Review: The Duchess War - Courtney Milan
Jun. 26th, 2015 09:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrj(It feels a bit odd not reviewing something with lesbian content on this day of momentous Supreme Court decisions, but this is what I had queued up.)
When more than one person mentions a specific author in the context of "if you like X, you may like Y", and if one's own books appear as either X or Y, it seems like a reasonable idea to check out what the other person is writing. And when one of that person's books turns up as a free Kindle special, well, what the heck. Nothing lost except perhaps some reading time that would have been otherwise allocated.
And so I found myself reading Courtney Milan's The Duchess War. I've never been a voracious reader of historic romances--not like some people I know--though I have my favorites. (Despite certain deep flaws of social consciousness, I return regularly to Georgette Heyer for comfort reading.) But I'm not entirely au courant in the field of straight historic romance these days. (There really aren't enough lesbian historic romances to really consider it a "field".) That said, I can easily see why Milan gets recommended regularly to those looking to go beyond tired old tropes in their historicals. Despite beginning with a bare outline that feels all too familiar -- a handsome and personable Duke being pressured to end his bachelor state, an intelligent and sharply impertinent woman of less-than-exalted birth, with a Dark Past, who collides with him under disruptive circumstances -- we get a result that's far from routine.
Milan's strength, in addition to a deft touch with description and setting, is taking the ordinary human foibles of two very different people falling disastrously in love, and making them seem romantic and attractive even in the midst of their chaotic messiness. (Is that too abstract? OK, it takes a good writer to write a realistic wedding night between two virgins and make it both sexy and endearing.) And if Milan's protagonists feel perhaps a bit too progressive and open-minded in their social politics for the setting, they aren't unhistorically so. It's just a matter of devising a story around the particular historic types needed to make it work. And it works very well, including the inclusion of enough secondary characters and trailing plot-threads to encourage the reader to seek out more of the author's works.
If The Duchess War doesn't leave me eager to pounce on every other Courtney Milan novel available, it's only because it is, in the end, relentlessly heterosexual, and as usual I'm caught between the desire for well-written, engaging stories and the desire for stories that acknowledge my own existence. To be fair, one of the features The Duchess War has going for it is that one is permitted to fantasize that the heroine's two older female guardians are engaged in a well-closeted Romantic Friendship. Though you have to be aware of and looking for the possibility to spot it. In a perhaps not-so-odd way, historic romances that have less explicit sexual content make it easier for me to do a cross-gender identification when reading.
But setting my own personal quirks as a reader aside, for those who enjoy progressive-thinking, well-written historic romance, with explicit but not excessive sexual content, I can definitely recommend this book.
When more than one person mentions a specific author in the context of "if you like X, you may like Y", and if one's own books appear as either X or Y, it seems like a reasonable idea to check out what the other person is writing. And when one of that person's books turns up as a free Kindle special, well, what the heck. Nothing lost except perhaps some reading time that would have been otherwise allocated.
And so I found myself reading Courtney Milan's The Duchess War. I've never been a voracious reader of historic romances--not like some people I know--though I have my favorites. (Despite certain deep flaws of social consciousness, I return regularly to Georgette Heyer for comfort reading.) But I'm not entirely au courant in the field of straight historic romance these days. (There really aren't enough lesbian historic romances to really consider it a "field".) That said, I can easily see why Milan gets recommended regularly to those looking to go beyond tired old tropes in their historicals. Despite beginning with a bare outline that feels all too familiar -- a handsome and personable Duke being pressured to end his bachelor state, an intelligent and sharply impertinent woman of less-than-exalted birth, with a Dark Past, who collides with him under disruptive circumstances -- we get a result that's far from routine.
Milan's strength, in addition to a deft touch with description and setting, is taking the ordinary human foibles of two very different people falling disastrously in love, and making them seem romantic and attractive even in the midst of their chaotic messiness. (Is that too abstract? OK, it takes a good writer to write a realistic wedding night between two virgins and make it both sexy and endearing.) And if Milan's protagonists feel perhaps a bit too progressive and open-minded in their social politics for the setting, they aren't unhistorically so. It's just a matter of devising a story around the particular historic types needed to make it work. And it works very well, including the inclusion of enough secondary characters and trailing plot-threads to encourage the reader to seek out more of the author's works.
If The Duchess War doesn't leave me eager to pounce on every other Courtney Milan novel available, it's only because it is, in the end, relentlessly heterosexual, and as usual I'm caught between the desire for well-written, engaging stories and the desire for stories that acknowledge my own existence. To be fair, one of the features The Duchess War has going for it is that one is permitted to fantasize that the heroine's two older female guardians are engaged in a well-closeted Romantic Friendship. Though you have to be aware of and looking for the possibility to spot it. In a perhaps not-so-odd way, historic romances that have less explicit sexual content make it easier for me to do a cross-gender identification when reading.
But setting my own personal quirks as a reader aside, for those who enjoy progressive-thinking, well-written historic romance, with explicit but not excessive sexual content, I can definitely recommend this book.
no subject
Date: 2015-06-28 09:51 am (UTC)[rummages] Yes, their current open f/f call includes historicals: http://riptidepublishing.com/open-calls/ff-novels
no subject
Date: 2015-06-28 05:31 pm (UTC)A browse through their thematic catalog filters also suggests they wouldn't be a good fit for tone and content. Just because a publisher is willing to consider a particular topic/genre doesn't mean they'd be a good home for it. The information structure in the catalog confirms a more impressionistic conclusion that they're highly focused on erotic content. Not a good home for me.
I might check out a couple books as a reader -- the catalog filters help, but further reading suggests that even the few books tagged as f/f more often than not involve their characters in f/m encounters as well. And the clear preponderance of a m/m focus makes it tricky to have confidence that they would "get" the sort of thing I'm interested in.