is really like. But, while that's not a bad thing, it doesn't make for a good story (romance or otherwise) when you're meant to root for that person and want him to win the love of a person who is essentially his victim. (Also, Balogh DID do that with this kind of character successfully in Dark Angel and Lord Carew's Bride and all 3 books came out in 1994.)
Irresistible: Old friends meet again after not seeing each other for a couple years, spontaneously have sex. A bit much Drama about "but we can't actually BE together..." because...it's dramatic? and a subplot where she's being blackmailed with her late husband’s secrets that dictated the plot more than it really should have, including a lot of the "but we can't actually BE together..." Nothing really stand out or noteworthy in this one, but it was a good one to recover from Dancing With Clara with.
Truly: This one centers around the Rebecca Riots in Wales in the 1840s. I liked that most of the characters were "commoners" instead of everyone being gentry, but I think I would have liked it even more if the hero hadn't been a lord, even if he didn't identify as English nobility at all, really, and still identified as a Welsh commoner. (His father was a lord and he's the product of a secret marriage between him andthe Welsh governess, which wasn't discovered until he was 12. Heroine is a childhood friend.) I think the actual romance took a backseat to the social issues in this one, and the book was a bit closer to historical fiction than a straight romance at times. The one issue I had was how long it took for the heroine to learn that he was Rebecca (aka, the masked hero) and I don't feel she really had enough time to process and deal with it by the end.
The Famous Heroine: The third book in the Dark Angel series. This is probably the closest thing to a stright-up romantic comedy I've encountered from Balogh. The heroine is a voluptuous and gauche merchant's daughter who is taken under the wing of a duchess after she saves the duchess's grandson from drowning. The hero is the dandy rejected by the heroine of Lord Carew's Bride. He thinks she's adorable, she thinks he's gay. Because of his clothes. She also spends the book rushing headlong into one farce or disaster or another, which should bother me, I think, but doesn't, since we aren't meant to see Cora as anyone but a good hearted person with a lot of exuberance, or to think there would have been anything wrong with him if he was gay (and it doesn't affect her opinion of him outside of deciding that he wouldn't be one to "ravish" her or anything.) She also seems to thing she's the conquering hero and he's the damsel in distress. This was very fun, but didn't have the OOMPH of a lot of Baloghs.
The Plumed Bonnet: Another Dark Angel series book, but unless I stumble across the other 2 at a UBS, my last until the next omnibus comes out. In this one, the hero has sworn off love and marriageable women altogether, thinking all his friends have been cruelly forced into marriages they didn't want (despite regularly visiting them and their overly happy families) but stops to give a woman he mistakes for an actress a ride across the country. The woman claims to be a governess who has just inherited a fortune, but was robbed on the road. He decides that she's playing a game to get a free ride. Except that whoops, she was telling the truth the whole time, and now she's compromised! I'm a bit "meh" on the plot and wish there had been more focus on her suddenly drastically changing social class (first by inheritance, then again by marriage) and dealing with that, but it was enjoyable anyway, and I like how he immediately owned up to himself that the entire situation was 100% his fault and she'd completely acted in good faith and been honest the whole time. I wish, though, that he had owned up to her about the mistake more quickly.
A Precious Jewel: This is a very interesting but also rather uncomfortable book. It's also one of the few where the prostitute heroine actually is a prostitute and still has sexual relations with other men after her relationship with the hero begins (and multiple before him). Of course, early in the book (but 2 months after he becomes her regular customer) she becomes his mistress, and so he her exclusive sexual partner. Balogh's portrayal of a prostitute's life and treatment by others, and how she's viewed, is much more honest than what you find in most romance novels (though still somewhat on the nicified side). It was refreshing in a way, but also often depressing and uncomfortable, especially as much of the conflict is the hero's coming to terms with the idea of his seeing her as anything else. This is, I think, one of those where you only really want them together because you want her to be happy and he's what she wants.