Dare, Tessa - Goddess of the Hunt

[oyceter]

Lucy Waltham has long been in love with her brother's friend Toby, but he seems to think of her only as a little sister. She decides that the best course of action is to seduce him, especially as he seems intent upon proposing to someone else. Unfortunately, she hasn't had much practice in seduction, so she decides to try on her brother's other friend, Jeremy Trescott, Earl of Kendall, first.

The beginning of this book is a fairly standard but fun Regency romp, in which Jeremy keeps trying to deny his attraction to Lucy and completely failing, having slight angst over her adoration of Toby, and overall being rather lost. Lucy is adventurous, loves hunting, and is trying to get rid of her reputation of being "one of the boys" to be more attractive, but there's not much makeover in the book, thank goodness.

One unexpected bit was Lucy's eventual friendship with Sophia Hathaway, her romantic rival, and I had a lot of fun reading about the two girls giggling and laughing with each other.

Then there's an abrupt switch in plot type in the middle, which I was first pleasantly surprised by. Sadly, the pleasantness of it decreased rapidly as Jeremy began to revert to somewhat annoying behavior thanks to his Angsty Backstory (why am I not surprised that a) he has one and b) it makes him behave badly?). I didn't believe the motivation for him to act as he did, it took away much of the initiative that Lucy had had in the first half, and the entire conflict largely depended on the two not interacting, thereby depriving me of a lot of the fun of the first half.

Overall, not bad, but it doesn't end nearly as well as it began.

(Also, I was annoyed at mentions of the West Indies. Yay, your relatives run plantations there. Let me count how many ways I do not find that sexy, exotic, or romantic.)

Links:
- oracne's review

Comments

[meganbmoore]

(why am I not surprised that a) he has one and b) it makes him behave badly?).

It's sad that I get surprised when angsty men are actually nice and the angst isn't used to excuse jerkiness. (Mary Balogh's heroes keep surprising me that way.)

[oyceter]

I know! It's one reason why I really like Marjorie M. Liu's angsty heroes.

How is Balogh, btw? I tried starting one book by her and just never got very into it, but reports of non-jerkiness sound promising...

[meganbmoore]

I've only started reading Balogh, but so far I like her. I've read 3 of her bedwyn books and their loose prequels, One Night for Love and A Summer to Remember. The latter books are better than the Bedwyn books themselves, but I'm told these actually aren't her best books, so I'm looking forward to reading some of her other stuff.

[oyceter]

Cool, thanks! I'll check those out some time.

[daedala]

(Also, I was annoyed at mentions of the West Indies. Yay, your relatives run plantations there. Let me count how many ways I do not find that sexy, exotic, or romantic.)

The sequel is actually dealing with that somewhat. I am only halfway through, so I can't tell if it's enough yet, but that she is going there at all is a major surprise.

[oyceter]

Huh, okay. I actually didn't read it specifically because it was partially set there...

[daedala]

By "going there," I meant, "actually talking about race and slavery" -- I knew they were going to Tortola. (I was going to avoid the book on those grounds, but had requested it from the library before I read the first one, and well, trashy book in hand....)

Very, very little of the book is actually spent on Tortola, thankfully. Most of it is at sea. I think that was a good choice: there are black characters who are not NPCs, and there is no picturesque backdrop of the horrors of sugar in the West Indies. It did mean that there wasn't much of the female friendship that made the first book stand out.

I'm...still trying to figure out what I think of the book. I do not know enough of the history. But the hero's half-brother is the son of a slave, and while that and what it means is glossed over a fair bit, that it is there at all is a surprise (I would expect most regencies to get out of that by some tortured explanation of why his mother wasn't a slave or wasn't really, since he is a major character in the book, much as widows tend to be virgins). The brother is also the captain of the ship, where the "hero" is the owner (who keeps undermining him with privileged racist ass behavior). One of the lessons the hero has to learn in the book is not to be such an overbearing privileged racist ass, particularly as concerns his treatment of his brother. His treatment of his brother in the past was pretty bad -- bad enough that he's really not a hero, IMO, and he doesn't really do much in the text to make up for it (the heroine does that for him, instead of seriously fixing her own issues). I'm also pretty dubious of feeling like I want to give the author good marks for effort, just because she's acknowledging racial issues in a genre that usually doesn't.

There are also some problems with the romance itself: the hero and heroine lie to each other a lot and the resolution is stupid. On the other hand, at one point she accuses him of looking for Glittery HooHa! "You were hoping your pure, innocent virgin had come along, to spread her legs and redeem your sins with her mystical virtue."

There are some very loose ends. The book wasn't good enough for me to want to reread it to try to find them. Possibly the sequel ties them up. The heroine of the third book (the sister) is an abolitionist.