book review: Last Night’s Scandal (2010) by Loretta Chase

This is coming out on July 27–tomorrow–and I won an advance uncorrected proof from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. Hurray!

Last Night’s Scandal is another Carsington family book, following the adventures of Olivia Carsington and Peregrine Dalmay, the Earl of Lisle, who apparently appear as children in Lord Perfect, which I haven’t read yet. Normally I wouldn’t read them out of order but it’s not every day that I get an ARC!

This isn’t an outstanding Chase book, but it’s a standard Chase book, which means I still ate it up with a spoon.

I’ve read six of Loretta Chase’s novels, including this one, and if they are a representative sample then I can describe the foundations of her stories:

The heroine is extremely smart, extremely stubborn and fearless, and extremely gorgeous. The hero is also extremely gorgeous, extremely stubborn and fearless, and usually very smart but may not show it as much. One of them has a Project and finds him- or herself having to work with the other, usually to their mutual initial frustration. Slowly they realize that they are attracted to each other and that the other is actually a useful, fascinating person. The hero usually is the first to realize that he is in love. Despite complications, they solve all problems and complete the Project by mutual awesomeness, then live happily ever after.

If any other author handled these stories I would be very annoyed at how perfect the hero and heroine are. But Chase’s writing sweeps me up in a rush of enthusiasm. When I’m reading about her characters, it’s fun that they are so clever and beautiful. They still have to work to solve their problems, both Project-related and in their relationship, and Chase is good at showing (not telling) how hard they work. But their general aura of awesomeness makes things happen faster and more excitingly. It reminds me of times when I’ve felt extra self-confident, when I’ve felt clever and daring and attractive, and times when I’ve worked with exciting people. It’s fun! In other words, Chase doesn’t say that her characters are smarter and prettier than normal people because that’s one of the rules for escapist fantasy. She shows them being awesome in action because if the reader can get caught up in it, it really adds to the experience of reading the story. (This is how it works for me, anyway.)

Stories vary based on which of the two has more common sense and what and where the Project is. In this case, Lisle has far more common sense, although Olivia is the one who drives the plot and solves most of the problems through leaps of imagination and quick action, and the Project is the restoration of a castle in Scotland.

I was initially relieved that it was set in Scotland, and not Egypt, where apparently Lisle went after Lord Perfect to live with the couple from Mr. Impossible, whose heroine is a hieroglyphics expert. Historical fiction representations of the English having adventures in other parts of the world, told from their own point of view, are almost inevitably problematic, more so when the problematic-ness is insufficiently recognized within the text, as is the case with Mr. Impossible. (This was actually the first Chase novel I read, and I liked it very much, but I’m sure it helped that I don’t know much about Egypt.) However, of course, even Scotland is another part of the world from England, and Last Night’s Scandal did not manage to avoid partaking in a colonization narrative, from the question of “How can we be good landlords to the Scottish peasantry whose language is confusing to us and who mistrust our ways?” to all the English servants being eager to leave, to repeated cheap shots about bagpipes and haggis (really, Chase?).

Well, that was something I didn’t like. Here’s something I did: the dynamic between Olivia and Lisle. They get angry at each other and fight in a number of scenes in the first half of the book, not because of a Big Misunderstanding or because they actually love each other but aren’t reconciled to it yet (both common sources of disagreement in romance novels), but because they’re good friends who have high expectations for their friendship after years of conducting it through letters, and are having a hard time getting used to relating to each other in person. It’s a thoroughly believable situation, and very much in line with Olivia’s impetuous character and Lisle’s feeling frustrated and out-of-place because his family (and, he thinks, Olivia) are preventing him from returning to Egypt. I really like how Chase handles their anger–they are mean to each other (it’s not at all one-sided) but mostly in ways they know the other can handle, and when they end up saying really hurtful things to each other, they deal with it together. It was really enjoyable watching them work through these things back to the relationship of trust and friendship they’d had for so long, while simultaneously realizing that they were strongly attracted to each other.

Overall: Not my favorite Chase, with some less-than-excellent bits (I also found Lisle’s character to be shown less thoroughly than Olivia’s, but probably reading Lord Perfect would have helped with that), but a fun and refreshing love story that I’m glad I read.

my interests in the romance genre

I’m interested in the boundaries of the (historical) romance genre.

A romance is a story with the growth of a romantic relationship at its center.

With this minimal definition, a romance can be anything. It can be set in the year 2510, on a starship, and the people falling in love can do so amidst thought-provoking speculations on what human lives and emotions will be like in that time and place. It can be set in a modern war zone with the protagonists finding love and safety (or the resistance!) together. It can be set in the 1920s at a London college where the hero, an Indian come to the country to study law, meets the heroine, an activist for women’s suffrage. (Together, they fight crime!)

Instead, the majority of books one finds in the Romance section of the bookstore tell much more similar stories. They are about one man and one woman.* All the characters who matter, and definitely the protagonists, are affluent. They are almost always white, and even in rare biracial romances, the heroine is still white.* And when you just look at historical romances, which are really all I’m qualified to talk about, options narrow further: Apart from a few European medieval and USian 19th-century western settings, the vast majority of stories take place in England during the early 19th century. The characters are aristocrats and they go to balls in the city and house parties in the country. Sometimes the heroes are spies in the Napoleonic War but Waterloo is as close as anybody gets to contemporary current events. They don’t even boycott sugar from slave plantations. Everyone is straight (except for the occasional villain), white, gorgeous, and able-bodied. By the end of the book, the hero and heroine are married and the heroine, probably more than half of the time, is pregnant.

I’m not exactly complaining. Certainly not as much as I expected to when I first started reading romance novels. One thing that this genre has taught me is that it’s possible for the same story to be treated over and over again and be fulfilling and worthwhile every time. Who knows how many stories there are where the hero and heroine meet at a ball, dislike each other due to some misunderstanding, end up engaged to each other because a society gossip catches them in what she falsely thinks is a compromising position, and by the end of the country party one of their families throws to celebrate the betrothal, have worked out their misunderstandings and fallen in love, happily ever after? But romance has shown me that a good author can make a very individual work out of that factory-issue framework. I’ve come to realize that this is one of the real arts of the genre–to make the characters and emotions so vivid that the reader can simultaneously participate in the comfort and safety of a familiar story (they will have hard times, but they will find love and they will be happy) while delighting in this particular story in its own right.

Nevertheless, while I do not criticize authors for following the usual pattern, my fascination with history and my sense of social justice want more. I want books that find a love story in different times and places, because that would be fun. And I want books that acknowledge that not everybody is rich and white and beautiful and able-bodied and straight. I know that for so many readers romance novels are an escape into a fantasy world, and it’s understandable that most people’s fantasies involve being prettier and wealthier and in perfect health and, well, not oppressed. But I also know that one of the themes of romance novels is that love will find a way–and what better way to illustrate this than with the love stories of people who aren’t at the absolute pinnacle of privilege in their world?

I firmly believe that all literature, and especially the literature that is most read for pleasure, is something that both responds and contributes to the way people think about life and values and other people. Popular authors (and other creators of media) have the power to affirm and critique this thinking. And what they say about relationships between men and women, or between rich and poor people, or about the existence and roles of queer people and people with disabilities and people of color in a predominantly white society … this matters. It matters because it confirms and informs the dreams of millions of people, with and without these privileges.

So when I say I’m interested in the romance genre, what I mean is:

I’m interested in what it is. Who writes it, who reads it, why it’s limited in the ways I’ve referred to, and where it’s transgressing those limits. Who are the authors who are looking for more in history; who are the authors who are writing from a different place of privilege than the usual straight, white, middle-class Western woman. And so I’m also interested in what it can become.

* As you probably know: Gay and lesbian romances can usually be found in the LGBTQ literature section in large bookstores (lots and lots more online, including a few with bisexual and trans characters). What I’ve found is usually by small publishers and not printed to resemble mainstream mass-market romance. Large publishers do print lots of romances by African-American authors about African-American characters, but these are usually shelved in the African-American section, not in the Romance section. (I used to think, along with a number of other white, straight people, that this was because of prejudice, but then I saw some African-American and queer people saying “No, actually it just makes them easier to find” which is certainly true.) Anyway, this is really to say that I do know that these romances exist, but that they are not marketed alongside or consumed by the same people as the straight, white books in the Romance section.

romance novels & I

As I mentioned, I’ll be writing about the romance genre, among other things. Just as a background, what follows is my own history of discovering that I liked reading and thinking about romance novels. (If you share that liking, what’s your history?)

I started reading them in 2006, when I was a fairly recent convert to feminism and still working on my English lit degree. I’d heard nothing but ill about them before–they were badly written, sexist, porn for prudes with bad taste in men. Yet I knew they were popular, and that they were written by women and for women. So even though I suspected they were everything I hated, I was curious.

My first few picks were by Stephenie Laurens. (I chose her because the amount of shelf space given to her indicated extreme popularity, and because I wanted something historical.) I really, really hated them. Even the one that started promisingly enough with the heroine dressing in men’s clothing to stop the smugglers (or something like that; it’s been a while) ended atrociously with the hero Taming Her Spiritedness.

But I was determined to find out for myself what was likeable about romances, so I went back to the store and this time I was lucky–I picked up something by Mary Balogh. I had found an author who truly respected her female characters, who gave them agency in their sexuality and in the course of their lives. I quickly read the whole Bedwyn series, and over the next three years acquired and read her entire backlist (yes, that was expensive, and got to be quite a hobby–I have a notebook with brief reviews of many of these novels, and will probably draw on them for a few posts).

Meanwhile I took a Feminist Rhetoric course in school and wrote a term paper about romance novels, drawing on Janice Radway’s work (Reading the Romance) which gave me some new, positive ways of thinking about the genre from a feminist perspective.

While I was reading Mary Balogh I didn’t look very far for other authors. I read a few by Julie Garwood that introduced me to racism in American historicals, and a few more by Julia Quinn, whom I found very lighthearted and fun but whose Everything and the Moon I threw against the wall.

Finally, about a year and a half ago, I discovered that guess what! Interesting people talk about romances on the internet! I started reading Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and slowly started following recommendations (or at least things that got made fun of a lot). I read Outlander (introducing me to scary gay stereotypes), The Flame and the Flower (introducing me to a different kind of racism in American historicals), Midsummer Magic (introducing me to … cream), a book by Jennifer Crusie, and a couple by Georgette Heyer. I also discovered Edith Layton and Beverly Jenkins. And then, thanks entirely to the internet, I found Loretta Chase and Sherry Thomas, whose books I might possibly like even better than Mary Balogh’s.

I’m beginning to realize that I have much more to learn about the romance genre. On my shelves I have a book each by Judith Ivory, Eloisa James, Victoria Alexander, Suzanne Enoch, and Suzanne Brockmann. And, now that I have this blog, I’m going to explore the romance genre community online some more and, I hope, find new authors and new books and new people who are discussing the things I’m interested in.

post number one

Hello! I’m Dorothea. You might have seen me commenting under that name (actually, under “dorothean” since “dorothea” tends to be taken already) at Shakesville and some other blogs. I am also dorothean on LibraryThing, which is my favorite non-bloggy place on the internet.

This is my location for bloviating about whatever strikes my fancy, mostly having to do with whatever I’m reading. In addition to going on and on and on about my own thoughts, I’m hoping to connect better with other like-minded people who share my interests in history, the romance genre, social justice, Mr. Spock, etc.

Here’s what’s coming up:

I’ve written drafts of a few posts already–I’m terrified that after starting this blog (which I’ve been planning for months) I’ll suddenly lose steam and never write anything for it–about the YA sf/f novel Anna to the Infinite Power, the life of Queen Victoria, and some of my thoughts on the romance genre. Those will be going up in the next few days, if they survive the draft stage. I’ll also be writing and posting about my current reading: A House Divided: The Antebellum Slavery Debates in America, 1776-1865, edited by Mason I. Lowance, Jr. And today I received an ARC of Loretta Chase’s Last Night’s Scandal in the mail (thanks, Smart Bitch Sarah!), so I should be writing about that before the publication date, July 27.

Once I get used to having a blog I will probably establish some kind of regular posting frequency, but I don’t want to commit to anything just yet. I’m also not sure how quickly I will be able to let comments out of the moderation queue (where all first-time comments will go) or respond to them, since I work 9-5 EST and really shouldn’t be messing about on the internet then.