The Pleasure of Her Kiss

Title: The Pleasure of Her Kiss (2003)
Author: Linda Needham (Avon)
Period: European Historical-Victorian (1848 England)
Grade: D-

Gak! I usually complain about romances where the hero is required to save the heroine from her harebrained schemes ala "I Love Lucy," but in The Pleasure of Her Kiss the hero chose to enable and encourage the heroine's harebrained schemes. This book is about ten different kinds of awful. It is the kind of romance where the author thinks she's flipping romance convention but instead her book is just as dull and trite as anything else on the romance mass market shelf.

Jared, Earl of Hawksley, wed and abandoned Kathryn Trafford in Egypt moments after her father's death. The marriage was arranged to protect the heiress and her assets, but Kathryn was less than pleased about being sent to England and neglected by an absent husband. Jared, like all heroes in long-lost spouse romances, wants to settle into a life of domestic bliss with his wife and is shocked when she doesn't recognize him. There is a brief sub-plot of Jared posing as a visitor to the guest house she runs at his country estate rather than revealing his true identity. It is quite dopey and she soon figures him out which is pretty embarrassing when you consider Jared is a spy. Just not a good one.

The crux of the novel, as is the case with most Needham's, is adopted children. Kathryn has taken in a large band of abandoned children and work-house urchins. Jared is opposed to having a ready made family of 20+ children and instead wants to find the children good homes. This is presented as cruel and self-centered with Jared unable to appreciate Kathryn's Jolie-like benevolence. What is wrong with wanting each child to have a good home with families that could give them individual attention? Where they wouldn't be raised in a class that permanently regards them as less than by strict conventions and norms?

The Pleasure of Her Kiss is set against the Irish famine and the grain embargo. Jared's latest mission is to uncover who is robbing and exporting grain stores to aid the Irish after the post-February rebellion embargo. Of course, amoebas can figure out this plot twist. Jared, in love with his wife, offers to financially support her Irish soup kitchens but that isn't good enough. She insists that she must continue to steal grain from the lords who support the embargo to "punish them" for their actions. In response, Jared suggests that he'll become a double agent and aid her in perpetrating her crimes! What the fuck? Is that supposed to be romantic? "Darling, let's get ourselves hung together! It isn't as if we have the responsibility of raising a brood of adopted children with no one else to care for them!"

There isn't anything feminist or radical about the hero supporting the heroine's goals when her goals are asinine.