i think up ciphers to trace unto your skin | because it doesn't feel safe to just say 'i love you.'

[redbrunja]

callmeonetrack recommended Cecelia Grant's romantic novels here, and I completely second that recommendation. I've read A Lady Awakened and A Gentleman Undone (each took me about a day and a half) and I greatly enjoyed both.

Read them if you like:

-determined ladies who drive the narrative
-heroines who are allowed to be broken and flawed and fucked up (especially the lead in A Gentleman Undone)
-actually hot, actually explicit, in-character sex scenes
-LADIES WHO KNOW ABOUT SEX, KNOW HOW TO GET THEMSELVES OFF/USE SEX TO KILL EMOTIONAL PAIN
-romantic leads who are actually romantic leads

I only have a couple quibbles,

which is that I wish that at the end of A Lady Undone hadn't been quite as neat - that the heroine would have to deal with her choices causing people who didn't deserve it hardship, and I didn't like how both heroines decided to make huge, dramatic gestures without consulting the hero. It's nice that it was the FEMALE lead being high-handed, and that the tension between the leads didn't depend on a misunderstanding but it's still frustrating, and in the case of A Lady Undone, I couldn't believe that the female lead didn't check that she had a place to land before jumping.

Comments

[lady-with-cats.livejournal.com]

ooh recs. ty!

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

Yay! Boost that signal!

But oh, your quibbles are interesting and not what I expected. I thought if you had them, they might be about Will's enormous guilt/manpain ( I read a critique about how he made the wounded soldier's death all about him and couldn't really argue that)! Both books have a bit of a rushed pacing as the resolution unfolds but then I really liked that they went out and found solutions to their own problems and didn't wait for the heroes to figure out a way out of the predicaments (although in A Lady Undone it kind of resulted in almost a farcical bad timing thing where she figured out a solution just as he left, etc.) and I figured Martha knew her sister would ultimately take her in, though she didn't check beforehand.

ETA: Meant to leave this on another post but what ultimately convinced me to try Grant's books (though I'm not a big historical reader) was the site www.wonkomance.com, which specializes in talking about romances that are just a little bit (or a lot) wonky and outside the box of genre conventions! Some fun discussions and recs there.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

I thought if you had them, they might be about Will's enormous guilt/manpain ( I read a critique about how he made the wounded soldier's death all about him and couldn't really argue that)!

After this comment, I thought about why I didn't feel that way, and there were a couple factors that made it play man!pain free for me. The first, and biggest, is that Will never, ever lost sight of the fact that 1.) other people were suffering and 2.) that how he acted REGARDLESS of why he was acting the way he was, effected other people. There was a line where he was concerned about how his depression would influence the people he spent time on and I was like, 'wow, you NEVER hear man!pain character even *consider* that.'

www.wonkomance.com, </i. I have had such a good time reading over that site!

[spirited-lizard.livejournal.com]

Sounds like the type of books I've read lately, so totally up my alley. Thanks for the rec!

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

You're welcome!