Guest Review - - A Woman Entangled

A Woman Entangled

By Cecilia Grant

Publisher: Bantam

Release Date: June 25, 2013

Kate Westbrook knows that she is beautiful, and she intends to use her beauty to see that she marries someone who will give her the life she is entitled to as the granddaughter of an earl. From the time she was thirteen, Kate has been focused on the goal of reclaiming what should be hers. Her father, a younger son, was disowned by his family when he married an actress, whose profession placed her beyond the pale despite her beauty, accomplishments, and virtue. Kate knows that her parents enjoy a happy marriage and that her father, who has found professional success as a barrister, has no regrets about his choices. Her family may be content with their comfortable, middle-class life, but Kate wants more—not just for herself but also for her younger siblings. She even harbors hope that she can be instrumental in reconciling her father and his family and perhaps even see her mother accepted by them.

Nicholas Blackshear, second son of a respectable but untitled gentleman, is also ambitious. He hopes to win a seat in the House of Commons, and he believed he was making progress until a scandal in his family not only made a political career an immensely more difficult goal to attain but also affected his current work as a barrister. Solicitors were reluctant to refer cases to a man whose brother had married a courtesan after a duel with her protector (A Gentleman Undone). His sister, married to her viscount (A Lady Awakened) could ignore society’s strictures and continue her relationship with their unrepentant brother. Nick didn’t have that luxury. He rejects all contact with his brother, but even that is not enough to stop the hemorrhaging of his career.

One of the few bright spots in Nick’s present life is his relationship with the Westbrook family. One of the young barristers Mr. Westbrook befriends and mentors, Nick has been welcomed into the Westbrook home and treated almost as a member of the family. Three years ago, Nick, like many a young man before and after him, was stunned by Kate’s beauty and thought himself in love with her. But when he summoned the courage to tell Kate of his feelings, she made it impossible for him to speak, clearly communicating, without ever directly acknowledging his intentions, that he lacked the qualities she considered essential in her husband. Despite the blow to his pride, Nick accepts his role as family friend and brotherly confidant.

Kate has been working assiduously to win the approbation of Lady Harringdon, wife of her father’s oldest brother and the current earl. When her work finally pays off and she receives an invitation to pay her aunt a call, Kate is elated. Hoping that Lady Harringdon, who has successfully settled her own daughters in appropriate marriages, may be tempted by Kate’s beauty to do the same for her, Kate is dismayed when she learns that her aunt’s idea of help is to find Kate not a husband but work as a lady’s companion.

It is Nick who encourages Kate to turn the balls and card parties she will be attending as part of Lady Harringdon’s training her as a companion into a husband hunt, teasing her that she can surely capture a duke. Kate assures him that she will settle for a duke. Teasing aside, taking Nick’s advice soon brings Kate to the attention of a baron, the same lord who is considering hiring Nick to tutor him in argument and public speaking, a position that could serve as the first step on the political ladder Nick longs to climb. But as Kate’s long cherished plans have their best chance of reaching fruition, she comes to realize her heart is leading her in a different direction.

A Woman Entangled is a quieter, less dramatic book than Grant’s earlier offerings, but it has the same level of complexity, the same layered characterization, and the same rich prose that characterized her first two books. Kate and Nick may be more ordinary than the leads in the other books, but they are complicated, contradictory, flawed characters nonetheless. Kate’s social climbing ambition makes her a less than appealing character at points in the story, but underlying her desire to win acceptance from her father’s family is a conflict addressed by no less than Jane Austen, as Grant indicates with the Austen allusions.

Two passages are central to understanding Kate’s point of view. One comes early in the novel when Kate considers how unalike she and her sister Viola are:

Kate…loved her sister. Indeed she loved her whole family. But was it so unreasonable of her to crave a life in which people valued courtesy, consideration, and etiquette, and recognized that there was more to be thought of, when delivering a letter, than whether the person on the other end could afford to pay the postage? Was it so wrong for her to want to not be nothing to people who shared her name and her blood?

…if she were ever to write a novel, it would be the opposite of a love story. Her hero and heroine would choose duty over their hearts’ desire, that their children need never be taxed for a romantic indulgence that was none of their own.

… A beautiful woman did well to be heartless. And if she hadn’t quite attained the state herself, at least she could make such a show as would convince all the rest of the world.

Kate considers herself a pragmatist. She wants a “good marriage,” one based on sensible, rational choices, rather than a “happy marriage,” one based on feelings. She clearly demonstrates her understanding of the different kinds of marriages in a conversation with Nick.

Kate: “I’ve pinned all my hopes on making a good marriage.”

Nick: “You have stringent ideas of what constitutes a good marriage. Myself I know of no better union than the one to which you owe your existence.”

Kate: “My parents have a happy marriage. That’s not the same.”

If Kate seems shallow, Nick seems hard and unforgiving. He loves his brother Will. He admits that he and the rest of the family lived with fear while Will was risking his life on the battlefield. Yet in self-interest, he cuts Will out of his life in the same way that Westbrook’s family cut him off. But Nick is not a bad man. He is a good man who is forced to make a tough choice and chooses professional and social survival over family feeling. He wounds himself as well as his brother by his choice, and he feels guilty. Both Kate and Nick grow and change as the story moves toward its conclusion, as readers want their heroes and heroines to do. Only imperfect beings are capable of growth.

I would be remiss if I failed to add that Grant uses secondary characters to enrich and expand the world of her novel. The Westbrook family is particularly delightful, especially Viola, a disciple of Mary Wollstonecraft and an aspiring author passionate about her work in progress, an update of Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Viola deserves her own story. I also had great admiration for Baron Barclay and Louisa Smith, the aristocratic wallflower who befriends Kate. I’d love to see more of them as well.

Romance fiction is filled with tales of aristocrats who marry outside their class and somehow avoid the usual consequences of that choice. I have delighted in many such stories, quite willingly suspending disbelief. Many of these books are cherished keepers. But I think it’s worth taking note of a novel that shows a more realistic view, including the effects on the generations that follow of marriages that may be happy but may not be “good.” I highly recommend this book. It’s a beautifully written novel, a darn good story, and a different slant on an old trope.

~Janga
http://justjanga.blogspot.com

Cecilia Grant Winner

The winner of a copy of A LADY AWAKENED by Cecilia Grant is

Jeanne M

Congratulations, Jeanne!  Please send your full name and mailing address to theromancedish (at) gmail (dot) com to claim your book.

Today's Special - - Cecilia Grant

.  It's always fun to welcome debut authors and today we have one who's been getting a lot of buzz around the romance world.  After her debut book, A LADY AWAKENED, had been enthusiastically recommended by both Dish regular, Penfield and favorite author, Eloisa James, I knew I had to check it out.  The holder of a degree in English, Cecilia (as she writes on her website) is delighted to be writing stories after waiting tables, composing software Help files and answering the carpool-lane-violators hotline.  After reading A LADY AWAKENED, I'm delighted she's writing stories too! 





Welcome to The Romance Dish, Cecilia and congratulations on yesterday's publication of your debut novel, A LADY AWAKENED!  Will you tell us a bit about it?

It’s the story of an intimate bargain between two of the unlikeliest partners imaginable. Martha Russell needs to conceive a child, ASAP, in order to pass it off as her late husband’s and prevent a nefarious brother-in-law from inheriting. Her new and idle neighbor, Theo Mirkwood, is more than happy to assist - until he finds out she means it to be all business and no pleasure.

At odds in the bedroom and beyond, they try each other’s patience, foil each other’s intentions, push each other to the brink of calling off the whole agreement... and form an improbable friendship. And then more.   

You created such a wonderful sense of time and place – from the language to the working conditions to the social and political climate - in this book without making it seem like a history lesson.  What type of research did you do to get it so spot-on?

I’m glad it read that way to you, but I always squirm a little when someone praises my historical detail because there are so many historical-romance writers who are better at that part of the job than I am.

I started out with a few general books - Trevelyan’s British History in the Nineteenth Century and Richard Muir’s The English Village were particularly useful - and then for specific issues, like how a roof in early 19th-century Sussex would be thatched, I did a lot of fact-hunting online.

Research can make you tear your hair out sometimes, not least because it results in this enormous iceberg of which you might only utilize the tip. In the roof-thatching example, I learned the names for all the different parts of the roof, as well as what material would have been used (different regions of England thatched with different grasses or reeds), only to wind up writing the pertinent scene from the point of view of a character who wouldn’t have known any of that terminology and wasn’t paying particular attention to what the thatchers were doing anyway.

Maybe one day I’ll write a book with a roof-thatcher hero.

What would you most like your readers to know about Martha and Theo, the heroine and hero of A LADY AWAKENED, before beginning their story?

Martha and Theo are going to fall in love. It’s going to look extremely unlikely for awhile but I swear they eventually will.

There was certainly nothing “typical” about this story, especially in the way Theo and Martha viewed both themselves and one another.  (Which I found very refreshing.)  Martha, in particular, is such a complex woman and not all that likable, especially at first.  (I strongly encourage readers to stick with the story as both her growth and Theo’s are immensely satisfying.)  I imagine this book will generate a vast array of reactions.  What was your inspiration for creating such atypical romance characters?  Should we expect more of the unexpected in your future novels?

I’m never going to be the kind of writer who comes up with a strikingly original plot, so I concentrate on original characters. And the quick-and-easy way to create an original character is to identify some of the most ubiquitous personality traits in the genre, and then write the opposite.

There are a lot of romances in which the hero needs major change and growth (repudiation of his rakish ways, for instance) in order to be worthy of the heroine’s love, but relatively few where she’s presented as not yet worthy of his. Heroines tend to be pretty likeable, and relatable, from the get-go, and the downside of this is that they don’t then get the big dramatic growth arcs that the heroes get.

So one of my goals was to write a heroine who, when we first meet her, is not ready to hold up her end of an adult romantic relationship, and has to struggle with her own growing pains at the same time the hero is struggling with his.

On the hero’s side, the most ubiquitous characteristic I could come up with was competence - romance heroes tend to be at the top of whatever field they’re in, whether it’s spying or leading society or just raking around - and so I wanted to write a man who wasn’t there yet, and who would stumble a bit on his way to getting there.

Should you expect more of the unexpected in future works? Well, you should probably expect more not-immediately-likable characters. As a reader I’m drawn to those, and so I like to write them too.

Speaking of future novels, your next book, A GENTLEMAN UNDONE, will be out in May, 2012.  (Gorgeous cover!)  Anything you can tell us about this one?

A GENTLEMAN UNDONE is the story of Martha’s brother Will. He’s got to come up with some money, quickly, to discharge a debt of honor incurred at Waterloo, but when he ventures into a gaming club he tangles with an ice-in-her-veins cardsharp who might be his ruination... or might be exactly what he needs.

Will is probably my most conventional protagonist so far; tortured and deeply honorable. Heroine Lydia is the more atypical character in this book. I wrote her partly in reaction to Martha, actually: after all those months spent with a prim, mulishly nonresponsive heroine, I wanted to write someone completely different. Lydia lacks scruples and has what you might call a vehement sexuality.

When the writing is finished, what do you most enjoy doing for fun and relaxation?

The writing, it turns out, is never finished. (I didn’t know this before I sold books and signed a contract.) Because I’m not a fast writer, I can’t really afford to take a month off to relax and re-charge: as soon as I hand in one book, I’ve got to be working on the next, whether it’s research, brainstorming, or actual writing.

Fortunately the writing is fun. I can’t say it’s relaxing, but it’s definitely fun.

I imagine your research requires a good bit of reading.  What types of books do you turn to for recreational reading?  Or do you even have time for that?

I read a lot of romance - mostly historical - partly for recreation, and partly to keep up with the market. That doesn’t leave nearly as much time as I’d like for other reading.

The books on top of my non-romance TBR pile right now are Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years and Helen Simonsen’s Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. And the last nonfiction book I really loved was Elizabeth McCracken’s An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination. Loss - in this case a stillbirth - is such a tricky subject to write about, but she does it without either pulling punches, or leaving you lying on the floor in a puddle of despair.

New Year’s is just around the corner.  Do you make resolutions?  If so, what are your resolutions for 2012?

Since about 1990 I’ve been resolving every year to stop picking at my cuticles. And now that I’ve gone public with it, 2012 will surely be the year in which I succeed. So thanks for that!

A LADY AWAKENED has been getting a lot of advance buzz.  What’s your favorite quote about this book so far?

I’ve been extremely lucky to have the book be so well received at some of the higher-profile blogs and review publications. There’s been more than one quote that would have buckled my knees if I hadn’t already been sitting down when I read it.

But my absolute favorite comes from the first reader who reviewed it on Goodreads - she said, “I felt like this book had been written for me.” I know what that feels like, as a reader, so to have accomplished it for someone else is just gratifying beyond words. 

Thank you, Cecilia!  Do you have a question for our readers?

Thanks for having me. I’d love to know if there are other fans of difficult, even off-putting characters out there. Anyone think the scheming, cigarette-puffing Thomas and O’Brien were the most interesting residents of Downton Abbey? Anyone secretly hoping to see Victoria Grayson smack down Emily Thorne? Tell me which unlikeable characters you can’t help but love!

One randomly selected person leaving a comment on today's blog will receive a copy of A LADY AWAKENED.  (U.S. and Canadian addresses only)

~PJ