The Salt Bride
Jun. 5th, 2012 08:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chocolatepot(I'm about halfway through.) I picked this up because it was free at the time, I think, and the title caught my eye because of the ASoIaF connection. It's definitely a novel about a romance and there are a number of romance novel clichés, but at the same time there's a lot less emphasis on sex and eroticism, which leaves a lot more room for plot.
The basic plotline is: Jane got engaged to the Earl of Salt Hendon and they had sex, she got pregnant and her father was angry, they broke up mysteriously, someone gave her something to make her miscarry, she goes to live a restricted life for years until her guardian dies, when Jane and Salt get married because she refuses to release him. In the marriage, there's a lot of tension with Salt's cousin's sister Diana, who's always been in love with him and who a) makes sure his mistresses miscarry so Salt thinks he's barren and won't get married and have kids to make sure her son's still Salt's heir and b) mildly poisons her son every time she thinks Salt isn't paying attention enough, to get him to rush over in the middle of the night, which is so messed up. I really appreciate how ruthless Diana is, it's great.
Also great: Jane's maid and her fiancé, an under-butler, are reasonably fleshed-out characters compared to many many servants in historical fiction.
As in the last book I reviewed, the hero is a bit of an ass. However, here he is supposed to be an ass, because it's part of his character arc that he stops doing things like bursting out with "I don't feel sorry at all for what happened to you" (nb: he doesn't know here that she was pregnant) and basically "you know what I'm talking about but I'm not going to spell it out even though you're acting hurt and confused!" On the other hand, Jane is sometimes anachronistically sweet - preferring to call Anna by her first name, finding Diana's putting her kids in the nursery to have dinner there barbaric, etc. The latter is esp. crazy as that was completely normal at that time, even among the women a few decades later who started getting into the cult of motherhood and whatnot.
There was a good description of a sitting room that was full of Chinoiserie, which is something a lot of people don't remember was big in the mid-eighteenth century, so kudos there.
The book is not great on fashion. I picture all sorts of 1980s movie costumes. When Jane arrives at Salt's townhouse before the wedding, she's wearing "light lace petticoats" and is mistaken for a maid: bad on two levels, one is that wtf is a "lace petticoat"? You don't make whole petticoats out of lace, and the other is that anyone wearing huge amounts of lace prior to the Pusher/Levers machine (can't remember which came first) is fabulously rich. Later they're out at some party thing outside and never mind the content of the interaction (which was a bit ridic), to hide a bandage on her chest Salt takes her kerchief and crosses it over her chest, tying it behind and tucking the ends into the lacing of her bodice. In the back. No, no, no, no, no. FTLOG, no. I can try to ignore the fact that her kerchief would have had to double in size to do this, and that that was really more of a 1780s thing rather than 1760s, but NO LACING IN THE BACK NO NO NO YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND 18TH CENTURY DRESS AT ALL. After this, every time the author mentioned a "low-cut square neckline" or some variation, which pops up a lot, it reminds me that the author thinks that neckline is cut directly out of fabric as a square. Augh. The word "corset" is used too often as well. However, she did mention ladies wearing useless, flimsy aprons, and that's good; also, in the same scene, the fan was described as being painted with gouache, which is also a good detail. And it's this kind of thing that makes the bodice-lacing more frustrating, because she's clearly up on other research.
The basic plotline is: Jane got engaged to the Earl of Salt Hendon and they had sex, she got pregnant and her father was angry, they broke up mysteriously, someone gave her something to make her miscarry, she goes to live a restricted life for years until her guardian dies, when Jane and Salt get married because she refuses to release him. In the marriage, there's a lot of tension with Salt's cousin's sister Diana, who's always been in love with him and who a) makes sure his mistresses miscarry so Salt thinks he's barren and won't get married and have kids to make sure her son's still Salt's heir and b) mildly poisons her son every time she thinks Salt isn't paying attention enough, to get him to rush over in the middle of the night, which is so messed up. I really appreciate how ruthless Diana is, it's great.
Also great: Jane's maid and her fiancé, an under-butler, are reasonably fleshed-out characters compared to many many servants in historical fiction.
As in the last book I reviewed, the hero is a bit of an ass. However, here he is supposed to be an ass, because it's part of his character arc that he stops doing things like bursting out with "I don't feel sorry at all for what happened to you" (nb: he doesn't know here that she was pregnant) and basically "you know what I'm talking about but I'm not going to spell it out even though you're acting hurt and confused!" On the other hand, Jane is sometimes anachronistically sweet - preferring to call Anna by her first name, finding Diana's putting her kids in the nursery to have dinner there barbaric, etc. The latter is esp. crazy as that was completely normal at that time, even among the women a few decades later who started getting into the cult of motherhood and whatnot.
There was a good description of a sitting room that was full of Chinoiserie, which is something a lot of people don't remember was big in the mid-eighteenth century, so kudos there.
The book is not great on fashion. I picture all sorts of 1980s movie costumes. When Jane arrives at Salt's townhouse before the wedding, she's wearing "light lace petticoats" and is mistaken for a maid: bad on two levels, one is that wtf is a "lace petticoat"? You don't make whole petticoats out of lace, and the other is that anyone wearing huge amounts of lace prior to the Pusher/Levers machine (can't remember which came first) is fabulously rich. Later they're out at some party thing outside and never mind the content of the interaction (which was a bit ridic), to hide a bandage on her chest Salt takes her kerchief and crosses it over her chest, tying it behind and tucking the ends into the lacing of her bodice. In the back. No, no, no, no, no. FTLOG, no. I can try to ignore the fact that her kerchief would have had to double in size to do this, and that that was really more of a 1780s thing rather than 1760s, but NO LACING IN THE BACK NO NO NO YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND 18TH CENTURY DRESS AT ALL. After this, every time the author mentioned a "low-cut square neckline" or some variation, which pops up a lot, it reminds me that the author thinks that neckline is cut directly out of fabric as a square. Augh. The word "corset" is used too often as well. However, she did mention ladies wearing useless, flimsy aprons, and that's good; also, in the same scene, the fan was described as being painted with gouache, which is also a good detail. And it's this kind of thing that makes the bodice-lacing more frustrating, because she's clearly up on other research.
