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Hot Under The Collar (2012)

by Jackie Barbosa(Favorite Author)

3.55 of 5 Votes: 3

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

Smashwords Edition

series

Lords of Lancashire

review 1: I enjoyed Hot Under the Collar; it’s a fairly steamy romance novella with a happy-go-lucky vicar as the hero. No kidding.One of the things I love about the romance genre is that its authors often take the accepted assumptions about the time (for example that women were downtrodden waifs whose lives were completely controlled by men) and turn them around, writing novels with independent female characters who direct their own lives. Hot Under the Collar does an excellent job of highlighting one of the cultural double standards of the time (and it’s still a double standard in our time, let me point out) that it was perfectly acceptable for men to have misadventures and then go on to be respectable members of society, but it was absolutely unacceptable for women to do th... moree same, even if those “misadventures” were not really of their own doing. So Walter is a respectable country vicar even though he spent his youth carousing brothels and gaming hells and being a general ne’er-do-well, but Artemisia is shunned by her community because she was fully compromised (in a family way) when she was sixteen, taken in by false promises of love. Walter, as a vicar who doesn’t believe he has the right to judge anyone, ends up teaching morals and values to the entire community by behaving morally.I loved this story and could not put it down. Walter is glorious, funny, charming, and indomitable, and Artemisia, while generally accepting her circumstances, is confident and strong, exactly the sort of character whose story I want to read. The secondary characters add depth to the story, certainly more depth than I expected from a novella, and allow us to get to know Walter in his professional guise.I know I’m gushing, but whatever. The best books (my favorites, anyway) are the ones that make me feel better about humanity, and this one jumped to the top of my list of feel-good favorites.
review 2: I won a copy of this from Jackie Barbosa on Twitter...Many historical romances have a corrupt vicar, usually a man who was the third son and had no other means of income. Not being a religious person at all, I've always been intrigued but that type of character. How must it have been for a person who doesn't have the desire or beliefs for such a position to have no other option to be be a vicar? It's not something I can imagine handling well myself, so it was interesting reading about Walter, a decent man who's making the best of his life as a vicar. And I'm a fan of the "fallen woman" trope, so this story was right up my alley. Artemesia was a great character. Like Walter, she made the best of a bad situation with limited options. After having a (stillborn) child out of wedlock, there was no hope of her marrying, so she went to London and became a courtesan. When she goes back to care for her father, she has enough money of her own to live independently. She's still a pariah in her town, but she deals with it. My one big complaint about this story is when Walter and Artemesia meet. Walter almost immediate says, "I want you," and while I, the reader, have enough of his POV to know his intentions, I felt that Artemesia should have been put off. That's the kind of behavior I'd expect of the stereotypical corrupt vicar, you know? Other than that, I really like the way the relationship developed, and I believed that they could make it in the end, though the resolution was a little to easy for my tastes. But it's a short story, so that's understandable. less

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