I have not regularly read historical romance, for the past, oh, several years (probably more years than I realize, to be honest). My book log shows that I read eight historical romances in 2020 (this once would have been a paltry number), and since then I’ve only read one or two a year; this reading has consisted entirely of one series by Julie Ann Long.
So, I started Viscount in Love with a little trepidation – would the issues that drove me away from a subgenre that I once loved rise up to annoy me again?
Unfortunately, the answer was yes.
The book opens at a ball, where Victoria Sutton, in her first season, is talking to her friend Clara. She’s making fun of her sister Leonora’s fiance, Viscount Dominic Kelbourne, who they are watching from across the room. The viscount, in Torie’s opinion, is “haughty—and bad-tempered.” We also immediately hear about his “volatile” Italian mistress, the mention of which feels anachronistic between two tender-aged debutantes, though I’m somewhat inured to that sort of thing in historical romance. Would that I were inured to “volatile” Italian mistresses; they seem to be the only type of mistress any of these manly historical romance heroes keep (to be fair, occasionally they are fiery Spanish mistresses rather than volatile Italian ones).
Dom catches them, naturally. Torie and Dom then verbally spar until supper is called, at which point Leonora shows up, outs the fact that Torie is dyslexic (they never call it that in the book, of course, just emphasize that she can’t read or write), and stalks off with her fiancé. Torie thinks the two deserve each other because they are both so cold. But which is Dom – cold or hot-tempered? And Leonora is portrayed as very proper, but would a proper lady blurt out her sister’s embarrassing “affliction” to her fiancé in a public place?
Inconsistent characterization – mostly of Dom but also a few other characters, chiefly Leonora, was one of my main issues with Viscount in Love. More on that in a bit.
The story shifts forward two years, to the funeral of Dom’s sister and brother-in-law, felled by that most common historical romance calamity, a carriage accident. Torie and Leonora (the latter still a fiancée rather than a bride) are in attendance.
Dom was not close to his sister but felt an affinity to her for having suffered under their terrible father, and Dom wants to do right by his orphaned twin niece and nephew, Florence and Valentine. Leonora is immediately haughtily appalled by the idea of having anything to do with children who are rumored to be illegitimate (Dom’s sister was apparently known to get around).
Torie, on the other hand, immediately bonds with Florence and Val, who are the most precocious 11-year-olds in the land. In fact, the three become such great friends that she takes to visiting them in their London home daily, teaching them painting (Torie is an accomplished artist).
Through these visits, Dom and Torie start to interact more. While they are like oil in water in some respects (him, forbidding and proper; her, daffy and frivolous), they do begin to find common ground in their care for Val and Florence. Thankfully, at this point there’s not *too* much mental lusting. I’m not a big fan of mental lusting in general in romance, and even less so in a story where the hero is engaged to the heroine’s sister.
It isn’t probably a spoiler that the engagement ends, which leaves the door open for Dom and Torie. The course of true love doesn’t run smooth, predictably.
So, as noted previously, one of my main issues with Viscount in Love was inconsistent characterization. Torie was fairly consistent, but I found Dom hard to get a handle on. I thought he was supposed to be a stick-up-the-you-know-what type of aristocrat, which made his engagement to the icy Leonora logical. But then one of his main characteristics is supposedly a bad temper. I didn’t feel like I saw the bad temper much, but it gets talked about a lot.
Primarily he seems to yell a bunch in the House of Lords, about slavery (he’s opposed). So he’s…kind of overly proper and kind of fiery, but the two halves never quite made sense together. Later in the book, he becomes less proper and uptight, which may have made sense in the context of his blossoming relationship with Torie. But it highlighted the fact that I really didn’t understand who Dom was. He had an unhappy childhood and hated his father. But he didn’t have the sort of trajectory that I like to see in historical romance heroes and heroines, where they grow in the course of the story and to some degree are healed by love (that latter of which I DO NOT believe in in real life – don’t try this at home, kids). The abusive father storyline just sort of fizzled out.
Leonora was also inconsistent. She’s thought of by Torie as being incredibly proper and even demure (or at least she pretends to be around Dom, supposedly). But in her scenes with Dom she comes off as a strong-willed snob. She’s so unpleasant it’s hard to understand Dom’s feelings about marrying her. He seems resigned to it, noting at one point that a gentleman would never break an engagement. But I wanted to understand what drew him to her in the first place and get a sense of how he came to understand they weren’t suited. A lot of the Dom/Leonora relationship feels like it was entirely engineered by Leonora and Dom was just along for the ride, which doesn’t make him seem like a strong hero.
In general Viscount in Love felt pretty History Lite to me – the characters and relationships (those precocious twins!) felt anachronistic and unrealistic. (I even side-eyed Torie as a nickname for Victoria; I would think Vicki would be more common. I don’t actually know, and I know authors get annoyed when readers assume something is anachronistic when they don’t actually know, but here we are. When I lose trust in a narrative, all bets are off.)
It’s not all bad – the book got more absorbing as the story went on, and the relationship that grew between Dom and Torie was actually quite sweet. I liked seeing Torie come into her own surrounded for once by people who didn’t think she was stupid because she was dyslexic. (In addition to being a talented painter, it’s suggested that Torie possesses and eidetic memory.)
It just so happens that I have a particular set of complaints against historical romance at this point, and this book pinged my radar on many of them. I’m giving Viscount in Love a straight C.
Best,
Jennie
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Jennie
has been an avid if often frustrated romance reader for the past 15 years. In that time she’s read a lot of good romances, a few great ones, and, unfortunately, a whole lot of dreck. Many of her favorite authors (Ivory, Kinsale, Gaffney, Williamson, Ibbotson) have moved onto other genres or produce new books only rarely, so she’s had to expand her horizons a bit. Newer authors she enjoys include Julie Ann Long, Megan Hart and J.R. Ward, and she eagerly anticipates each new Sookie Stackhouse novel. Strong prose and characterization go a long way with her, though if they are combined with an unusual plot or setting, all the better. When she’s not reading romance she can usually be found reading historical non-fiction.
