For those who aren't avidly watching the romance community, there is currently a trash fire going on in which an author trademarked the word "cocky" for use in titles of books and series. This is a bitch move, and it's not going particularly well for her, but it's brought up a lot of interesting conversations about titling and tropes in the romance genre as a whole. We romance readers love our tropes--and why not, as long as they're done well? And titles tie in very closely with them, because it lets you know exactly what you're going to get, in a way that other genres don't practice that same variety of branding. For example, Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake implies that a heroine is going to behave badly while falling in love with a man who is known to be a womanizer in high society. In contrast, here are a few other books I'm currently reading: The Sparrow, In the Garden of Beasts, The Unimaginable, Salt & Storm. None of these titles really tell you what the book is about--and let me tell you, The Sparrow is definitely not about small birds. But these romance titling conventions mean that, while you're never guaranteed to like a book, for a variety of reasons, you know if the book you pick up is going to trend in a direction you'll like. And for that reason, romance can be an extremely comforting genre to browse, because you know exactly what to look for in order to get what you want.I've been having reading difficulties recently. While I've liked a lot of books, I haven't loved very many yet this year, and I've found a lot that ended up being just okay. In the middle of several other books that weren't impressing me very much, I turned away to a good-old standby, the historical romance. And luckily, I had just gotten off the waitlist for this book. Sarah MacLean's name has crossed my field of vision many times--due to friends reading her books, due to her books being recommended for people who like other books I've read, due to her writing a romance column for the Washington Post. Somehow, despite all of this, I had not read any of hers. But NRTBWRAR (geeze) seemed like as good a place to start as any.
The book starts with an encounter between our heroine, Calpurnia "Callie" Hartwell, who is curvy and plainer than is fashionable and who languishes for ever finding a husband during a terrible Season when she eighteen, and our hero, Gabriel, a marquess with a bit of a womanizing reputation who never wants to marry due to how his mother acted when he was young. Then we skip ahead ten years--Callie is on the shelf, sitting in "Spinster Seating" at balls, and watching her dazzling younger sister getting ready to marry a duke. Gabriel, in the meantime, has found a previously-unknown half-sister dumped on his doorstep, and is determined to do right by her and bring her out in society, but he'll need the help of a respectable woman to do so. When Callie turns up at his house in the middle of the night, looking for an adventure of her own, Gabriel decides she's perfect for the task, as her reputation has never been objectionable at all--though if Callie completes her adventure list, she'll be ruined for sure...
The banter here is good. Callie is taking charge of her own life, even if only one or two other people know it. She is determined to live, and to take hold of the experiences she wants even if she isn't supposed to want them--like learning to fence or attending a duel, things that ladies are not supposed to do. Her sister is also lovely and charming and supportive, to the degree that she knows what Callie is doing, and Gabriel's sister, Juliana, is definitely set up for a good book of her own at the end of the trilogy--I presume the second book will focus on Gabriel's twin brother. Even Gabriel's former mistress ended up being surprisingly nice, and I was pleased that MacLean didn't go for cattiness between the old lover and the new in order to drive the plot. Women don't have to be nasty to each other, guys! It's possible!
I liked Gabriel overall, though I didn't always find him to be the most interesting. I also found him a bit more...absent, I guess, than I thought a proper romance hero should have been--both emotionally and physically. He popped in and out, mostly when Callie was having one of her adventures, but I would have liked to see a bit more reaction between them. Additionally, oh dear stars above, someone please erase the phrase "sweet rain" from the English language. Like, what? Ew. Stop. Also, Gabriel is kind of a jerk for most of the book. This is pretty common in the genre, but even when Gabriel blundered quite badly, he was very, very slow to make apologies or amends for it, more so than he should have been.
Overall, I liked this quite a bit. Not a raving, "must have it again and again" book, but something that definitely leavened my reading slump somewhat. I'm looking forward to reading some of MacLean's other books and seeing what else she has to offer.
4 stars out of 5.
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