Regency Buck by Georgette Heyer

Regency Buck by Georgette Heyer


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
The one where our heroine and her silly brother discover, upon their father’s death, that their new guardian is the sardonic Lord Worth. And then everyone gets into social scrapes.

Almost, but decidedly no. The heroine here is almost my favorite kind of Heyer girl – witty, perceptive, cleverer than the men who are supposed to be her betters – except for how she’s ultimately an idiot so that the hero can explain the entire plot to her. And the hero. Almost my favorite sort of Heyer man – dry, sarcastic, smart – except for the part where he’s also a raging asshole. And their dynamic is almost my favorite sort of Heyer romance, where the couple spends the entire book being hilariously cutting at each other, except for how he sexually assaults her on first meeting, threatens to beat her later, and she seems to like that sort of thing.

Actually, you know, one of my favorite things about Heyer in general is that she really played around with romance structures and – I almost said conventions, but of course it wasn’t that, since she invented so many of them. This book is no different. It’s a vague sort of mystery where you’re supposed to be unsure who the hero actually is, but the whole thing almost, but ultimately just doesn’t work.

Sometimes, so close is also so very, very far.

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The Dante Club

The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Bizarrely, I think this book would have gotten a higher rating out of me if it hadn’t had the bits I really liked.

Boston, 1865. The fireside poets – Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, and their publisher – investigate a series of murders modeled on Dante’s Inferno, which they are translating.

Eh. A quite good bit of literary historical fiction bolted to an extremely unfortunate mystery. We’d have these great, detailed scenes of the poets talking through the cantos of their translation and being all bitchy lit theory at each other in this adorably stiff affectionate way, and then, turn the page, and the mystery. Bad pacing, weird fits of tell, a fixation on gruesomeness at the expense of most other things, a lot of ridiculousness (a vagrant whispering the words carved over the doors of hell to a policeman before committing suicide? Really?).

And weirdly, if it had just been the mystery I would have shrugged at a bit of typical clumsy New York Times bestselling airport fiction. But it wasn’t, and the bits of more nuanced writing, of real grace and complexity, were ultimately more frustrating than they were enjoyable.

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