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I Kissed An Earl (2010)

by Julie Anne Long(Favorite Author)

3.89 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0061885665 (ISBN13: 9780061885662)

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

Avon

series

Pennyroyal Green

review 1: Violet Redmond is good at pretty much everything. She's a chess whiz, shoots and throws darts perfectly on her first try and even peels potatoes perfectly on her second. Sometimes this works out well (the moments where she impetuously saves the titular earl, whathisname, are awesome and the way she wins their wagers is very fun), but by the end of the novel it gets to be a bit much. Despite her somewhat improbably skills, though, she's still a pretty fun protagonist, and her quest to find her brother is compelling in a way that most romantic heroines' motivations are not. Her counterpart, Earl Argray, pales a little in comparison, getting off to a bad start with the regrettably standard "I could totally rape you but I'm not gonna" menacing and then spending the rest of the... more novel repeatedly getting blindsided by her awesome skills. Though his backstory seems very cool (he's mixed-race and has been at sea since around age ten, slowly accumulating a loyal crew from various heroic deeds), he never really quite makes the leap from collection of masculine attributes to convincingly human character. All the sailing and heroism and rugged dudely strength in the world couldn't make this guy compelling, because it's all just window dressing.Take Fatima, the Earl's Moroccan mistress, for example. At the beginning of the book, he's thinking about marrying her and moving to Louisiana, but after enough narrative mentions of her "brown skin" for Violet to get suitably jealous enough for a couple pages, she just... disappears, along with the rest of his original plan. Which is pretty iffy, since as always it's a brown girl conveniently fading out so the white girl can look better, and also makes the earl a much less interesting character, because his whole motivation quite easily goes up in smoke.Not to say this is a completely bad book. Violet's love for her family is affecting, and, as a secondary character in the other books, she sure is fun. For me, though, this one's a dud.
review 2: The first book in Julie Anne Long's Pennyroyal Green series, The Perils of Pleasure, is one of my favorite historical romance novels ever, but as I've been reading the rest of the series (not in order, which is fine, since mostly the books stand alone), I've found them all over the map. Most are solidly entertaining, some are good (none as good as The Perils of Pleasure, yet), and some of them really piss me off. I like Long's writing style, but I often find I don't like her characters. This one I really enjoyed while I was reading it, and I spent the whole time I was reading thinking that it was nice to have another great story in the Pennyroyal Green series after the last two I read, which were disappointments (Like No Other Lover and Between the Devil and Ian Eversea), but now that I've had some time to reflect, I think I got sucked in by the pirates and the pretty boats and the good, angsty conflict, and really the book isn't all that great. The Good: I really love romance novels where there's an angsty, apparently insurmountable conflict standing in the way of the couple's happiness. Here, the hero and heroine both have the same objective -- to find the heroine's brother -- but with very different ultimate goals: Flint wants to capture and kill him, avenging the death of his (Flint's) mentor and friend, while Violet wants to warn her brother of the search and thus save his life. The success of one would mean the other's failure, and despite their strong and immediate attraction, Flint and Violet both resist each other as long as possible, knowing that the only possible end to their romance will be betrayal. The Bad: I had a hard time willingly suspending my disbelief through parts of this book, particularly where Violet, blindfolded, threw a dart at a map and hit her target (the tiny island nation of Lacao) on the first try. Yeah, right. But what really, really bothered me is that Flint was too rapey for my tastes. He never actually does rape Violet, but he makes sure that she is ever aware that he could, and most of the sex in this book is Angry Sex. Some readers like that, but not me. less

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