Anne Stuart makes me cringe.. and I mean that as a compliment

After enjoying Ruthless so immensely, I'm now reading number 2 in this trilogy, Reckless, the story of the son of the protagonists of Ruthless, Adrian Rohan. The heroine is called Charlotte Spenser. I'm not sure why it pleases me so very much that she's Spenser rather than Spencer, but there you are.

I'm about a quarter of the way in, enjoying it a great deal, and already a major Stuart trademark has asserted it - the Cringe.

I love high conflict novels where characters are really put through the mill. And boy, does Stuart deliver on this. There are many forms of suffering and one that Stuart does particularly well is subjecting the heroine to feelings of inadequacy. It's hard to read and it's relateable - who among us hasn't felt precisely this at some point in our lives? It delivers an emotional punch, creates empathy for the character. It makes us cringe. I experience the best cringes physically, a clench of sympathy, right in my gut.

Attractive as the cover for Reckless is, the heroine is actually a six foot redhead. She does not consider herself attractive. At thirty, she considers herself firmly on the shelf. At the start of the story, she decides to attend a three day orgy with her worldly cousin. She is going, in disguise, to satisfy her curiosity but with no intention of participating. However, on the very first night, she is discovered by Adrian and forced into a tryst with him.

At the start of the scene when Adrian first accosts her Charlotte believes he doesn't know who she is, or even that she is female (she is dressed in a monk's robe). She is horrified to have seen him, even more so to have fallen into his hands. She is desperate to get away - and for reasons that make you ache for her:

She could push back her cowl, shock him into releasing her. But she still held off, hoping there was some way to escape this terrible mess she'd gotten herself into without betraying her identity. And the dismal truth of it was that she wasn't so much afraid of the social aftermath as of him knowing she'd been there. She was afraid to see that light in his eyes flicker and fade with disappointment once he saw who he really had in his net.

As their battle continues, Adrian forces her to an uncomfortable admission in an attempt to make him release her:

"You would hardly lower your standards to .... to .... be an unwilling antidote, a plain old maid."

There's no reassurance from Adrian, merely this:

"The word is fuck... And you wouldn't be unwilling."

Charlotte has long been obsessed with Adrian, watching him from afar, hating her own stupidity and knowing him far out of her league. She is in a place of absolutely no power in this scene: poor, plain and in thrall to a man she feels sure will despise her, or at least be completely indifferent. She is desperate to remain anonymous.

So close, so tantalisingly close, and all she had to do was pull back her cowl and he'd release her, shocked, horrified, perhaps disgusted at the thought of the mistake he'd almost made...

... "You don't want to do this," she said desperately.

At which point he delivers a line that seems rather cold, but actually delivers to Charlotte a modicum of power and eases both her low sense of self-worth and the reader's fears:

"Of course I do. I've wanted to do for a long time, Miss Spenser."

Delicious.

Fighting vainly the old ennui...

My story is much too sad to be told,
but practically everything
leaves me totally cold.
The only exception I know is the case,
when I'm out on a quiet spree,
fighting vainly the old ennui
and I suddenly turn and see,
your fabulous face

From I Get a Kick Out of You

by Cole Porter

en·nui   /ɑnˈwi, ˈɑnwi; Fr. ɑ̃ˈnwi/ [ahn-wee, ahn-wee; Fr. ahn-nwee] –noun
a feeling of utter weariness and discontent resulting from satiety or lack of interest; boredom

Ennui. The very blight of romance heroes everywhere. Rakes in particular, of course.

Funnily enough, ennui is what I've been feeling each time I pick up another romance novel with an ennui-ridden hero. Every time a hero looked at a supermodel or courtesan and thought, Ah, how bored am I of all this, I would think, well, Ah, how bored I am of all this. And I don't think this was as a result of some fancy metafictional intent.

The conceit of the ennui-ridden hero is that along comes the heroine, and suddenly his whiskers start a-tingling again and his nose starts a-twitching. If the heroine is plain, he will find her a refreshing change to all the beauties he's used to; if she's disapproving of him, he'll be delighted with her unusual frankness etc.

I've always thought there ought to be something about the heroine that marks her out from all the women the hero is so bored with and one of my major issues with this particular type of story is how rarely this desire is satisfied. I'm often just bewildered by the attraction the heroine holds for the hero and find myself blinking when he muses, internally, about how she's different from any woman he'd ever known without ever really articulating why.

So it's funny, the reaction I - the ennui-ridden romance reader - had to Ruthless by Anne Stuart. Dangerous, bored rake? Check. Plain, devoid-of-attraction heroine? Check. Recipe for Ah, how bored I am of this? Check.

But I loved it. I loved it. I raced to the end and my, the end! All lovely pacing and it just built and built and came to a close with me heaving the sort of big happy sigh that is the crock of gold I look for in each romance I read. Quite rare, those sighs.

Yes, it broke through my own ennui and made me love again. And can I articulate why? It's not easy. It's not as though the other romance-readers out there seemed to see how lovely this book is. I remember seeing a spate of reviews coming out for this book, what, six months ago? And I'm sure there was no rapturising, not that I recall. How could all those readers fail to see that? Am I the only one? Was this book made for me and me alone?

No, of course not. It's just that Stuart does dark heroes like a dream and Rohan has this rather wondeful way of being simultaneously cruel and kind to the heroine that I just loved. Elinor has had a nasty experience in her past and has closed herself up in her plainness. Starved of attention, she's like a little drab flower struggling to survive in a shady spot. Along comes Rohan, a blistering sort of sun, and shines all his attention on her, the good and the bad. And it turns out that Elinor's a hardy plant, one that astonishes this great powerful sun with her resilience. Oh, I'm getting a bit over-poetical now, aren't I? But that's as best I can articulate it, the thing about this book, that made it different from the other bored rake books. The thing that broke through my ennui.

Be back soon!

I'm off.

It's mid-term break here so we've done our usual of hiring a cosy cottage in a picturesque corner of the world. I'll be offline for a week and a bit. But I'll Be Back Soon *seamlessly seagues to song below*.



But is there more to my choice of song than merely that I will, literally, be back soon?

Did I think of it because I'm reading Surrender to the Devil by Lorraine Heath (a new to me author) in which the heroine is an ex-Rookeries child who was once apprenticed to a thief called Feagan?

Is it because I've been sentimentally thinking about my own lovely boys and boys feature with cheeky insoucience in the clip featured above?

Or is it - ?

Damn, I got nothing else. I think I'm just about burned out. Burned out on everything. Never have I needed more a cosy cottage, a warm fireside, real ale and sticky toffee pudding. No work. No writing. No internet.

And my Kindle. My lovely lovely Kindle.

I'll. be. back. soon.

Towards the elimination of DNFs

Before I had my Kindle, about 10% of my book purchases were DNFs, books I never finished, and perhaps another 10% would be books I'd all but give up on, but would skim to the end.

Since I got my Kindle, I haven't purchased any print books. Of course, I will eventually buy a print book - when one comes along that I can't get on Kindle probably - but at the moment, I'm still too taken with my Kindle to pay print books any attention (which is probably why I'm still to finish The Unwilling Bride by Jo Beverley).

One of the things I like best about the Kindle, is the ability to ask for free samples. I rarely buy a book without first looking at a sample now. In fact, I save up samples, and have 'sample' evenings every now and again. This is a bit like a browsing in a bookshop except (1) I can do it in the comfort of my own home, (2) have a cup of tea at the same time and (3) thereby get to read about a chapter or so of say 5 or 6 possible purchases before deciding whether to buy. Generally I find samples to be quite generous - at least a chapter or more.

I'm finding that I'm buying about 1 in around 4 samples that I try - and that's probably a lower purchase rate than I used to have just buying print books off of Amazon. I live in the UK where few book shops stock romance so I was buying most of my print books online anyway and never getting the opportunity to browse other than via author websites. I therefore purchased quite a lot of books without having a sense of whether it would work for me. I'm hoping to find a big reduction in my DNFs now that I have the Kindle.

Pre-Kindle, I also had a tendency to stick to new authors I'd heard of (e.g. via other blogs) and leave authors whose names I didn't recognise alone. Now I'm trying more entirely new-to-me authors, particularly when it's so easy to try someone out on a short story/novella for a very reasonable price.

That's another interesting feature of ebooks actually, the fact that story length becomes less important. Shorter lengths can be reflected in smaller prices; I find myself beginning to look at books/ stories in a different way. I don't really think of a short story as a "short story" anymore. Just as a story. Does that make sense?

My Kindle is challenging my ideas of what books are and of what they should be.

What do you think? Do you relate to books/ stories differently depending on whether they are paper or ebook? Do you browse one or other more thoroughly before you buy? Do you prefer one or other format for particular reasons?