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Title: The Countess Conspiracy
Author: Courtney Milan
Genre: Regency romance
Thingummies: 5
Synopsis: Sebastian Malheur is a famous, brilliant, reviled scientist who dares lecture on Darwin's theories and how they relate to sexual selection. Violet is a widowed countess and Sebastian's best friend. They have a secret. Wait, no, two secrets. Wait, no, kind of a bucket of secrets that they take turns carrying until it upends all over them.
Thoughts: This may not be great literature, but it is exactly what it sets out to be, and for that, I give it five stars. I love Milan's romances--the characters are incredibly endearing, the obstacles actually make logical sense, and the history is really well researched. (In this case, one of her characters makes an important scientific discovery that, obviously, in real life someone else made. But we'll just call it a slight alternative history and be done with it.)
One thing I love is that she sets up major obstacles that would take an entire book to resolve for other people and dispenses with them in the first forty pages. Yes, there are problems that could be solved by people actually talking to each other instead of willfully misunderstanding--and so they do. They sit down and have the conversation that sane and reasonable people would have. And then she uses that as a springboard to introduce new, and even more complicated problems. So you don't ever have the urge to throw the book at the wall because, seriously, why are these people being so stupid? They aren't stupid. It's just that life is complicated, and sometimes requires sacrifice and compromise and some cleverness to negotiate.
I also love that she tends to give minor characters more complexity than you might expect. Her supporting casts are often set up in the roles one might expect--the sympathetic but flighty sister, the harsh and impossible to please mother, the proud and stern older brother. But none of them end up where you might expect--each turns out to be a more complicated person and a more complicated relationship.
And there's wish fulfillment. Of course there is. It's a romance, that's half the point. Perhaps some of the changes of heart are a little unlikely. But they're set up properly, and when our protagonists win, it feels like they earned it. You know how things are going to end, just as you know that at the end of a mystery, there will be a solution. But how we get there--there's the skill.
Author: Courtney Milan
Genre: Regency romance
Thingummies: 5
Synopsis: Sebastian Malheur is a famous, brilliant, reviled scientist who dares lecture on Darwin's theories and how they relate to sexual selection. Violet is a widowed countess and Sebastian's best friend. They have a secret. Wait, no, two secrets. Wait, no, kind of a bucket of secrets that they take turns carrying until it upends all over them.
Thoughts: This may not be great literature, but it is exactly what it sets out to be, and for that, I give it five stars. I love Milan's romances--the characters are incredibly endearing, the obstacles actually make logical sense, and the history is really well researched. (In this case, one of her characters makes an important scientific discovery that, obviously, in real life someone else made. But we'll just call it a slight alternative history and be done with it.)
One thing I love is that she sets up major obstacles that would take an entire book to resolve for other people and dispenses with them in the first forty pages. Yes, there are problems that could be solved by people actually talking to each other instead of willfully misunderstanding--and so they do. They sit down and have the conversation that sane and reasonable people would have. And then she uses that as a springboard to introduce new, and even more complicated problems. So you don't ever have the urge to throw the book at the wall because, seriously, why are these people being so stupid? They aren't stupid. It's just that life is complicated, and sometimes requires sacrifice and compromise and some cleverness to negotiate.
I also love that she tends to give minor characters more complexity than you might expect. Her supporting casts are often set up in the roles one might expect--the sympathetic but flighty sister, the harsh and impossible to please mother, the proud and stern older brother. But none of them end up where you might expect--each turns out to be a more complicated person and a more complicated relationship.
And there's wish fulfillment. Of course there is. It's a romance, that's half the point. Perhaps some of the changes of heart are a little unlikely. But they're set up properly, and when our protagonists win, it feels like they earned it. You know how things are going to end, just as you know that at the end of a mystery, there will be a solution. But how we get there--there's the skill.
