Review: Reckless by Anne Stuart

Title: Reckless (The House of Rohan #2)
Author: Anne Stuart
Genre: Historical Romance
Heat Index: 3 out of 5
Release Date: September 1st, 2010
Word/Page Count: 408 pages
Format: Purchased

Adrian Alistair Rohan lost his faith, and now, a dedicated member of the depraved Heavenly Host, he loses himself in his only pleasure: the seduction and debauchery of beautiful women. Rich, charming and devastatingly skilled in the arts of love, he never fails in his conquests... until Charlotte Spenser.

Charlotte is facing a desolate, passionless future, none of which matters to Adrian, who imagines her a toy until better prey arrives. But beneath her drab exterior, Charlotte is a woman as enchanting as she is brilliant and, lured into Adrian's world, soon she becomes the seducer, and he the seduced...

Yeah, this was kind of like an exercise where a skilled writer performs a slew of cringe-inducing tropes. That aspect is best covered by some of the other more ranty reviews here. But you can pretty much play bingo with this book. Bad-boy/rake who's bored with the promiscuous lifestyle falls for the 30 year old virgin spinster who's an "ugly" 6ft tall amazon goddess. I was willing to read it because Ms. Stuart has proven to be a competent writer in the past. And I might have given it 3 stars despite the cliche-bingo and uncomfortable virgin-sex scene(s) that danced a bit closely to the rape-fests that older romance novels are known for. But ultimately, it was just a bit too ridiculous and frankly kind of sloppy.

Charlotte's cousin Lina sets the stage for the ridiculous with her whole warped logic of, "my poor ugly hopeless cousin has a crush on Rohan and I must cure her of this by sleeping with him and possibly making her watch." That in itself was a... stretch. But as we get further into the story, we're supposed to believe that Charlotte was affected so deeply by one unsuccessful dance with Rohan during her season at the tender age of... wait... 27??? 27. Yeah. And I'm not sure how we're expected to like Rohan at all when the whole time in his narration he's going on about how pathetic virgins are and how he knows all about Charlotte's crush on him, and how she'll just fall in love with him and he'll just have to wipe that from her system and too bad so sad, etc. And apparently, even though Charlotte mentions in her internal narration early on in the book that she is in love with him, we still get to experience that wonderfully cliche moment towards the end where she realizes, OH NOES! She's in love with HIM? How could this have happened?!? I'm not really sure, but it seems like there were some continuity issues there that maybe should have been caught by the editor. Same for the supposedly shocking moment where Lina kisses Simon - errrr, they ALREADY KISSED, hello. Lastly, I felt like we could have used less purple in the sex and almost-sex scenes and maybe replaced that word count with more actual character development.

In short, it wasn't a wall-banger, and like I said, at least it was technically well-written, even if the plot itself needed revamping. I will likely go on to read the next book in the series, because for some reason, Anne Stuart's writing is at least somewhat palatable for me. So I guess I'm holding out hope.