Sherry Thomas is one of those authors I want to like – readers who share my tastes love her, and the descriptions sound like books I’d like to read. But I think her books verge too far toward literary fiction for me – they may be worthy books but I don’t find them especially romantic.
Beguiling the Beauty by Sherry Thomas
(2012, Edwardian) 1/26/13
Grade: 3
When the Duke of Lexington meets the mysterious Baroness von Seidlitz-Hardenberg on a transatlantic liner, he is fascinated. In reality, the “baroness” is Venetia Easterbrook—a proper young widow who had her own vengeful reasons for instigating an affair with the duke. But the plan has backfired. Venetia has fallen in love with the man she despised—and there’s no telling what might happen when she is finally unmasked…
I never liked the old school romances where the hero and heroine hated each other until the end of the book, when they fell into each others arms and declared eternal love. I could never believe that all the hurtful things the characters did to each other could be forgotten so easily. Sherry Thomas’s books remind me of those romances. They are written in a much more sophisticated way, but the characters still spend most of the book hurting each other, inflicting painful emotional wounds until they suddenly discover a happy ever after in the last few pages. When I read Beguiling the Beauty, I didn’t feel carried away with romance – I felt sad and a little depressed. Everyone in the book, including the secondary characters, seem determined to inflict unhappiness on one another. The author has an elegant writing style which kept me reading to the end, but I found it hard to believe in the happy ending. Perhaps that’s a failing in me as a reader.
I still have a couple of Sherry Thomas books in my TBR pile that I may try to read at some point, but I doubt I’ll buy her books again. It’s disappointing, because there are so few new romance authors, especially those who are writing something other than “same old same old”. But I guess I’m too much of a traditional reader to enjoy something too far outside the lines.
Karen Wheless
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