View to a Kiss Book

Caroline Linden has only disappointed me a handful of times, but this is one of those times.

I don't even care that it's super implausible, what with Harry sneaking into Mariah's room at night and dressing up as a septuagenarian peer of the realm. It's a romance, so the entire thing hinges on me the reader believing that Harry and Mariah have an irresistible attraction or whatever. I don't. Harry has a bout of love at first sight, but there's something so tepid about his emotions that I just don't buy it. Mariah is enchanted with him too, but again… why???

Also, these two are not very intelligent. Harry's a goddamn spy for the Home Office, but he can't figure out what's right under his nose. Mariah is apparently much brighter than her peers, but she just acts like any other sheltered girl who's used to getting her own way. She doesn't think anything through; she's unimaginative and silly; her original plan to discover who Harry is is to go to the park and talk to every gentleman she meets, never suspecting that maybe the reason why he doesn't want to tell who he is is because he isn't the sort of gentleman to wander the park on a May morning. Constant attempts to get us to warm up to Mariah, with quotes like:she couldn't imagine life without debates over the Corn Laws or Catholic emancipationfall flat. I assume we're supposed to see her as so enlightened, but she clearly isn't because when Harry tells her about a mistreated prostitute he saw that night she's like 'oh so if I just give her some clothes and food she'll be all right'. When she and her father get caught in a working class crowd on their way to visit the King, she's confused as to why the crowd don't seem to like her.

I admire the effort to remind us that Mariah's life is one of privilege that was not shared by the majority of the population, but this is no Courtney Milan novel, and anyway all thoughts of the working poor are basically pushed aside to concentrate on a bigger question: how can we get to the HEA?

In the interests of full disclosure I'll admit that I hate the name Mariah. Also her surname is Dunmore, and I just find it difficult to imagine a breathtakingly beautiful heroine named Mariah Dunmore. Am I taking this too far? Will everybody named Mariah blacklist me? Because to me, Mariah Dunmore sounds like the 'before she was famous' name of a 1950s Hollywood actress who had one big role before dropping off the face of the earth.

I still have hopes for the next book though, daft as that is.

Fun titbit: the heroine of Love and Other Scandals appears here, as does the hero of the single greatest HR novella ever written, All's Fair in Love and Scandal. So I guess you could read this before reading those, for some fun background, though I don't think it's really worth slogging through the rest of this.

ANYWAY. This is not the Caroline Linden I know. Her entire Reece Family Trilogy, two thirds of The Truth About the Duke and various instalments of her Scandalous series are the pinnacle of historical romance, and I suppose if you're churning out a book a year you're bound to have some misses.