Grade: B-

I accidentally grabbed this book from the pile I have on the passenger seat of my car—I meant to grab the Kleypas one— and didn’t realize my mistake until I was sitting in the waiting room of my doctor’s office. Because I didn’t want to go down ten floors on the elevator, walk out to the parking lot, and jay-walk across the street where I parked my car, I was a little more than peeved. Though I had grabbed this book on impulse while I was standing in line at the grocery store with pasta, tomato sauce, and Clementine oranges (I’m addicted to those things. I can eat four in one sitting) in my basket, I was a little leery reading about a heroine called Vanessa Huxtable (who, by the way, is also a middle child. Huh). Seriously?!?! Vanessa Huxtable? Damn, I was expecting Denise to come out, yelling at Vanessa over a sweater she stole while Little Rudy eggs them both on (Man, Little Rudy grew up with some boobies, what?!). But soon enough, I realized that these two Vanessas could not be more than worlds apart. First of all, Tempestt Bledsoe would probably condescend to cutting a bitch if the bitch looked at her cross-eyed and secondly, that Vanessa Huxtable would probably never marry a rich man she doesn’t love right away even if it meant her family could keep their house and be eating nice for a while (like, say, Dr. and Atty. Mrs. Huxtable got kidnapped by Somalian pirates and Denise was the only one holding the family together, and it’s not like Sondra ever gave a shit about any of them anyway once she was out of that house!). Which brings me to my main peeve of this book and every single book that follows this trope: WHAT THE HELL IS SO SELF-SACRIFICING ABOUT MARRYING A VERY RICH, VERY GOOD-LOOKING MAN WHO CAN MAKE YOUR EYES ROLL TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD IN THE SACK?!?! True-love, schmoo-love… fancy jewelry, couture clothes, five meals a day, a goddamn mansion, and an orgasm smorgasbord can go a long way in ushering that nonsense in. Martyrdom, my skinny muscled fanny!

Vanessa Huxtable, who’s not technically a Huxtable any more because she got married (she is now a Dew) and got widowed soon after, is the 2nd eldest daughter in a family of orphaned kids, which includes: the saintly one who must not break in front of the children but probably cries herself to sleep at night EVERY night bemoaning her lost love, the lovable ridiculously good-looking ONLY son who realizes he must take care of his sisters because he is a man but he never learned how to be a righteous man so now he’s desperate to find a mentor who will usher him into manhood, and the scampy little sister who says precocious things, like, “Oh, Nessie, is this mansion really ours? For real? We get to eat all we want and never have to huddle together again for warmth? Oh, sister, please say it is so!” all wide-eyed and cute… oh, wait. I’m getting the last one confused with some Dickens beggar child or something. The third sister is actually sixteen or seventeen… old enough to be wishing she was Bella Swan being kissed chastely in Edward’s arms. Or she had morphed into Rudy Huxtable in my head (was there an episode where Rudy had a wiggly tooth and an older sibling tied it to a string, the end of which she tied to a doorknob? Oh, wait, that was Full House!). I should not be reviewing and drinking a bottle of Arbor Mist White Zinfandel at the same time. Now where is my bag of Chee— anyway, where was I? Vanessa! What can we say about Vanessa… to start with, she is very plain. In this book, she is described as “plain,” “homely,” and awwww, so sad, not quite as beautiful as her sisters. In fact, Vanessa looks like a garden gnome compared to her beautiful siblings who must have sprouted full grown from Heidi Klum’s vagina (hey, I bet Seal is packing a HUGE one. If she can take him on with a grin on her face, I bet those pretty white kids could just fall out of her vaj like Slip N Slide…) Her oh-so-dead Daddy once told her he wished he had named her Jane so he could call her Plain Jane (seriously? What an asshole). And the hero could barely look at her without throwing up a little in his mouth. I kid, I kid. Maybe. But he did look at her once and twice and thought, “Damn, that poor bird ’sho got dropped in the shallow end of the gene pool… where the little runts pee and stuff. Why can’t she look as hot as her sisters? And brother?” (except with an English accent) But even though Vanessa was the UGLIEST CREATURE WHO EVER LIVED (if you look in the mirror and you don’t look like Inguna Butane, you should just wear a hijab and a hockey mask and confine yourself to the basement forever with only your cat to keep you company), she managed to bag the hottest guy in her little village. And he was in love with her! They were the bestest friends and he was mad-crazy for her, (but she only loved him as a friend) only he had the wasting away disease and Vanessa, whose only purpose in life is to make everyone happy and laugh all the time, wanted to make his last days comfortable and pleasant, so she proposed to him and they were happy for a little bit and then he died. The end. Ha-ha, just kidding. Even after the death of her ridiculously good-looking husband, Vanessa remains faithful to his memory by staying with his aging parents and thinks about him a little each day and remembering how happy they were, even if it was just for a little while…

Until Elliot Wallace, Viscount Lyngate comes into her little quaint village of Throckbridge and THROCKS her like a hurricane (did you see what I did there?). Throcks her like… Ahem. That would have been funnier if his name was Throckbridge. *sigh* He’s not a sociable kind of guy, thinks shabby little towns are a bore, and as far as he’s concerned, the sooner he’s out of Throckbridge, the better. And the reason he’s in Throckbridge? Stephen, the Huxtable brother, is now the Earl of Merton and until the boy reaches his majority, Lyngate is the guardian. He was also the guardian of the previous (and oh-so-dead) Earl, who happened to be a sixteen year old boy and appeared to be suffering from Down’s Sydrome. Lyngate and Vanessa meet at a ball where he is coerced into dancing with her by her title-struck father-in-law. She is sparkling and witty, seemingly intelligent, and Lyngate, much to his consternation, finds himself intrigued. Even though she is SOOOOOO not his type. ‘Cause she’s sooo… homely. Why isn’t she as pretty as her sisters, he wonders. When Lyngate announces to the Huxtables that he will be whisking Stephen away so Stephen could take his rightful place as the Earl of Merton, the Huxtable sisters say HELL NO and insist on coming along. Lyngate is aghast. As if he doesn’t have enough to worry about—oh yeah, he needs to find a wife and get working on the whole heir and a spare thing— now he has to launch these 3 damn females into society and they have no proper chaperone. Lyngate arrives at the conclusion that he should marry one of the sisters, preferably Margaret, the eldest and the prettiest one. His reasons are the following: 1) she’s a spinster, 2) she can chaperone her own sisters, 3) he doesn’t have to go hunting for a bride, 4) she’s hot. Margaret, of course, is prepared to MARRY A MAN SHE DOESN’T LOVE for the goodwill of her siblings, but Vanessa won’t let her. Oh no, Vanessa can out-martyr Margaret, even though Margaret is madly in love with someone else and is obviously willing to forsake that love so that her sisters may have a better life… so take that, Vanessa. But Vanessa will not be cowed. Brazenly, Vanessa marches herself to Lyngate and says something like, “I don’t love you, but my sister loves you even less and if you force her to marry you, she will die a thousand deaths because she loves someone else, so marry me instead because I can give you lots of blowjobs and I totally know how to do it.” Lyngate is all, “Prove it.” Of course, because Vanessa’s ONE experience with a man was with an invalid who could barely get himself out of bed, her kissing and seduction skills leave much to be desired, but Lyngate is… charmed. But Vanessa’s SELF-SACRIFICE is not altogether altruistic: she likes being with a man, wants to have children someday, and is attracted to Lyngate. Ooooh.

The courtship between Lyngate and Vanessa is cute, but familiar: Lyngate wants to think it’s merely a marriage of convenience, but Vanessa is determined to make him see that they could be happy together (though I have to admit that Vanessa’s tendency to laugh at everything was a little disconcerting. I must have come across “she laughed” almost every other page. Seriously, why does she laugh so much? Was she bitten by a rabid hyena?) They talked about the conflicts they came across like two rational human beings and the BIG MISUNDERSTANDING was resolved easily enough without much drama. He explained, she listened and didn’t throw things at his head or run away, end of. I appreciated that Vanessa’s grief for her dead husband seemed genuine. It wasn’t just some “baggage,” this man was obviously important to her and it showed. What I’ve always liked about Balogh’s characters is that they seem to possess real, complex emotions. They had “lives” before the hero or the heroine came along. It was interesting to see Vanessa have to reconcile her new feelings for Lyngate with what she felt for her dead husband. One scene that I thought was particularly touching was when Vanessa sits by herself in her room immediately after her honeymoon with Lyngate and takes out the picture of her dead husband. She studies the picture and cries because she was so happy with Lyngate that she had forgotten to grieve for her dead husband, which brings about feelings of guilt. She thought she was betraying the memory of her poor dead husband by falling in love with Lyngate . It seemed to be the most sincere thing about Vanessa, since she was so convinced that she had to portray an image of a happy-go-lucky person. Interestingly enough, even though Vanessa is SO UGLY OMG SHE’S HIDEOUS, she didn’t really dwell too much on it. She didn’t do the “OMG, HE’S SO HAWT HOW CAN HE WANT ME” nonsense that more unfortunate-looking characters tend to trot out. She was not as pretty as her siblings and was ok with it. I just wished everyone else was! If one more thing was said about Vanessa being a troll, I was going to kill something.

While this book was a nice read, what prevents me from giving it higher than a B- is that I wasn’t compelled to finish it. When I love a book, I can sit down and devour page after page, finishing it in two to three hours. But with this one, I was able to set it down and do the laundry or clean the toilet or walk the cat. There were attempts to make the storyline more exciting: the introduction of Con, a suspicious, shadowy figure who may or may not be a bad guy; he is supposed to be the Earl of Merton, but due to some dumb English law, he isn’t. He attempts to make trouble for Vanessa and Lyngate, but fails and turns out not to be such an evil guy, after all. And then there’s the requisite evil psycho mistress who WILL NOT LET LYNGATE GO NEVER NO ONE WILL DARE DUMP ME. She was thrown in to make snide remarks about Vanessa’s looks, so Lyngate can go NO DAMN YOU NO SHE IS BEAUTIFUL and help him realize that Vanessa is the prettiest little wife, after all. I thought the most exciting part of the book was this Con guy in the prologue. He is standing before a grave, it’s raining, he’s saying things like, “We’ve found him,” and he’s all mysterious and kind of creepy… then he pops up later in the book and he’s all of a sudden everyone’s favorite cousin who’s really a psycho who’ll kidnap one of the sisters and tie her to the train tracks. I was like, “Ooh, he’s dark, he’s tortured…” and then I check the back of the book and wonder who this Elliot guy is. I will bet you ten bucks that this Con guy will get his own book. It won’t be the 2nd book (that’s the youngest sister) or the 3rd book (that’s Margaret), or the 4th book (that would be Stephen, the brother)… and he’s not really a Huxtable, but I’m telling you, he’s sequel bait. I wonder how that would turn out. I mean, he has no money, no title… *rubbing chin* hmmm… maybe he’ll make his money like Heathcliff and pester some poor English countryside miss with baby brothers and sisters and a deaf butler and a nearly blind housekeeper and a flatulent, flea-bitten dog and a senile aunt living in a cottage with a leaky roof. Or he’ll end up marrying some American heiress or something… a plucky American heiress whose reputation gets compromised and… wait, no, that won’t work ’cause Con doesn’t have a title. Or maybe he’ll turn out to be a villain, after all, and kidnap the baby sister and tie her to the train tracks.

What do you think?

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 11:20 pm and is filed under Books, Grade: B, Romance: Historical, Reviews by Ai! Grabe.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.