The Truth About Cads and Dukes by Elisa Braden

August 18, 2020

"Love one another, but make not a bond of Love:

 Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.

Give One another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.

Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone."  Kahlil Gilbran

Not: Mine! Mine! Mine!

https://www.elisabraden.com/ 

You know how it is when you glom some authors. You start to see patterns forming, a certain sameness in all the books. Well, that eventually started to happen for me with Elisa Braden’s series, Rescue from Ruin. I noticed it by the sixth book, which was really the third book I read, but decided to talk about it with this one. Are you confused? Regardless of the order in which I read these books, take my word for it; there is a pattern. In fact, there are a number of patterns. All of her books have insta-lust. Notice I didn’t say insta-love. Because all of the attraction happens right away, way before they talk to each other, I would not classify the feelings happening as love. In every case, all of that lust progresses into possessiveness rather rapidly. Then that possessiveness progresses into ownership. She is his, and he is hers. They are mine, mine, mine. I am not sure you really should “own” someone. In all healthy relationships there has to be a little individualism. If not, someone suffocates, or loses their own identify.  Every single book in this series has that “owning” relationship thing going on, and there does not seem to be too much respect for the person they supposedly love.

Another pattern I noticed is that none of the women seems to be able to extricate themselves out of the dangerous situations in which they land. They were all “Nell Fenwick” waiting for Dudley Do-Right to come along. Then the biiigggg pattern is allll the page after page of sex. The variations seem to be out of some textbook…it is mind numbing, and after a while monotonous.

When this story began, I thought for sure I was going to like it. It opened with our heroine, Jane Huxley, climbing in through a window. She is slightly over-weight, wears glasses, and is described has having a plain face…over, and over, and over again. I get it, only someone really, really, really in love with her would consider her attractive. Anyway, she is attempting to crawl through a window. You may wonder why she is doing that. Jane is what some people would call a soft touch. She believes what people say. She is on a mission to retrieve something for Lord Colin Lacey. You remember him.  He is the cad who impregnated Atherbourne’s sister. Well, he is still up to his old tricks. Oh, he did not seduce Jane; he did something just as bad. He led her to believe he was her friend. After she manages to crawl in through the window into a darkened room, she hears what she thinks are giggles…manly giggles. When the lights come on, she is embarrassed to find herself in a room full of ne’er -do-wells, Colin included. How humiliating for her. It seems it was all a lark. There was a bet between the men in the room. Jane becomes a laughing stock, her reputation destroyed. Up to this point, I was having fun reading the book, and then it all quickly became depressing. However, I still had hopes for Jane’s character. After all, she is paired with one of my favorite types of heroes, a stuffed-shirt-clock-watcher, Harrison Lacey, Colin’s older brother.

Confronted with another woman ruined by his turd brother, Harrison faces the music. He believes that Colin would never make any woman a good husband, so he steps in and marries Jane. I love stuffed shirts when Cupid lets loose his arrow. However, Harrison is zinged fast. His Mr. Toad gives him trouble immediately. He has no control. He was obsessed with Jane, and I am not sure why. I thought she was funny when she was climbing in through the window. She only exhibited her fun self to her family, so I was not quite sure what Harrison saw in her. I think Ms. Braden needs to give us more of the male POV in her novels, because usually we have to guess at what is going on in their minds. Unless, of course, they are thinking about humping. Anyway, for me, the story started to lose its charming momentum.  

I was disappointed that Harrison and Jane were never fully developed. They could have been so much more. They had the set-up to be a very memorable couple. She was so shy, and he was so uptight. This is not the first time for this plotline. Other authors before have done it, and it has worked. I wish it had worked this time. Pages of obsessive whankee-roo smother us, and the characters get lost in all that excess moisture. I was sorry that there was a lost opportunity to make this into a wonderful book. As it is, it is just ok.

 

Time/Place: Regency England

Sensuality: Bfffffft