Beguiling the Beauty (utgåvan 2012)

I love Sherry Thomas, and I hate writing negative reviews of books written by authors I love, so I'm going to keep this short.

This story is so impossible that I think Sherry Thomas used up all her talent trying to hammer it into some workable form and had none left over to make it actually romantic. The early chapters stutter forward oddly; we have the hero, Christian, who is obsessed with the heroine, Venetia, for upwards of ten years despite only having glimpsed her on two brief occasions. Sherry Thomas has to work hard to make us believe that this powerful, rational, scientific man could be subject to such an irrational passion and...she doesn't quite succeed. It doesn't fit with his character, not when he's had such minimal exposure to her.

Venetia, for her part, suffers from having to share page space with characters destined for future books. She has a complicated past herself, involving two previous marriages, which we discover right along with the backstories of Venetia's sister and her sister-in-law. Scenes that ought to have been devoted to shoring up the romantic connection between Venetia and Christian are devoted to the two sisters and their beaux-to-be.

Then there's the particular contrivance of this book: Venetia and Christian have an affair on a boat traveling from New York to London, while Venetia wears a veil at all times so Christian never sees her face (and thus never recognizes her as a person he's been obsessed with for ten years). She's motivated by revenge, because he's said some horrible things about her, but their time together is so special that they fall madly in love. There are just so many details that need explaining here - what does she do in the dining room while wearing a veil? When in Christian's room, are the lights off? Is he wearing a blindfold? What other steps are necessary to keep him from recognizing her? And where did she learn to speak German so well that she can pass AS a German? - that I constantly felt the author's hand forcing the story along and never, ever felt the magic.

I could go on, but it would be spoilery to discuss much more of the plot. There are more unlikely events and Sherry Thomas works really, really hard to make them seem plausible and she more or less succeeds, but that doesn't make the book itself a success. The ending, in particular, was a ridiculous letdown. Comic rather than moving. ( )

tedious in some places, but not that bad overall. ( )

I can't believe I'm giving a Sherry Thomas book two star (and really, the only reason it's not one star is because at least the grammar is good). This book lost me at the prologue, and it never got me back.

Christian sees Venetia once, from a distance, and falls instantly in love. Doesn't speak to her at all, doesn't even make eye contact because she doesn't notice him, but that's it--she's so other-worldly beautiful that he falls in love and stays in love for 10 years, during which time she's widowed twice over and he grows resentful because the love of his life--whom he's never met--is just too beautiful for him to forget and he can't stand that she lives her life in a way he doesn't approve. Not that he knows how she lives her life, because, again, he doesn't know her and doesn't know anyone who's close enough to her to provide him with any details about her life.

Ten years after not meeting her and falling in love with her anyway, he gives a lecture at Harvard about evolution. During the Q&A, in order to make a point about how dangerous beautiful women are, he, without revealing her name, recites a whole bunch of details about her life. Venetia, of course, is in the audience and is understandably horrified. Now, even though a lot of people in England would know who Christian was talking about, there's no reason for her to believe that anyone in audience would have any idea. So, as far as she knows, there are no consequences to Christian's indiscretion other than her justifiably hurt feelings. No matter, after a few days she decides she wants revenge, and the best revenge would be to get him to fall in love with her on the ship that will take them back to England. That sounds like an incredibly petty reason to seek out that level of revenge, but whatever, I'm always game for a good revenge plot. Except that doesn't happen, because after one night of hot lovin', Venetia (who's hiding her identity with a veil) is in love with Christian and now she's in a state because how can he ever forgive her?! Venetia girl, I sympathize with that long dry spell, but ain't no orgasm that great.

So, basically, what we have here is a romance between two immature people who are too stupid to know their own minds. A heartbroken Venetia disappears, intending to never let Christian know the truth. Christian is hopeful that she'd come to him like she promised, even though he's all conflicted when he sees Venetia and once again is in thrall, because he doesn't know that Venetia is his Baroness. And it turns out that a fellow Englishwoman was in that audience at Harvard, and she knew exactly who Christian was talking about, so she happily spread the word. And around this time, the presumed infertile Venetia finds out she's pregnant (I can't believe Sherry Thomas went there). Yada yada yada, Venetia confesses everything right after Christian figures it all out on his own. They get married. Christian's pissed and Venetia is heartbroken but hopeful.

And then, the most ridiculous resolution to the most asinine conflict occurs, in the form of the gossip who spread the word about Christian's badmouthing of Venetia. I seriously considered DNFing right there, but with 10 pages to go I carried on, with my eyes rolled way back into my head.

I wasn't crazy about His at Night...it just wasn't for me, but it wasn't a bad book by any means. But Beguiling the Beauty was just awful. The characters were dumb, the plot was weak, the conflict was nonsense. Not a good start to this trilogy, although the secondary characters were a hell of a lot more interesting than the "hero" and "heroine," so here's hoping for the kind of writing that made Sherry Thomas an autobuy for me in the next book.
( )

There are times when I have a difficult time picking up a new book released by one of my favorite authors. "Why?" you might ask, and I would respond "Because I don't want my feelings or expectations to be let down." This is an example of one of those times.

A couple of weeks ago I picked up a copy of "Tempting the Bride," the 3rd book in the Fitzhugh series, and after reading 4 chapters in, I quit. I fell so quickly into the storyline, that I couldn't bear to read further until I started back at book 1. NOTE: This is not to say that the reader must read these books in order, as Ms. Thomas has done an excellent job in the past of writing each book as if it stood alone.

Now to explain the deduction of a full star in this book's rating. Harsh, I believe, for a storyline and author as good as these are, but my only way to convey an important point.

Ms. Thomas is the real thing. She weals her writer's pencil with such grace, as to make the stories almost poetic in their cadence.

This story is no different, in theory. However, it didn't escape my notice that this book is only 304 pages long. Checking her next two "Fitzhugh" entries, resulted in noting each as being of the same 304 pages in length.

To date, her previous 4 novels were: 352 (being the shortest), 382, 432, and 432. I also noted that they were published by Bantam-Dell and easily found for months afterwards, for sale at the grocery store, etc. This new trilogy is published with Berkley Books (Penguin publishing group), and when I sought to buy the second in this trilogy "Ravishing the Heiress," I could not find it at any of the places I normally purchase paperbacks (grocery stores, Target, Walgreens, etc.). Yes, it was released 8 months ago, but I still occasionally find her earlier works from 2008-2010. Also, I noticed more printing errors and the binding to be of lesser quality. You're probably wondering what this all has to do with my review of Ms. Thomas' book "Beguiling the Beauty." Nothing, yet everything!

I realized from the first book read of Ms. Thomas' in 2008, that she was no ordinary writer. But I was willing to wait the year it took for her to release her next two books (2 were published in March and July of 2008, 1 in May 2009, 1 in May 2010). She never failed to remind me as to why I admire her writing.

With "Beguiling the Beauty," Ms. Thomas' imagination doesn't disappoint. I loved the storyline and the characters. But the lush, musicality of her writing was a bit diminished, making her offerings closer to some of my other favorite writers. She had been, far and away, better than all other historical romance writers.

I have not yet read her next two installments, but knowing that each is of the same shorter length, I imagine I might have the same complaint. Yes, after waiting two years for this story, the reader was able to purchase her next two books within 6 months of this one's release, but I think I prefer waiting for 1 year and receiving 1 book, rather than 3 after 2 years.

Publishers and Agents, don't be so greedy and short-sighted. When you have a gem, don't try to add additional facets. After all, adding more cuts, results in less of the product, and that is frequently not a good thing. ( )

I have been a fan of Sherry Thomas’ novels ever since reading Private Arrangements; she is one of my favourite authors of Historical Romance, even though I would classify her books as Wallpaper Historicals, as opposed to “deep” Historicals like Laura Kinsale’s. This is not due to any kind of sloppy research or glaring mistakes – while I am not an expert, I am quite confident that Sherry Thomas’ novels contain neither of those, that her research is extensive and immaculate and that she gets every detail right.

However, her characters never feel quite contemporary to their period to me, but rather like people from the twenty-first century placed in front of an authentic background, intricately painted down to the last, historically accurate detail into which the never really merge. Reading her novels, I’m always reminded of pop-up books for children, where when you turn a page the main actors of the scene would fold out as upright cut-out figures standing out vertically from the horizontal background. In fact, this analogy can be carried even further - in pop-up books, neither characters nor background have any real depth in thenselves, but both combined result in a kind of three-dimensional effect that is more than just the sum of its parts.

This hopefully makes clear that I’m not at all averse to Wallpaper Historicals, especially not when they are done with such irresistable charm and beauty as those by Sherry Thomas. That her characters appear more modern than Victorian (and I should probably point out, just in case that it is not already obvious, that this assessment is very much subjective, and your own mileage may vary considerably) does not keep them from being well-rounded, likeable and fascinating to read about (it might even help the “likeable” part), and Sherry Thomas’ strongest asset is not her historical accuracy but her wonderful writing – her prose style is both lush and elegant, and to watch her spin out several interrelated extended metaphors over the course of a novel is a sheer delight.

While there were recurring characters in all her previous novels, Beguiling the Beauty is much more emphatically the first part of a trilogy – there are a sister and a brother of our current heroine that are quite blatantly being set up for the sequels, and in consequence they get quite a bit of narrative attention without any of their stories coming even close to a resolution. I am not decided yet on whether I like this or not – it does give author a bigger canvas to paint on, but it also leaves parts of the picture in the dark. I suppose it won’t be until I’ve read all three volumes of the trilogies that I’ll make my mind up on that, but for now it definitely gives this novel the feeling of being unfinished even as the heroine gets her Happily Ever After, but I will just have to see how it works out in the long run.

A second minor niggle is that events in Beguiling the Beauty stretch the limits of plausibility almost to tearing point. Of course, nobody reads Romance novels for their realistic plots, but even so the strings the author pulls are getting a bit too blatantly obvious when not only the hero and heroine (with her sister and sister and law) but also London’s chief rumour-monger all come together during the same lecture in Harvard, and for added implausibility the heroine is also the hero’s childhood love which he tries to get out of his system by denouncing her at, of all times, that very lecture. But those (and some similar things later on) are effectively nothing but slight distractions in what is otherwise a highly enjoyable novel. While not quite Sherry Thomas’ best (that is to me her second novel, Delicious), Beguiling the Beauty charms with its prose and enchants with its wit, it is far enough from common Romance clichés to be fresh and entertaining but stays close enough to true and trusted formulas to not throw the reader off – it is a fine line that Sherry Thomas (like every Romance author) treads, but she treads it with illimitable grace and effortless elegance, making Beguiling the Beauty a joy to read and me look forward to the remaining two novels in the trilogy.