Book Review: Recent Reads #6

Title: Devil's Cub
Author: Georgette Heyer
Genre: Historical Romance/ Regency Romance

Why I picked it Up: Jennifer Crusie mentioned it once in her blog in an entry about rape in romance novels. And it sounded awesome.


Review: Oh my god. So awesome. So awesome.

Mary Challoner rules.

I've decided, in lieu of an actual review, to pretty much go through the opening plot in "Tabatha Speak." You may remember previous entries in that series including "Tabatha Paraphrases the plot of The Cutting Edge from the back of Amy's Parents' Van" and "Tabatha explains Abraham Lincoln to her 13-yr-old Sister" and the copious entries of "Tabatha retells Grimm's Fairy Tales using "bitch" and "fuck" a lot" from the college years.

So, basically, smart and sensible Mary Challoner has a really big problem. Her younger sister, Sophia, is a stupid tramp and her mother is a clueless pimp. Sophia, stupid tramp that she is, thinks that she's important enough that she can run off to Paris and sex it up with rich playboy Vidal and he'll be forced to marry her. Mary is not a half wit, she knows that that won't happen.

So she devises a plan to piss of Vidal and make it so he'll never want to see her dumbass sister again. The plan is pretty much on the same level of Jack Bauer robbing a convenience store to delay a terrorist. She takes off her mask and pretends to be a brazen hussy who was just fucking with him.

Unfortunately, she didn't anticipate how royally pissed off Vidal would be, and he forces her, by threat of excessive intoxication, to board his yacht and travel to France with him. At which point, three sheets to the wind, Vidal decides it's time for the tramp to make good and have sex with him. Unfortunately, he's too drunk to take Mary seriously when she tries to tell him that she's, in fact, not a dirty tramp... so she has to shoot him.

And thus. True Love.

Vidal's bottom line is that he may be a womanizing, dueling, violent asshole but ruining respectable women is crossing his moral boundary line, and he's going to mary Mary whether she likes it or not.

Mary's bottom line is that she's willing to take the repercussions of her actions, but she will not willingly enter into a dangerously lopsided marriage with a man who doesn't love her but with whom she's, against all logic, appeared to have developed feelings for. Because she's sensible like that.

A hilarious romp involving the two stubborn leads, various adventures across the French country-side, Vidal's ridiculously awesome mother (who was, apparently, the heroine of a previous romance novel in which she dressed like a boy and had a propensity for shooting people), Vidal's drunk uncle, and assorted other characters ensues.

Final Thought: Dude, the women in Heyer's novels are some of the feistiest, grounded, sensible, ass-kicking ladies I have ever encountered. If I have to wade through the nonsense trappings of the genre (flowery language and incessant detailed descriptions of regency-era fashions and manners) I will gladly do so just to get to spend time with these ladies. Luckilly, Heyer wrote a bazillion novels, so I've got plenty left to explore.