Third in the Palace of Rogues series.
Plot: Hugh is an *shudder* American, who has been holed up growing increasingly restless at the Grand Palace on the Thames. He’s been tasked with finding a woman who took off with hardly a clue, and he’s hoping, maybe marry the gal once he finds her? The inn has new guests however, in the Vaughn family – an earl with his wife, two daughters and son, on account of a small misadventure involving a snake and gunfire that led to an urgent need for repairs on their home. The eldest of those daughters is an Ice Queen. Lilias is distractingly beautiful and entirely unavailable. Not just in the class division sort of way, but in a She’s Got a Shell So Thick You Need A Nuke To Breach It sort of way. Because as it turns out, she’s nursing a bit of heartbreak herself, and ill advised as it is, maybe they could both use a bit of a distraction from their real lives. Shenanigans ensue.
If you’re a Long fan, this is a great demonstration of her skill. It isn’t quite as funny as some of her other books, but it still has the same wry humour, relentless compassion for all the characters, including the antagonists (or the characters you might have expected to be antagonists), and a loving but stern examination of the things we value as a society. Lilias is sick of being treated as nothing but a titled beauty, but she also doesn’t really understand her own anger because this life is all she’s ever known. Hugh has been through so much that he’s just sort of Decided what his future would look like and who his wife is supposed to be and is stuck mentally on that because he’s never really dared explore what he truly wants, which is a family (that he could lose). It’s heartbreaking and melancholy and impossible not to root for these two as they struggle to untangle years of trying to shape a life they can be content with within the societal constraints they’ve been raised on only to realize contentment isn’t much better than misery, and that for happiness, you’ve got to take risks and challenge rigid notions of what your life is supposed to look like.
My very first review for cannonball was a Julie Anne Long book, and I grieved not being able to enjoy a book that is otherwise so damn good because of a few small, careless choices. I’ve read (and loved) other books of hers which have not had those problems, but this book in particular seems to have been written as if to me, specifically. I’d asked why our protagonist needed amorphous “native women” to teach him about sex when friendly widows would do just fine and not have a thick old layer of racism on it, and boom – we have friendly widows teaching our protagonist how to sex right. I’d asked why we get wonderfully varied women who we are told basically all have the same Pleasure Button, and here we get a protagonist whose experience has taught him to in particular take pleasure in finding out what individual women enjoy. I’d asked why we can have such compassionate treatment of people doing really awful things and then have unquestioned racist depictions of ethnic minorities, and suddenly we have jokes about “bitter Indians” being addressed and explored and such comments being the combination of a tedious cocktail of ignorance and prejudice. And it would have been easy to just erase that reality from the book, and I respect that Long didn’t take that route either. This is hardly a primer on Indigenous peoples, but it deftly addresses some of the most common misconceptions (they are not a singular entity, they are not savages, they are not just mindless killing machines, you can and should be curious about who they actually are). I doubt Long read my review, but I was so, so pleased to be able to read this book, which deals with very similar themes as Like No Other Lover but with the same thoughtfulness and care that Long was giving the rest of her work.
