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La Princesse Au Petit Pois (2013)

by Eloisa James(Favorite Author)

3.75 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

2290058246 (ISBN13: 9782290058244)

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

J'ai Lu

series

Fairy Tales

review 1: ISBN? - 9780749956028Genre? - Historical / RomanceCharacters? - Tarquin Brook-Chatfield, Duke of Sconce / Olivia Mayfield Lytton / Georgiana Mayfield Lytton / RupertSetting? - London (England)Series? - Fairy Tales #3Title? - Olivia becomes possessive over the Duke when her sister becomes interested in him.Character Analysis? - I loved the relationship between Olivia and Georgiana, as they're my view of what sisters should be, but aren't usually. I also loved the change in Tarquin as he falls in love with Olivia and how she changes his view of life.General Comments? - The description could have been better. It definitely wasn't because of the characters that I only gave this book five stars instead of four. I felt that you couldn't place yourself within the setting.Recommen... mored? - Yes, a great read.
review 2: I'll be honest that I couldn't get past a quarter of the way into this book before I had to put it down for good. The problem is that the "heroine" of this novel is just - to be blunt - a horrible person.The setup is simple enough. She's engaged to be married to a duke. Not only does she not love him, but she's not really "duchess material" - she's on the curvaceous side, has a bawdy sense of humor, tends to lean towards impropriety at times...all of that has potential to be quite a bit of fun and enjoyable, as I like my heroines with personality.The problem is that she's mean. That's all there is to it. She's just a mean person. Her fiancé (the non-hero duke of the story) has legitimate brain damage from birth, when he went without oxygen for too long. These details are given fairly early on and permanently impacted both him and his mother (his mother, from the description, seems to have been left in something barely above a vegetative state after childbirth). The duke's brain damage is also used as "humor" in the novel, in the least humorous way imaginable. The way Olivia, the heroine, and her sister talk about her fiancé is just mean-spirited and horrible. And, to add insult to injury, the duke's father tells her at one point that (among a couple of awful reasons), he agreed to go forward with the engagement because she's "nice" to his son. To his face, perhaps. I do recognize that, at the period in which this book was set, the characters would not be as educated about the duke's situation as we are today, so I tried to give the characters a bit of the benefit of the doubt. I was willing to give her character a bit more of a pass about the comments she makes in the first couple of chapters because, at that point, she was truly ignorant about the situation. However, then there's a scene where the duke's father tells her what happened and she begins to feel genuine sympathy for the duke and his mental incapacity. She also recognizes that he's a kind-hearted and even somewhat sweet man. At that point, I figured that, while the heroine would be no more inclined to want to marry him, the bad-mouthing him behind his back would stop. Right?Wrong. A couple of chapters later she's again making horrible comments about him behind his back, about how stupid and witless he is.I don't understand why the author didn't realize how incredibly unsympathetic this makes her heroine - and how easy it would have been to avoid. If the intention was to create a situation where she's engaged to duke X almost all her life but doesn't want to go forward with the wedding, and then she meets duke Y...There are at least a dozen ways to accomplish that goal without making her a truly deplorable, reprehensible, unsympathetic, and downright mean-spirited character. The only thing that prevented me from writing "cruel" in that list is that she only says those awful things behind his back but is nice to his face. But is that really better?No. She's still a horrible character. I was somewhat disappointed by a previous book written by this author, but I had actually enjoyed several others she had written. However, this book gives me serious doubts as to whether I'll bother to pick up the next book by Ms. James. less

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