I mean I'm not a Napoleon!wife, but still

[chocolatepot]

Just finished The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, if you can call it finishing when you skim from halfway through to the end. Definitely an anti-rec. It can't decide whether it wants to be an old-fashioned swashbuckling Scarlet Pimpernel adventure, a standard romance novel, or a Janet Mullaney-esque modern tongue-in-cheek romance. The adventure made me want to jettison the romance novel clichés even more (STOP FIGHTING ALL THE TIME YOU IDIOTS), and the tongue-in-cheek jokes made me notice the downside of the old-fashioned aspect (no French characters that were helpful or in any way positive). It also seems like kind of a let-down to set it in that short peace between the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic Wars, just because the Terror is a much more exciting time to be doing daring deeds. So basically, for me it failed to be a fun adventure story because the adventure didn't happen, an interesting love story because the characters were too flat, and a fun semi-parody by taking itself too seriously the majority of the time. The chaperone, Miss Gwen, was so obnoxious to me but the narrative clearly thought she was a spunky older woman ... but I found it annoying that she was a stickler for propriety when it came to the girls but was just rude to anyone she felt like being rude to. Especially Napoleon, who was not short ffs.

Don't even get me started on the framing story with an American scholar coming to Britain to research things, that sort of thing makes me shrivel in embarrassment. Just write a British self-insert, ffs.