Long takes on Beauty and the Beast with mixed results.
Plot: Lord Lavay is a prince from the House of Bourbon, which means very little after the French Revolution, and boy is he grumpy about it. Fortunately, being a romance hero, he has already successfully recovered at least some of his wealth by becoming an operative for the British Crown? Doing some kind of mysterious… Investigation/violence? Something very alpha and impressive, surely. Until one day, he’s set upon by six men and is badly injured. He finds himself renting a manor in Pennyroyal Green to recuperate, where his beastly temper means he’s going through housekeepers like tissues and the staff are generally disinterested in doing anything to endear them to a jerk whose going to be gone soon anyway. Lucky for him, Elise has recently been dismissed from her job teaching at Miss Endicott’s school for recalcitrant girls and urgently needs any job to support herself and her young son. There is nothing like desperation to make an untenable employment situation appealing. Shenanigans ensue.
This book is a strange combination of some of Long’s best writing (the jokes, the banter, it’s all peak Long), and some of the laziest writing from her I’ve encountered. Maybe she’s losing steam this deep into the series. Class has been explored so deftly in previous books while here we’re basically being asked to root for a guy who opposed the populist revolt of the French people against a monarchy that was infamously oppressive and extravagant. Not a reasoned argument, mind you, just a dude mad about losing his house and having no interest at all in understanding why people wanted him and his family dead.
The only real difference between Elise and Belle is that Elise anticipated her vows with a guy who did not come through seven years ago and was promptly thrown to the dogs when she came home pregnant and unwed. She is an avatar of a person. She is brilliant, clever, wildly intuitive, knows medicine and finance in addition to cooking, baking, and cleaning (including how to make the cleaning products), is a devoted and exceptional mother, has the patience of a saint, and of course, is also young and hot. There’s a thread of lines about how she’s a risk taker, because of how she has a bastard, but it really doesn’t track. She has trusted a couple people she shouldn’t have (but had good reason to). Except for that, at least once she accidentally spoke too passionately to the wrong person. But this is central to why she takes a chance on Phillipe and it makes no sense because she is patently not the risk taker Long is trying to convince us she is.
Phillipe, in fact, is a dumpster fire of a person and also of incoherent characterization and in every way worse than the Beast he’s modelled on. How did the prince of the House of Bourbon become a thug for the British government? Literally every part of that, from how he’d have made those kinds of connections to how he would have developed the skills required to how it made him rich again is left untouched. Especially since he seems to hold no curiosity whatsoever about anything except getting back everything those unwashed masses stole from him which he was 100% entitled to keeping. How did this guy learn anything? How did he make any allies? How did he make the choice to have to work for the first time in probably 3 generations of men in his family?
Indeed, though this is a story of this dude marrying his housekeeper, even at the end of the story, he doesn’t seem to have reevaluated his position on the idea that people of the upper classes are just better, rather thinking that he’s spent too long with the rabble to be able to integrate back with his own people. This guy is more of a beast than the actual literal monster he was clearly modelled on, with less of an excuse to be one, and with a weaker redemption arc. This is especially confusing because Elise is constantly telling the reader what good man Lavay is. He isn’t. A lion with a thorn in his paw is not a valid analogy, Long, because he’s a fucking man who is capable of reason and not an animal. He’s charming and witty when he’s in a good mood and a violent, abusive, classist narcissist when he’s not, which is most of the time. A person as brilliant as Elise should be able to see that. I suppose it’s an indicator of Long’s skills as a writer that I didn’t realize I hated Phillipe (and that this was not going to change) until well past the halfway point. This book is a romance the same way It Ends With Us is a romance.
Elise’s kid is great. I mostly dislike child characters, but Jack was written in a way that feels both about age appropriate, but also funny and silly and in a perfect fit for the tenor of the book.
As tends to be the case with Long’s weaker books, the resolution for some pretty heavy problems is provided with barely a hand wave, along with entirely needless drama between the protagonists. Why not use the space on the page to give us a proper end instead of relying on cheap melodrama?
