Venetia by Georgette Heyer

Venetia by Georgette Heyer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


You know . . . I respect the hell out of Georgette Heyer.



This book had a couple strikes against it going in:



1. The narrator of my audiobook was a deeply unfortunate choice, and her British accents sounded like Eliza Doolittle, the before version. Hilarious for all these “people of quality,” and really distracting.



2. It’s one of those romances where the dude grabs the girl and kisses her within 30 seconds of meeting to establish his rakish bona fides. Not my thing.



But this won me over. It’s not a good place to start with Heyer, because she’s thinking about and playing with a lot of the conventions she established. This is a more sexual book than any of the others I’ve read. Not in actual explicit content, but in awareness of sex. There’s a very clear sense here of all the rules about virginity and chaperonage being, you know, rules that the characters understand as a construct. And deeper, this is a book about people who choose, for whatever reason, to step outside the rules. The reasons aren’t always very good, and there’s some irritating smugness about whose peccadilloes really “count,” as it were (hint: the woman is always to blame).



But yeah. It’s a Heyer about a girl who loves a guy, and a guy who loves her back. This is never in question, and there’s no narrative tension about that. But she has to decide to be with him, and understand her decision in light of decisions the people around her are making to live in or outside the rules. And I liked it.



…And any Heyer where the marriage proposal involves discussions of orgies is okay with me.





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