Sakura of DOOM

Lydia Joyce writes gothic romances, some more gothic than others. This one felt very gothic, given the use of spiritualists and seances. Thomas Hyde, Viscount Varcourt, has been suspected of killing his older brother for years. His mother is currently enamored with spiritualism, particularly the veiled spiritualist Esmerelda. Thomas is worried Esmerelda is using his family to further her own ends and tries to drive her away from his mother.

Em is using her role as Esmerelda for reasons we don't know, and soon, Thomas coerces her to investigate what his mother knows about his brother's death. I don't particularly like Thomas, but I find his relationship with Em fascinating. There's a lot of power play involved, and although Thomas does the stupid alpha male thing of thinking it's okay to be threatening non-virginal women, Em responds not by protesting her innocence, but by continually forcing herself to be icy and unafraid. It has the effect of making the reader and Thomas judge his actions without the "this would be okay if she really were a Gypsy*/fallen woman/whatever." Also, as we all know, I am a total sucker for icy women.

This is definitely a dark romance, and I don't buy the happy ending at all. However, unlike Anne Stuart's Moon Rise, I like that the darkness in this book is more centered in the heroine, as opposed the more traditional innocent heroine/dark and mysterious hero dynamic. Also, as a plus, Joyce's plotting doesn't completely fall apart as much as it usually does. There is still a totally random solution to one mystery (who killed Thomas' brother), but since I didn't care about that one, I was okay with it.

... Now I want to read a gothic romance by Joyce that features a non-aristocratic hero and a brooding, secretive, possibly murderous heroine.

Actually, I would read a book like that by anyone!


* Am annoyed with the book's use of the Roma, and while it's in character for everyone to think of them as Gypsies, they're basically used as exotic flavor. There's only one speaking Roma character, and most of it is about Em and how she fits in or doesn't with the Roma community. Bah.

Marianne Ransom has just been orphaned, and she's on her way to London to hopefully find a job as a governess. But Marianne has different plans, and she ends up stumbling into some rather unsavory elements of Victorian London. In the end, she's taken on by a rich duchess for her supposed relationship to a famous spiritualist.

I'm not actually sure if this is a gothic or a mystery; none of the men seemed all that threatening to Marianne after her first London encounter, but on the other hand, there is a forbidding house with secret passages, an overprotective head housekeeper, and a woman who hides her disfigured face under a veil. What made it less gothic-y to me was Marianne's largely unfazed attitude. She's most definitely an ingenue, and very much eighteen years old to boot, but she also learns rather quickly and ends up having a bit of a backbone. I liked her a lot, despite or possibly because of how the omniscient narrator pokes at her faults.

Anyhow, this was a very fun read that drew me in via the plot and the developing relationships between the characters.