This is going to be a pretty critical review. You should know that most other people really liked this book, and this author:
Other reviews:
Book Smugglers, 8 out of 10
Gossamer Obsessions, high B
TGTBTU, LauraD, B
TGTBTU, Shannon C., A-
TGTBTU, Lawson, B
Amazon.com, 4 stars with 17 reviews
Goodreads, 3.7 out of 5, 117 ratings, 32 reviews
All About Romance, more on my wavelength with a C+
I had heard good things about this historical romance author and decided to read her debut, Compromised (Berkely Sensation, March 2008). Since Compromised, Noble has published Revealed (a RITA finalist this year) and Summer of You (her website with excerpts and purchasing info is here).
It’s 1829 and the Alton sisters return to London with their ambassador father and stepmother after years abroad. They will have their Season, finally, but the family’s hopes are pinned on Evangeline, demure and lovely, rather than Gail, tall, assertive, and bookish. Gail, not interested in gowns, balls or betrothals, rides out one morning and ends up in a lake after a horse crash with Maximillian, Viscount Fontaine. They clash: he’s overbearing, she’s impulsive, and each blames the other for the mishap.
They meet again during the girls’ debut ball, when Max is caught kissing Evangeline in the conservatory. Max is under pressure from his father — with whom he has a very strained relationship — to find a wife within three months or be disinherited. He ends up betrothed to Evangeline … but there’s that prickly sister to deal with.
The author is going, tone-wise, for very light and humorous, kind of Julia Quinn lite. The Alton family dynamics I think were supposed to be reminiscent of Austen’s Bennets (the beautiful, sweet sister, the brash sister, the scheming mother figure, the slightly out of touch but loving father figure), but the portrayal of the parents veered from comical to menacing and back. By the end of the book, the loving father had become stern and implacable, and the untrustworthy stepmother had somehow become the sisters’ ally and friend. This woman, who was obsessed with “good Ton” for the entire book, turns around at the end and says “gossip isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on” when the author needs a deus ex machina to help the girls escape to get married in Scotland.
I found the characterization of the hero wholly uninspired. He was so generic I can’t tell you a thing about him. I felt like the author threw in every cliched hero description and they didn’t gel: sometimes he was “steely”, sometimes he sported a “lopsided grin”, etc.. He wasn’t quite a rake, wasn’t quite troubled, wasn’t quite suave or sexy. He was not very bright, and not able to control his own life at any point in the story. He was just … there, kind of like a ghost of heroes past, leaving a wan impression on me as a reader.
I have become comfortable as a historical romance reader with a certain world I identify as “Regency”. I know it bears little resemblance to the real Regency England, but I have certain genre expectations. Some of these are that the heroine doesn’t call a strange man by his first name, say things like “bullshit”, sneak into the home and enter the bedroom of a man engaged to her sister, grab the reins of a stampeding horse, etc., etc. And a man doesn’t call a lady he has just met “Brat”. I found those things very distracting.
The writing wasn’t to my liking either. Just for fun, I did a Kindle search of the word “obviously”, and I got SEVEN pages of Kindle results. Some characters liked it so much they used it twice in one sentence!
And there are exchanges like this:
[Max:] “what do you mean, you finally received “a really good kiss’?”
Gail rolled her eyes. “I was so hoping you missed that.”
Or this:
[Gail:] “Where do I stand with you, Max? Where the hell do I stand with you?”
Putting aside that neither is the sort of thing I would expect to come out of a Regency heroine’s mouth, I don’t feel that the same person would say both those things. Sometimes, Gail sounded very YA, as in the first quotation, and other times, very contemporary, as in the second. It didn’t work for me.
Compromised just didn’t stand out from the pack for me. There are so many authors I want to read, and so many backlists I have to conquer. Unless a later book by this author gets rave reviews, I think I’ll be moving on.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Kenda Montgomery, ReadReactReview.com. ReadReactReview.com said: Read it:: Review: Compromised, by Kate Noble http://www.readreactreview.com/2010/08/12/review-compromised-by-kate-noble/ [...]
All I can say is I heart this review – I haven’t been able to finish any of her books yet. I feel better that I’m not the only one going against the prevailing opinion. It sounds negative and I suppose it is, but I find her authorial voice anachronistic and very much ‘lite’. I think I might like her as a contemporary writer better.
I agree with most of what you’ve said about this review, which is why I feel I have to add:
READ REVEALED. It’s a 100% improvement over Compromised, and one of the best Regency historicals I have EVER read. It was a lucky thing I’d had both of Noble’s first books on my TBR because I might have read Revealed otherwise but it. Is. WORTH IT. One of the best-written heroines I’ve ever encountered, plus Marcus, for all that he’s a Beta, is a remarkable, easily memorable beta.
I fall over myself to suggest Revealed to people precisely because Noble’s first book wasn’t all that impressive.
agree x 1000 with AJ. i read Revealed first, and have since reread it twice in one year, the heroine is teh awesome and the hero is DEFINITELY complex.
since i loved Revealed so much i promptly bought Compromised, super excited to glom. i was also very “m’eh” about it, very unimpressed. i found the writing was weak and immature compared to Revealed.
i haven’t read Summer of You yet but im planning on it. i hope you give her another try!
I loved the beginning of this, with all the gossiping servants. It made me think of the opening scenes of Pride and Prejudice, with the truth universally acknowledged that was surely only held by gossiping matrons with marriageable daughters, and how everyone knew right away how much Bingley and Darcy were worth and that they were single. Austen doesn’t show the servants, but they’ve got to be part of the gossip. So I thought Noble was showing me a real Regency world where people were defined by birth and fortune, everyone knew everyone’s place, and it would be hard for the characters to escape that.
Of course, then, the rest of the novel disappointed, though I think I enjoyed it more than you did. It was very uneven, including, obviously in the sentence-level writing sense. I chalk this up to first novel and still want to try more, hoping the good will be more prevalent.
ok, I *might* be convinced to try Revealed. I guess I needed to give this review the “free noobie upgrade”?
That’s a weasel word all authors should try to excise – and a lot of people in speech too. Bit surprised her editor didn’t pull her up on it.
I don’t mind people using a little contemporary usage in their historical dialogue – real world period dialogue is far more slangy and casual than you can ever pick up from texts – but what this author has chosen sounds not only very particular to the modern world, but to a particular subset of the modern world (i.e. young white Californians.) Perhaps she planned it as a kind of Jane Austen, the Vampire Slayer and lost her nerve
Hm… :X I haven’t read this book yet, but have owned it for a few years? Or whatever? And never read it… meh.
I’ll still read it – at some point… but uh oh.
I don’t think you can get more lite than Julia Quinn. I’ll admit I glommed her books when THE DUKE AND I came out, but I can’t read her anymore. Those excerpts sound like they could come from Quinn and, to quote SINGING IN THE RAIN, “I just can’t stand it.”
Oh, that’s too bad. I really enjoyed this one (yes, I’m one of those.) That’s not saying that it’s without problem, but I did find it quite delightful. It’s been over a year since I read it (and I don’t have it with me anymore, as it didn’t survive The Move) so I can’t try to have good discussion on your points, but I’ll see what I can remember…
I reread my review, and I did at least completely read Romilla differently than you, more as an exasperated stepmother than the wicked variety, but I don’t think I ever saw her as working against Gail. Definitely manipulating in her own way, but I suspect I saw that as working with the family and the ton to try to have a satisfactory outcome of the various situations. Actually I rather liked her!
Anachronisms abound, that’s for certain, and I noticed it more so in Gail’s opinions about things like imperialism and the Elgin Marbles (straight out of 20c post-colonialism). Hearing 19c heroines spout enlightened views supported by the Association of Art Museum Directors (and the Greek government) generally get the raised eyebrow treatment from me and it did here too. I don’t think many people in early 19c England would question whether it was right for the Marbles to be in the British Museum. But for some reason, the lighter, breezier Regencies get a bit more of a pass on language like you quoted, probably for the bare reason that I treat these books as sort of more humorous and lightweight, and don’t get to in-depth with a critique of it (my own shortcoming).
I was probably the only one out there who actually preferred Compromised to Revealed, and my excuse for that is that I read Revealed immediately after reading The Spymaster’s Lady. I haven’t read a ton of books in that vein, but really, I’ve never read a better French/English Regency spy romance than that, so that definitely colored my experience of Revealed.
I’m with AnimeJune and others who urge you to try Revealed. The Summer of You is right up there too. Compromised isn’t as good as the 2 more recent releases, IMO.
I thought Compromised was all right, but Revealed and The Summer of You had me laughing and crying and cheering all the way. She’s definitely heavy on anachronisms in all of her books, but Kate Noble’s later two works are absolutely terrific on an emotional level.
Count me with those who think Revealed was better than Compromised. And I think The Summer of You was as much better again. But you might want to read Revealed first, because those two are sequential. I’m sure that part of my enjoyment of The Summer of You came from already knowing the main characters a little from other POVs.
I had to go back and check to see which book (Compromised or Revealed) I had DNF’d in the first 3 chapters. Between the 21st century language and the annoying bickering between the hero and heroine, I couldn’t take it. I agree with Sonoma Lass that Summer of You is much better. It is very romantic, which made up for the anachronistic dialogue, the historical howlers, and the apparent disinterest in providing anything remotely approaching a realistic background and context.
There are a whole host of authors who appear to be trying to be the next Quinn, and Noble seems to fit well into that group.
ETA: Not that there’s anything wrong w/being Quinn or writing like Quinn, it’s just not my preferred type of historical romance.
ok, Summer of You it is! If… I decide to read another Noble. there are still too many Ivorys, Gaffneys, Kinsales, Beverleys, Goodmans, etc. to read first!