While the Duke Was Sleeping - Sophie Jordan (Rogue Files #1)

This was my third Sophie Jordan book and my second of her historical romances--it does interest me that she doesn't use another pseudonym for writing adult romance than the name she uses for her young adult books, but that's besides the point--and I think it might be my last.  See, recently, the Washington Post published an article called "How Trump killed off my romantic lead" by romance author Sarah McLean, which focused on toxic masculinity in romance novels.  McLean herself cops to being guilty of having this problem in past novels and the article addresses how she strove to steer away from it in the book she was writing at the time of the election.  I haven't read the book in question, but the article was heavy in my mind as I read While the Duke Was Sleeping, because if there's an absolutely toxic hero I've encountered recently, it's Struan Mackenzie.

The plot here follows heroine Poppy Fairchurch, a shopgirl with an infatuation for the Duke of Autenberry who routinely buys flowers from her for his various lovers.  When a fight in the street snowballs into Poppy pushing him out of the way of an oncoming carriage and the duke ending up in a coma, Poppy accidentally makes herself out to be his fiancee--and finds herself welcomed into his family with open arms.  Or at least his family that doesn't include his bastard half-brother Struan, the guy Autenberry was fighting with to begin with, and who came to London to get revenge on Autenberry for the sins of his father.  Ah, the drama.  And how does Struan decide to get revenge?  Why, by taking Poppy, Autenberry's fiancee or possible mistress, of course.

I liked Poppy as a character, I really did, other than her absolute inability to say, "Oh, hey, this is a misunderstanding" and peace out.  Clearly her perpetuating the misunderstanding had higher stakes than her saying "no" to Strickland, the duke's best friend, when he tells her to go along with it in the first place.  But besides that, I did like her.  She's struggling to raise her fifteen-year-old sister, who is prettier and flightier than is probably good for her.  She dreams of true love, even though I'm not convinced she really thought that she was ever going to marry the duke, not even at the height of her infatuation.  But Struan was another matter.  He and Poppy had chemistry, undeniably--but Poppy didn't want him.  She told him no, repeatedly, because even though they had chemistry, she thought she deserved better, or at least different.  And yet Struan repeatedly sexually assaults Poppy, ignores that she says no, and is absolutely horrible to her in the process.  This isn't sight unseen in romance novels, of course--but most recent ones have been better about this, and Struan belongs firmly in the era of bodice rippers rather than in our modern one.  Our modern age of historical romance, that is.

There were some promising side characters here and the sequel to this, The Scandal of It All, seems to have a promising main couple--but after finding the other romance I've read by Jordan weird and this one just outright uncomfortable due to the absolute toxicity of the hero, I'm just not convinced I can go for it.

2 stars out of 5.

A Good Debutante's Guide to Ruin - Sophie Jordan (Debutante Files #1)

Much to my surprise while looking at what other series Sophie Jordan had on offer, I have read one of her books before--Firelight, a young adult fantasy about shapeshifter dragons and dragon hunters that's pretty much like Twilight but possibly even worse.  I'm actually very glad I saw that after I read this book, because it probably really would have colored my impressions of this one otherwise.  Also worthy of note is that this isn't actually the book I wanted to read.  I wanted to read While the Duke Was Sleeping, which is the first book in her Rogue Files series, but there was a hefty library waitlist for that, so I settled for this one instead.

Let me put this out there to begin with: while I think Declan and Rosalie ultimately made a good couple, the setup here is kind of...uhm...weird to me.  Because they're step-siblings.  And they did live together, though apparently not for the past ten years.  But still.  Step-siblings.  And not only that but they start hooking up while Rosalie is in disguise at a house of sin, where people go to have orgies, watch other people have orgies, etc...  And their whole relationship basically is based on a lie...

So, yeah.  Let me back up a bit.  The story follows Rosalie, who has spent the past ten years of her life at a finishing school, including two years after she actually graduated because her mother never bothered to collect her.  The headmistress decides she can't keep Rosalie forever, even though she likes her, and so delivers her to Declan, the Duke of Danbury and Rosalie's stepbrother, as he's her only other family.  Declan hates Rosalie on sight because of her connection to her mother, and vows to get rid of her as quickly as possible--his aunt and cousin convince him the best way to do this is to give Rosalie a huge dowry and marry her off.  And so the husband hunt begins.  But Rosalie is in love with Declan, and always has been, and while she accepts she'll have to marry someone else, she's not about to let Declan decide on exactly who that will be for her.

What I think ultimately rubs me the wrong way about this book is that it was specifically written to titillate.  There's absolutely no reason that Rosalie had to be set up as Declan's step-sister and didn't enter his sphere in some other way, maybe by ending up in Peregrine and Aurelia's care.  There was absolutely no need for the whole Sodom (the house of sin) plot line.  There are plenty of other tropes that could have been used to fulfill these same plot lines, and yet Jordan chose these, apparently just to shock and titillate the reader.  But she uses them without fully committing to them.  There are some pretty serious kinks that come up in this book in various ways, but Jordan clearly can't decide if she wants to commit to them and have a full-fledged historical erotica, or if she wants to have a more sedate, "traditional" historical romance.  So she bounces back and forth between the two and doesn't really land in either, and it's an attempted balancing act that doesn't ever really work out.  Consequently, I don't think this will really please readers of either camp.  There's also some really twisted stuff involving rape going on in the background here that's never truly addressed, particularly the impact it must have on the character in question and how it shaped everything leading up to the book.

So, am I still interested in Jordan's other historical romances?  Yes.  Aurelia in this one seemed like a girl who definitely would not have actually existed or at least acted the way she did in reality, but has promise as a romance heroine.  And I still want to read the Rogue Files books when I can get the first one from the library.  But as for this one... Eh.

2 stars out of 5.