Review: A NIGHT LIKE THIS by Julia Quinn

Abandon disbelief, all ye who enter here.

Anne Wynter-with-a-Y is a governess to some Smythe-Smiths, and is roped into playing the piano at one of their infamous musicales. Daniel Smythe-Smith, the Earl of Winstead, recently returned from abroad, sees her from across the room and decides he HAS to have her. So he chases her down after the musicale, sticks his tongue down her throat, and voilá! Anne and Daniel are in love. But since they're both on the run from nefarious no-good-doers, will these two crazy kids ever get together?

Before I start this review, I should probably mention that I have a habit of being indifferent about the Julia Quinn novels everyone else seems to love, and really liking the Quinn novels other people hate. Notice I said indifferent and like, not love and hate--her fluffy romance has always been a little too fluffy for my tastes; but she does write charming historical romance really well. Or she used to--I hadn't read any of her novels since Mr. Cavendish, I Presume; but a few of my favorite bloggers assured me that A Night Like This was enjoyable, so I was interested in checking it out.

I didn't hate A Night Like This, but I had some problems with it. First and foremost, there was no chemistry between Daniel and Anne at all. The only things they seemed to see in each other were 1. physical attraction--Daniel likes Anne because she's pretty; and 2. on Anne's part, Daniel's an earl and rich. Actually I have no idea what Anne felt about Daniel because Quinn never bothers to explain or demonstrate Anne's feelings on the subject until page 306 when she declares she loves him. He sexually accosts her in a hallway before they're even introduced and her reaction is, "Eh." And this woman's life was supposed to have been destroyed by a man who took advantage of her? Seems like an unrealistically mild response on Anna's part. Daniel then proceeds to be a total creeper and forces her to live under his roof, which should at the very least annoy her. Or maybe she could be like, "Hooray, I can finally get my claws into that rich bloke and quit teaching these brats!" But no. No reaction at all. Like, hellooooooo? *knock knock* Anyone in there? She could seriously be a talking sex doll and evince as much personality.

I also had a problem with the Smythe-Smiths. They were gimmicky joke that was starting to get old in the Bridgerton series (the family with two last names that's tone deaf but insists on holding yearly musicales, laff laff), and now they have a whole series all to themselves? Scraping the bottom of the barrel, are we? I wouldn't mind so much if they had ANYTHING else going on other than the fact that they're terrible at music, but they don't. Seriously, that is THE ONLY THING going on with this family, and there are four incredibly long conversations in this novel about how the whole family is bad at musical instruments. We get it already!

I did enjoy parts of A Night Like This--the parts that had nothing to do with the romance. I especially liked the chapter where Anne's charges put on a very imaginative play titled "The Strange, Sad Tragedy of Lord Finstead," and made Daniel play the lead role. That play sounded really fun and interesting, and I wish A Night Like This had half of that imagination. Alas, it really felt phoned in, and the parts that were fun to read weren't enough to make up for the complete suspension of disbelief required to swallow the plot, or the lack of romantic tension.

Thank you to TLC Booktours and the publishers for sending me this book to review!

The Lost Duke of Wyndham by Julia Quinn

For those of you not familiar with the romance genre, Julia Quinn is a Major Name in historical romance.  She's not as big as Nora Roberts, but she's certainly the leader of the pack of Regency-era romance writers that emerged in the 1990s following the success of the Pride and Prejudice miniseries.  This is the first book not related to the popular Bridgerton series that she's released since 2000, and it's surprisingly good.

I've never been a huge fan of Julia Quinn, though I do read her books.  My issue with her is that her books are just too perfect--the heroine is always decent, smart but not too smart, pretty but not too pretty, etc.  The hero is likewise rich (they are always, always rich), handsome, dashing but not so much that he would ever dream of abandoning the heroine, and an overall a nice guy.  The plot moves along in the expected way, and at the end your have a pleasantly believable HEA.  Quinn's books feel to me like the equivalent of literary pablum:  I have never hated one of her books, and I have never loved one of her books.  They're just pleasant, non-thought inducing ways to spend the time.

The Lost Duke of Wyndham is pretty much more of the same, although technically Quinn has really upped her game with this book.  The storyline, characterizations, and plot twists are tight and solid.  The beginning was a little rough because the heroine kissed the hero within the first ten pages and, of course, swooned.  Urn, swooning, really?  Let's rewind 75 years and try again.  But somehow, the plot and the hero pulled me out of my skepticism and dragged me back into the book.

Since this is Julia Quinn, it's hard for me to say anything too bad or good about the book, although there was one bad point and one good point that stood out to me.  The really great part of the book is that, although it's pretty clear from the beginning that Jack (hero) is the real Duke of Wyndham, you don't know until the end if he's going to accept that fact and take over his duties.  Things become even more complicated when a Major Plot Twist is revealed.

The bad part of the book is Jack and Grace's (heroine) relationship.  It starts out with the rather unlikely kiss-and-swoon and picks up a bit once Jack moves into the ducal palace; but although the two are clearly attracted to one another, I had difficulty seeing them as a real couple.  The sex scene was kinda awkward.  Even worse, I barely cared if these two got a HEA.  The central relationship in the book was actually the one between Jack and his long-lost grandmother, and that was almost completely ignored.  I wanted Jack and the dowager duchess to come to some sort of understanding or armistice, but they never did.  And you would think that a man who spent his whole life unaware of half of his family tree would be a little curious about them, but he never evinces any curiosity in the inhabitants of the palace other than Grace.

Interestingly, the reviews for this book on Amazon are completely spread out--there is a nearly-equal number of people who gave the book one star, two stars, three stars, and so on.  This is amazing because usually people LOVE Quinn's books--for The Duke and I, 118 out of 164 reviews gave the book 5 stars.  Even toothpaste commercials can't claim results like that.  Could The Lost Duke of Wyndham actually be arousing more feeling in people than that of warm fuzziness??  One reviewer actually called this book "too charming," which is amazing because all of her books are charming--the difference here is that people actually seem to be noticing.  In a book where Quinn is clearly growing as a writer, the light-hearted Kodachrome feeling that carried her earlier work is beginning to feel more like artifice than ambiance.  I'm not suggesting Quinn stop writing romance, but (sad to say) she might benefit from writing in another subset of the genre for a while.  Paranormal romance, anyone?



*Reposted from my old, non-book blog, 6/23/08

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Books Over Time

I've been spending a lot of (re: too much) time lately on Goodreads building my "library" by going through my favorite authors one by one and adding them in.  This has forced me to realize several things: 

• One, I read way too much.  It would probably take me years to add in all the books I've read, and I'd still miss some. 
• Two, the photographic memory of everything I've read that I prided myself on?  It doesn't exist.  Especially when most of an author's books are more or less the same.
• And three, my opinion of books tends to change over time.
  

Not the ones that I've re-read, but the ones I read once.  This didn't necessarily surprise me so much as the way my opinion changed.  I would have expected it to be steady somehow--the less I remember of a book the more I like, it for example--but it isn't.  It's totally random.  Books I barely remember I gave four stars to (?).  You'd think if I enjoyed it that much, I'd at least remember some of it.  For example, Medieval Bookworm posted a review of The Secret Diaries of Miss Miranda Cheever by Julia Quinn, which I read a few years ago when it first came out, and it sounded terrible.  Yet I gave it 4 stars?  HUH.  I didn't think I'd ever liked a Julia Quinn book that much until The Lost Duke of Wyndham.

But maybe--and this is certainly a possibility--my assessment of books has become harsher the more I read.  I haz become jaded. -_-

Has your opinion of books changed unexpectedly over time?  Do you think it's because your standards have changed, or because you simply forgot what the book was about?

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