Reviews for The Taming / The Conquest (Peregrine Family Series #1 & #2)

The average rating for The Taming / The Conquest (Peregrine Family Series #1 & #2) based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-06-29 00:00:00 Raymond Rodriguez Oh, what wicked smelly webs we weave.... For all the complainers out there who hate it when historical romances, medievals in particular, gloss over the ripe aromas and body hygiene of the time, this is the book for you! I admit that I've griped on numerous occasions when a heroine's legs and armpits are amazingly smooth or a hero only smells "overpoweringly masculine." Whatever that is. Scrotal funk laced with sandalwood is my guess. But this book took medieval odiferous realism to a whole new level, described so often that it grabbed the plot in a hammerlock and broke its arm. I don't think I was supposed to wonder just how dirty the Peregrine brothers' taints were, but given just how much word count went into describing how filthy they were and the condition of the shithole they lived in, my fiendish brain went there, dragging me against my will. Liana Neville is a super-rich heiress who runs her dad's household like a dream. She's kicked aside her screechy stepmother, who would really like to run the castle herself TYVFM. So she pushes the fat and lazy Papa Neville into putting Liana up on the wedding auction block. Sadly for Liana, all her suitors praise her beauty while obviously mentally calculating her worth. She wants someone who only wants her because she's pretty! Enter Rogan of Crabbe Lyce. Which one is he? Take your pick. (Though I'd hit Michael Palin no matter what.) Liana, dressed as a peasant, finds him lolling about in the nude by a pond and they have a fight about his lice-infested clothes. Then later he shows up on her doorstep to court her. She's outraged one minute, then is head over heels in love the next. (Don't ask. There was a paragraph I must have missed, but logical progression isn't one of Liana's strong suits anyway.) Somewhere in there, she wants to back out of the marriage and he drags her upstairs and rapes her to make the contract impossible to break. Even though Rogan makes it obvious that all he wants is have her dowry to kill the Howards, the clan that stole his wife and castle, Liana's got a bee in her bonnet that He Is The One and This Marriage Can Succeed. So, all inexplicably starry-eyed and swoony over Lord Filth of Smellington, she arrives at milord's castle and meets the rest of the family. Dear readers, I have never read a romance where the hero (or anybody loosely labeled as "the good guys") was such a wallower. This is Hoarders: Extreme Medieval Edition. Turned my stummick. The hawks roost in the dining hall, their shit caked to the walls. Spiders and webs dangling everywhere. A foot-deep carpet of refuse and maggoty garbage on the floors. Sand in the bread. A moat only a match away from the Cuyahoga River, with floating cow heads and carcasses. A bridge isn't necessary. The enemy could stroll across it. After a bit of culture shock, Liana sets to work. While miffed at the willingness of Hubby and Fam to inhabit such a cesspool, she re-directs her rage. As she whistles while she works, she heeds her serving woman's advice to take all the abusive shit that comes her way and bow her head, because husbands like doormats for wives. She figures that if he has a clean house and good food, he'll see the light and love her and all will be well! But Rogan can't help but be a dickhead to all and sundry. Why he and his brothers haven't already been descended upon by the Torch & Pitchfork Brigade is anybody's guess, because Rogan's solution to unresolved thievery is to torture and kill random peasants until someone 'fesses up. Of course the peasants' only hope is Liana's plucky wager to find the thieves in exchange for Rogan being her slave for a day. You know what? I don't care. Like so many of Johanna Lindsey's early books, Deveraux has the hero and heroine ping pong between rage and love over the course of a couple sentences or paragraphs. Little things tick one of them off, and then they're all happy and snuggly again until one does something stupid like fart and fluff the blankets and they're off again. Liana is totally hung up on having Rogan think she's pretty, even if he kicks her self-esteem around in other things. I haven't had good luck with Lindsey, and I'm beginning to think that Deveraux's stuff is in the same vein. Hella popular, but pretty effin' mediocre, dumbed-down, and sloppy. (Probably why they're so popular.) There's also a dead granny in a tower room dispensing marital advice and Liana wanders into danger, requiring ass-rescuing and - of course! - that Hero Epiphany where he realizes he doesn't want to be without her. Rogan's brothers (and cross-dressing, rat-bludgeoning sister) and their hangers-on were equally gross. Absolutely everyone was a miserable specimen. Bleargh. Oh yeah, and Rogan is a cheater with a harem of slatterns named after the days of the week when he sleeps with them, and his and his daddy's bastards populate a whole village. That seems to have ticked some readers off. You know what? That was the least of my gripes. Dumb. Dumb dumb dumb. And yes, flaming retarded.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-07-22 00:00:00 Leroy Tate Instagram || Twitter || Facebook || Amazon || Pinterest WOW! Ratings for this romance novel are all over the place, and sometimes I'm like, "Why all the hate?" But this time around, I can totally 100% see why this novel was so off-putting for so many people. Honestly, if it weren't for the attempt at making this "feminist" and the tongue-in-cheek narrative (which you could argue, correctly, trivializes the abusive themes of this book), this would have been pretty unbearable. Apparently, I tried to read this eight years ago and DNF-ed it and all I remembered of the book was that the hero had lice. GROSS. But... historically accurate. Medieval times were pretty disgusting times and even the lords-- even the attractive ones-- probably had wretched body odor and body lice, so points for accuracy, I guess, and for not taking the Disney-fication route that so many other medieval period romances do. Even if pee sluicing out of an indoor-outhouse doesn't get your motor running, it's probably at least true to the times. The plot of this book is pretty interesting. Liana runs her wastrel father's house and her stepmother, Helen, hates not having any power in her home. She demands that Liana get married off or she's taking her unborn baby with her and leaving. Liana's father knows he's letting go of a good thing but the idea of getting saddled with a replacement woman is such a pain that he gets off his ass and starts making arrangements for suitors to come and pay his daughter a visit. Liana, obviously, is displeased, as said suitors all start making obsequious compliments to her appearance while keeping one eye firmly on her dowry. It isn't until she rides off in anger and comes to a beautiful man resting in a glen that she feels the first stirrings of anything other than resentment. She approaches him in a peasant outfit, watching him sleep, and when he wakes, he is disgruntled and they have an altercation that results in her throwing his clothes in the bog. When he demands she cleans them, she pounds them full of holes and swears to him that one day, she will make him crawl. It turns out this man is Rogan Peregrine and he is one of her suitors, and wonder of wonders, Liana chooses him because not only is he incredibly attractive (despite the-- shudder-- lice in his clothes), he's the only one who didn't bullshit her. Unfortunately, Rogan isn't the prince she'd dreamed he would be and is not so easily tamed. His castle is literally filled with shit. The moat is full of black ooze, the tower he keeps his hawks in has mountains of bird shit on the floor. All the bread has dirt and sand in it, the peasants are thieving and desperate, and it's basically hell on Earth. Also, the "hero" is a cad of the first order: he has a mistress for every day of the week and they're named after the days they fuck him on, with one kept in reserve called "Waiting" in case one of them is on her period. He rapes the heroine twice-- once to prevent an annulment, and once just because. He won't let his servants obey her, he keeps his mistresses under her very nose, and he basically insults and denigrates her at every opportunity. What makes this an interesting book is that his behavior is treated as unacceptable. Joice, Liana's servant, keeps telling her to be an obedient wife and obey him in all things, but Liana quickly decides that isn't the way to go. She connives and bargains her way into getting the servants and peasants on her side, and when she finds out he's with one of his mistresses, she sets the bed on fire with them in it. While it's painful to see such a competent, strong woman saddled with such a pig of a man, the fact that this is set in medieval times when women were legally considered chattel makes this easier to stomach, and Liana probably is acting with all the agency that was allowed her during those times. Rogan slowly starts to change and respect his wife once he realizes how better off he is with her, and one of the funniest, character-turning moments is when his wife convinces him to go to a fair in disguise and he sees the peasants performing a morality play in which he is the villain. That's when I think he starts to realize how his thrifty, slovenly actions are affecting those around him, and that he isn't the strong, take-no-shits man he's envisioned. In the background, there is a sort of Hatfields and McCoys rivalry between the Peregrines and another family called the Howards, and we eventually learn that this rivalry probably dates back to (as one might expect) a contentious matter of lineage and inheritance. The Howards also kidnapped Rogan's previous wife, who ended up annulling their marriage and marrying into the Howards family, so Rogan's "women are traitorous scum" mindset is partially because of his assumption that any woman he lets his guard down around will ultimately betray him to his enemies. A stupid assumption, rife with misogyny, but one that is gleefully facilitated by his family, especially his brother Severn, who have several horses in this race and are unwilling to let him go. Despite how problematic this story is, I did enjoy it. It was refreshing to see a story of this type that had humor that didn't come across as forced and a heroine who was strong and empowered in a way that felt plausible for the time in which it was written. A woman who found out I was a romance blogger gave me a whole bunch of Jude Deveraux as a present, and so now I have about fourteen of her older books to read, including the next book in this series, THE CONQUEST. I must say, I probably wouldn't have picked up this author if not for this woman, since my first memories of reading THE TAMING were so bad, so it just goes to show that sometimes it's worth giving an author a second chance. 2.5 to 3 stars