Lynne Connolly’s review of The Spanish Duke’s Virgin Bride by Chantelle Shaw
Contemporary romance released by Harlequin Presents 01 Nov 07

I think there’s a conspiracy afoot. This is the second Beauty and the Beast story I’ve read recently that fails spectacularly, the other being Jennie Lucas’ The Innocent’s Dark Seduction.

It takes elements of the legend – the rose, the castle, the dark overlord, the father in trouble – and tries to update it. But it’s not the elements of the story that matter, it’s the motivations and the emotions beneath and in both examples, that’s what’s lacking. Injecting the modern parts of the story between the gaps isn’t the way to do it, neither is telling the reader the bits she should be shown – the isolation and the power of the hero, the virginal but spirited heroine.

I read this as I read most HMB’s – as a diversion, a way to take a break from a busy day, and the more I read, the more echoes came back to me of the usually reliable Lucas and her crash-and-burn book from last year, one Mrs Giggles was convinced was a parody, and for all I know might very well be.

In this one, as in most HMB’s, the heroine’s motivations are taken care of much more than the hero’s, and in this case my sympathies were all with the hero. The heroine’s father had embezzled from the Duke’s bank, and he decided to call in the debt by making her marry him for twelve months. His father’s will demanded that he marry, so he decided to marry her.

Okay, so this is where it starts to fall apart for me. The heroine’s father embezzled. That’s a crime. For the story to work, the hero has to be the sole owner of the bank, and how many banks do you know that are privately owned? Thought not. And there is a mention of “the board” in the story. In this day and age I doubt the board of any bank would condone criminal activity by one of its employees, whatever the reason for it. Javier, the hero, would have been asked to resign on the strength of that alone. There is no way embezzlement of three million pounds could be covered up, with the audits and accounts that are required, and then for the crime to be kept secret and the perpetrator not prosecuted. Crimes are public prosecutions, not private ones. So I not only found it hard to believe, I found it morally lacking. You do the crime, you do the time.

The heroine is a milk-and-water English virgin with the magic veejayjay that enslaves the hero. He marries her and he sleeps with her but they don’t have sex for months. Three months, to be exact. Nah. They fancy the pants off each other and despite a near-rape on the wedding night (but of course, being the hero, he doesn’t, it’s meant to demonstrate the violence of his emotions) she wants to bestow her precious virginity on the man she loves. Give me strength. Shaw didn’t sell me this one, though I know what she was trying to do. Stick with the myth, show how it works today. Only it doesn’t. Grace (Beauty? Go figure) got on my nerves. She wanted everything her way and she wasn’t prepared to pony up to get it. She cheated, just as her father did, by denying Javier the sex he’d bought (yes, he bought it).

And the writing wasn’t up to standard, or the editing was uneven, I don’t know which. But in the middle of the book every thought and speech was tagged, and then qualified by an adverb. In the course of one page, we get ‘she muttered helplessly,’ ‘Grace said quietly,’ ‘Grace promised gently,’ ‘Grace said anxiously,’ ‘looking blankly,’ ‘she squeezed his arm reassuringly.’

And so it goes. In the novelist’s jargon, this amounts to “telling,” ie the author telling the reader what she should be thinking instead of showing her by actions or body language. “Showing” goes to the heart of a story much more than “telling” and is one reason why I found myself thinking and reasoning, instead of getting immersed in the story. Even if you don’t know about it, all those words ending in “ly” eventually get tiring with sheer repetition (did you notice all the “ing” words I used in the last paragraph? I left them in instead of editing them out to give an example of how words can get repetitive and I bet a lot of you did notice). Any editor doing a thorough job would have sliced these out, and while I don’t doubt the competence of the editors at HMB, it might be that they are concentrating too hard on fitting the author into the mould of the line, rather than the quality of the story itself. And they have little time to work on one book, because of the rapidity of the releases.

So I found this a deeply unsatisfying read, but there are hints of what a great story it could have been, had the author had time to think it through and deepen it, and the editor time to do a proper editing job.

A D- for this one. I just hate giving F’s and there weren’t any typos that I noticed, so I seized on that to lift the grade.

Grade: D-

Blurb:

“Revenge, passion and a convenient marriage…

Duke Javier Herrera is a ruthless Spanish billionaire. He’s learnt the hard way never to fall in love. Now he needs a wife if he’s to inherit the family banking business. Grace Beresford is the daughter of a man who’s fleeced Javier of millions, and he sees an opportunity for revenge and a convenient wife.

At first, Javier doesn’t care that Grace hates him – all he wants is her body. But then he finds that even this small price is one she refuses to pay…despite their explosive mutual attraction. How long can Grace remain his wife in name only?”

Read an excerpt here.