The Rake, huh? More like ‘The Alcoholic’ but that probably wouldn’t make a good title for a bodice ripper and supermarkets wouldn’t stock it.
This mustThe Rake, huh? More like ‘The Alcoholic’ but that probably wouldn’t make a good title for a bodice ripper and supermarkets wouldn’t stock it.
This must be the first historical romance written along the lines of 12 steps of AA clubs. You can see it in its structure but I am not admonishing Putney for using it. It provided a good frame for an exciting novel which would get more stars from me if the heroine’s secret and at the same time her reason for hiding from the world for a decade weren’t so utterly silly in the end. Talking about blowing things out of proportions!
Read this one if you like your romances a little darker, full of self-destruction tendencies and some violence and rest assured that this is not one of those sorry stories of a man being changed by the love of woman. Those stories are toxic. I AM looking at you Fifty Shades of Fuckery.
In ‘The Alcoholic’, er, I mean ‘The Rake’, the hero finds it in himself to change and embarks on that long journey before he meets the heroine. She might make it a tad more rewarding to be sober but it he is not changing for her or because of her, which is a healthy thing to read in a romance novel. The alcoholism and all the mess associated with it are not glorified but they are, of course, romanticised. But hey, when hasn’t alcoholism been romanticised?
Has there ever been a more perversely English book?
From the paragraphs meandering around and telling the reader what in the narrator’s humble opinion Has there ever been a more perversely English book?
From the paragraphs meandering around and telling the reader what in the narrator’s humble opinion makes a great butler to the descriptions of the unobtrusive beauty of the English countryside it somehow manages to be the saddest love story ever told. Also as my friend Lewis says: “it’s the best example of dramatic irony in contemporary literature.”
The narrator, Mr Stevens, is the ultimate tragic hero. He is so repressed that he doesn’t even know how to be honest with himself. His only identity is that of a butler and he had been wearing for so long that whatever personality he might have had is long gone. And morphing into his profession is what he twistedly defines as ‘dignity’ - the quality he admires most of all. And all we get are his monologues, monologues that frustrate us and depress us. This book should be unreadable, and yet it is a page turner. Not much happens, which is symptomatic to Mr Stevens’ life and yet this meticulous character study is so emotionally involving that even though I’m reviewing it a long time after finishing it, it is still very fresh in my mind and proves to me that those five stars I gave it were fully deserved.
All in all, it’s a cautionary tale – what if you wake up one day towards the end of your life and realise that you have wasted it, that all you believed to be good and true turned out to be a sham? Would you just plain deny it or would you just try to make the best of the remains of the day? ...more
I asked karen to send me this book because with a title like this I thought it must be really good. Who knows - maybe even some threesome action. But I asked karen to send me this book because with a title like this I thought it must be really good. Who knows - maybe even some threesome action. But no. No threesomes. The twins were his sons. Don't despair though. There was lots of sex anyway. The main character had sex once in her life when she was 17 or so. But during that one night she climaxed so many times she was all good for the next 6 years of celibate. Then that mysterious stranger reappears in her life and they are at it like rabbits. He makes her come over and over again, all the time every 10 pages. He also happens to be a multimillonaire and a prince on some made up island near Cyprus and wants to buy her lots of clothes and other things. It also turns out he's good and kind to his subjects and an excellent father. Logically, she hates his guts. But luckily towards the end of the book she falls down the stairs and hits herself in the head. In the hospital she realizes that's as good as it gets and if she was hoping for some paranormal lover - a vampire, demon or a werewolf maybe, she is in the wrong book. So she settles for her multimillionaire prince who gives her multiorgasms and they live happily ever after....more
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