Friday's Child

Hmmm. So I can't seem to get the name of this book right. I keep calling it Friday's Girl. Even when I'm looking at the cover. And that's the name I submitted to The Classics Circuit apparently. Oops. I'm actually reviewing Friday's Child by Georgette Heyer.

If you're a Heyer fan I would turn away now.

I hate to bash a book I read because of The Classics Circuit, and I don't want to cause others to turn away from the rest of the Circuit, so please view my review as just that - MY review. Others seem to be enjoying her, and you might too.

But I didn't. At all. I actually couldn't even force myself to finish it. I tried again tonight to actually finish it before I wrote the review because I didn't think it was fair to bash it when I haven't even read the whole thing. But I just can't take any more.

I hated everything about this book. Her writing. Her language. Her characters. Her lack of any sort of interesting plot. And the fact that she's constantly promoted as some sort of second coming of Jane Austen. How can anyone who has actually read Jane Austen say that?!?! That's completely asinine. She writes about the same time period, and that's the end of the similarities. Her writing style is dreadful. Dreadful! And her language just seems like she's trying to hard. She's billed as being historically detailed, but I feel like she just tried to cram as many random words from the time into each sentence as possible, to the point of being unreadable. (From dreadfulness, not from lack of understanding of the words) And she also uses a lot of words that I've never seen in any books actually from that time period, such as "ton." You see that in every romance novel set in the Regency period, but I've yet to come across it in an actual authentic book of the times. You do frequently see "Beau Monde" though, which means the same thing, or even the full French phrase "le bon ton" but never just "ton". That just seems odd to me, like they're trying to trick readers into thinking they're using words of time period when maybe they aren't and they're just trying to hard.
On to the characters. I read a 129 pages and still would forget who Sherry was. Sherry was the main character. How is it even possible to forget that, especially more than once?!?! I sometimes forgot twice in one sitting! I kept up with War and Peace in a bad translation, so I know that wasn't just poor reading on my part. All of her characters were entirely forgettable, and were either horribly boring or overdone caricatures. I wished I was reading one of those weird Austen-monster books and zombies were going to pop out and eat everyone. None of the characters were likable. They all seemed completely stupid, like the characters in a dumb slasher flick. Shallow, insipid, and boring. And apparently Heyer's known for her characters? I'm so confused. I kept thinking, since I keep getting the title wrong, maybe I've got the wrong author? No? Hmmm.
And finally the plot. Since I didn't care about any of the characters, the plot had little chance of interesting me, but still. It was awful, and fairly non-existent. Which could be fine, but it was written in a way that made it seem like things were happening constantly, because there was no inner portraits of the characters or anything else, only action, but then there was no actual plot to tie the action bits together. And the book starts by seeming to focus on one character, then abruptly switches gears, then switches gears again, sort of. It's just odd, and very disjointed.
If you want to read Regency-era romances about the Beau Monde, read Julia Quinn. She is a million times better than Georgette Heyer. She's a better writer, will make you laugh, creates actually memorable characters, and spins quite entertaining plots. She still uses the word "ton" a ton though. If you're interested in what others have to say about Heyer, check out The Classics Circuit.

Marriage Most Scandalous

Yes, I seriously read a book called Marriage Most Scandalous. And I'm blogging about it instead of keeping it a deep dark secret. Is it weird to anyone else that my mom keeps both my grandmother and I in constant supply of racy romances? Anyone else have a mom who does that? Well, since my grandmother reminds me of the grandma in the Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovitch, I don't really know why that still surprises me.
Anyway, I did in fact read, and enjoy!, Marriage Most Scandalous. For the most part anyway. I read it on Monday, which was the day after I got home from my conference. I took a nice long hot bath, which is appropriate since that's what's depicted on the cover, and relaxed with it. I really liked the two main characters and the story had an interesting plot. A man unknowingly sleeps with his best friend's new wife, they duel, man accidentally kills his best friend in duel, and is banished from the country. His pretty neighbor tracks him down years later and convinces him to come home because someone is trying to kill his father. They solve the mystery and fall in love.
I just really wish the book had ended a little earlier. They had a perfectly reasonable plot going, I cared about the characters, and was invested in them, and then she whips out this crazy plot twist that makes zero sense. She had a perfectly reasonable and still somewhat surprising ending going and bam! She throws in all sorts of craziness that completely took away from the heart of the book. And this is why people mock romance novels and soaps. Oh well. It was still exactly what I needed for a relaxing bath and evening after working 16-hour days all week.

Romance Novels

My mom shares all of her romance novels for me, and I tend to read them right before I go to bed, since they usually don't keep me in suspense the way other novels do, so I can actually go to bed at a decent hour instead of doing the "just one more chapter" thing. They are also a good way to clear my head after a stressful day at work when I don't really want to think to hard.

Here are a few I've read recently:
Minx by Julia Quinn - I keep saying Quinn is a different breed of romance novelists, and she is. Her books really go beyond the genre and she always has lovable characters. The male main character in this one is in a few of her others, and I love it when characters reappear like that. The female protagonist in this one is feisty and funny. She dresses like a man and runs the property and farm that she lives on, even though it's back in the early 1800s. It's got a good little story and was fun to read.

The Rocky Road to Romance by Janet Evanovich - I love Evanovich for her characters too, and she's hilarious. This one is a little weak; it's one of her first books, before the Stefanie Plum series. It actually has a lot of similarities to the Plum series, so it's really a building block for that which makes it more interesting to me, to see her process of becoming a better writer. It's got an accidentally crime solver, a crazy old lady who packs a .40 in her purse, and a dog named Bob. But the two characters fall in love way to soon and it has a really thin plot.

Song of the Road by Dorothy Garlock - Garlock's book are very sweet. They're more actual romance than loosely plotted sex scenes strung together like people think of romance novels being. She has several books about Route 66 back during the Depression. Song of the Road is one of those. It takes place in New Mexico and is about a young widow with a baby on the way and a drunk, mean mother. The mother was one of the most infuriating characters I've ever read about. She's horrible, and I feel so sorry for people who have to grow up with parents like that. The main character though was a tough, capable woman who manages to revive her family's motor court to make money and falls in love in the process. Good, simple, entertaining.

What Happens in London...

I know romance novels aren't the most literary things in the world, but they are great for a nice break. And I love Julia Quinn. She's intelligent (she went to Harvard!), she writes well, she creates lovable characters, her books actually have a story, she writes more realistic sex scenes than most authors period (seriously), and she's funny. That said, What Happens in London isn't her best book. It's still good, and I still enjoyed it, but it just didn't draw me in the same her Bridgerton series or most of her other books do. I'm not sure what it was. It definitely picked up by the end, and I caught myself wandering around the house brushing my teeth and fixing dinner with it in my hand (hmmm...that's probably why I'm not the most outstanding cook in the world), but it had a slower start than usual. I think it was because there wasn't any suspense about the two characters. She tried to create mystery around Harry, but since we see things from his point of view early on we know he's a good guy. I think that was the problem. But Julia Quinn on a bad day is far superior to most romance novelists on their best days.

Wizard's Daughter

I finished Wizard's Daughter by Catherine Coulter this weekend. It was terrible. I'm not quite sure why I finished it, except that I have a weird thing about finishing books once I start them. There are only two books I have started and not finished, and I plan to go back and finish them someday - The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. We had started reading The Invisible Man my sophomore year of high school when the May 3 tornado hit and we were out of school for a week. There was another big project we were also doing at that time, so the teacher allowed us to either complete that project or do a report on the book and I did the project. I didn't have time to also finish the book because I was volunteering at church a lot. (The other project was to write and act out a monologue as an author and I picked C.S. Lewis.) I only read a few pages into The Killer Angels, which was our last assignment in senior English and we weren't even being tested over it or anything so a group of us just watched Gettysburg instead. I have both books and do plan to finish them some day.

Anyway, I'm supposed to be writing about Coulter's book. I've read a few of her romance and her mysteries and usually enjoy them, and I thought this would be a good one because I love Harry Potter and this had wizards. However, it was one of the most poorly written books I've ever read. I kept checking the flaps to see if it was a reprint of her first book or something, but it's not. Apparently she's just gotten lazy. That or she wrote this a million years ago and couldn't get it published and now that she can get anything published she cashed in on it. I never expect much from the plot of a romance novel, but this was laughable and didn't even make sense. And it was full of inspiring passages like this: "'This cannot happen, it cannot. My demon chant, none can overcome it, but you have killed me.' 'Yes,' he said. 'It is a very old, very powerful sword.'" Really? That's the death scene of the big villain? The whole thing reads like something a twelve-year-old would write, certainly not a celebrated author.