The Duke Is Mine by Eloisa James
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book as a test case for me, to see if I really did like Eloisa James. The cover did nothing for me, and the cover copy wasn't interesting either. The fact that this was a retelling of "The Princess and the Pea" didn't do anything for me, either. I'd always disliked that story. According to James' afterward, there's apparently a pun in the story that I missed as a child and never considered as an adult. (With the pun, Andersen's story does improve.) Susan Palwick's version of the story, "The Real Princess," asks readers to question what "sinister motives" might lie behind a man's search for a woman so delicate that a pea beneath so many mattresses could bruise her. Once that story was in my head, I was never able to let it go, and I came to hate "The Princess and the Pea." (Palwick's story is collected in Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears.)
You can see I came to this story will all sorts of baggage. I used that baggage to determine if I liked James well enough to trust her with material that did not initially seem appealing. She did a wonderful job with it. James wove the fairy tale in and out of the story expertly, and she did it in such a way that it rarely felt forced. Her language was typically fun and engaging, mixing anachronisms like the phrase "wardrobe malfunction" in with references to contemporary fiction like The Castle of Otranto. Her heroine was expertly drawn. Olivia was in a difficult position, betrothed to a man that she could not love, but her honor forced her to accept her fate. When she has a real chance at love, rather than chasing it down, she tries to make everyone else happy. Her self sacrifice is almost absurd, but she's been trained all of her life to be a representative of the best sort of nobility. While her parents believe that the training has not stuck, they cannot see just how deeply it is ingrained in her.
I've now come to the conclusion that James is awesome. Not all of her books are five stars for me, but I can trust her to create heroines that I care about, to be playful with anachronisms and allusions, to be the sort of romance writer that I wholeheartedly enjoy.
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3 comments:
Okay, so which ones are five stars?
I really liked "The Ugly Duchess." It played with the conventions of the romance genre in interesting ways, and both of the leads were complicated people. That was a five star book for me.
I haven't read that many of her books just yet, so I can't weigh in on the rest.
Ooh. I think I might actually have a copy of THE UGLY DUCHESS.
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