The Gentleman Caller

Title: The Gentleman Caller (1998)
Author: Megan Chance (HarperTorch)
Period: American-Antebellum (1856 New Orleans)
Grade: D-

This isn’t a romance novel. When the hero and heroine have zero chemistry and only a handful of scenes together what is even the point of marketing it as romance?

I wanted to like this book. New Orleans is my favorite city and my favorite American setting. I’m a big fan of Chance’s heavy, but romantic The Portrait. In The Gentleman Caller, she failed to craft a plot or characters worthy of her effort or talent. When the most interesting character in a romance is the heroine’s bitchy, manipulative sister the author has missed the mark. The younger sister should be grateful she at least got some human emotions.

Rosalie and Jack are the WonderBread of romance characters. They are devoid of personality or human emotion. She is supposed to be pious and selfless, but she just comes of as a spineless dolt. He is supposed to be brooding, but instead comes of as fickle moron. Jack is in lust first with his fiancé’s beautiful sister and then suddenly discovers he’s fallen in love with Rosalie. How? They are never together. Why? On the rare occasion she is with him she is a raging bitch. Rosalie is obviously tentative toward men and has a dramatic reaction to her sister’s plight. The signs about her BIG SECRET are so obvious Helen Keller saw it coming. Jack? Not so much.

You could drive a truck through the book’s plot holes. Why would the patriarch of an long-standing Creole family want to marry his favorite daughter of to a lowly ex-con American who doesn’t even share his family’s faith? A faith that is the hallmark of said daughter’s life? Traditional Creole families usually despised the uncouth bourgeois Americas who migrated to New Orleans. They didn’t offer up their daughters and their fortunes on a whim! Why the father despises and belittles the youngest daughter is never illuminated. Worst, The Gentleman Caller is chocked full of stereotypes about women who have ambitions beyond marriage and motherhood, women who have abortions, slavery, and voodoo. It is creepy and red state-y and would have made even a good romance suck. And this wasn’t a good romance.