It has been forever since I’ve had time to write about anything, and really, when given the choice between writing and reading, when I’m out of school it’s going to come down to reading. Sorry peeps. In honor of my first day off in 12 days, I figured there was no time like the present to tell you about the book I finished Christmas Day...
I honestly cannot remember why I decided to read The Dangerous Viscount... seriously, it has the stereotypical romance cover I abhor (is that girl dead?), the title is almost as bad as some of those overly descriptive The-Notorious-Rake’s-Blind-Pregnant-Widow-Bride that haunt the romance genre (honestly, the man is not even a Viscount until page 79), and really, who wrote the back cover for this book? Did they bother reading the book first? These three features seriously hinder the appeal of this book from the outset.
The back cover glosses over the most overarching concept of the whole book - Sebastian’s sheer geekiness, and just says he has no interest in love or marriage. The virgin male is a rare character in romance, especially historicals, this is not something to skip over when trying to attract the reader’s interest. Honestly people. How hard is it to read a book and pick out the most unique features of that book and highlight those features in a couple sentences? The one on the author’s website, while similar to the one on the back cover, is way better and actually shorter, btw.
Somehow, this book ended up waiting at my local library for me. This happens sometimes, I request books in the wee hours of the morning and don’t remember it happening, so I checked it out (cover down), hid it in my book bag, took it home, and eventually got around to picking it up... and fell madly in love with it.
I realized about 50 pages in that this book was the second in a series (The Burgundy Club Series)... and yes, I will be picking up the first and the third (once it comes out). Missing the first didn’t hamper my enjoyment at all; I was just made delightfully curious as to what happened by bits of information dropped in this book.
So, on to the story. It is extremely rare that I am brought to laugh out loud by a book, especially a historical romance, a sly giggle, maybe, but a true laugh, almost never. This book did that to me in the first chapter (page 5, read it and hopefully you have the same reaction). I loved the eccentricities and obliviousness of Sebastian (sadly, I could totally relate to the poor awkward guy way more than the heroine) and the whimsical Montrose family is so delightfully refreshing in their atypical historical romance parents attitudes and reactions that I thoroughly enjoyed reading about them.
Diana, in her quest to distance herself from her bizarre family, is refreshingly not bitchy. Usually when a heroine in a romance desperately wants away from her family she’s horrible about and to them, not so in this book. Diana’s previous husband is also not demonized, a “novel” concept for historical romance that I dearly appreciated as it gets rather tiresome for the bar to be set so low for the hero to come in and rock the heroine’s world when the dead guy was an abusive jerk.
Without spoiling a good portion of the book, geeky and awkward Sebastian was raised to despise women, and has never even been interested in er... carnal delights... until he glimpses some pink stockings while a lady is riding a horse and then touches said lady’s leg while encased in said pink stockings and then he’s just lost.
I loved every single character in this book from our Super!Geek hero to his evil nemesis cousin to Diana’s eccentric family and even Sebastian’s unintelligible staff in Northumberland. Miranda Neville has written a book so engaging that I never caught myself looking ahead to see if I could skip a couple pages here and there. I am desperately looking forward to reading Sebastian’s friend’s tales.