LynneC’s review of From Dirt to Diamonds by Julia James
Contemporary Romance published by Harlequin Presents 23 Aug 11
When you want the pure, true crack that is Mills and Boon Modern romance, you turn to Julia James. She gives you all the wild madness, the extremes of the Cinderella trope that is the basis of the line, and the purple prose. Not to mention the exclamation marks! (note; not the same person as Julie James, who writes those lovely romantic comedies. Not many laughs here). From Dirt to Diamonds is no exception. If you want an engrossing, emotional read about characters you can sympathize with, you’re not going to find it here. Where other writers can take well-worn tropes and give you a great, emotional read, James gives you fairytales and extremes of emotion that verge on insanity. So be warned.
In this one, the heroine is going by the name of Thea Dauntry, but she used to be Kat, the daughter of a drug addict who was in her turn the daughter of an alcoholic. So Kat becomes a model (what else?) and falls under the influence of a blackmailer who threatens to cut her if she doesn’t either give him money or do some porn shoots for him. So she steals from the hero and when caught doesn’t come clean. The hero proceeds to ruin her career. Her blackmailer is conveniently offed at this point. And now we’re about three chapters in, so I’ll put spoiler alerts for any more plot details.
Kat decides she is going to change, not go the way of her mother and grandmother, who she never knew, so she becomes a well-paid model. Then after Angelos (I’ll come to him in a minute) ruins her, she reinvents herself but is still a model. WTF? So how did she do that? She has a passport, presumably under her new name, papers, and nobody in her profession recognizes her as the girl who used to be Kat, although Angelos has no trouble recognizing her across the space of a crowded restaurant. Thea’s also got class. She knows the difference between Rachmaninoff and Shostakovitch and she reads. In fact, she behaves like a fifty-year-old in a twenty-something’s body. She doesn’t like being stared at, she doesn’t drink and she doesn’t take drugs. And she’s a model.
So realism just went flying out the window. Forget it, it doesn’t belong here.
The hero, Angelos, is your Greek tycoon hero. Tall, dark, brooding, all that. Executive. Loves to hike in Switzerland. He ruined Kat without really investigating the whys and wherefores, and he hates himself for the attraction he feels for her. So it’s all about him. When he meets her again, he wrecks her plans to marry a nice young man. For the young man’s good, naturally. What a hero. Prince Charming he is not. So he takes her away with him, because that’s what you do to someone you want to ruin. OMG the angst.
And if we can’t feel the angst from the story, James emphasizes it with prose that doesn’t stint on adjectives or exclamation marks. Here’s a bit from early in the book, before James has really got into her stride:
“A hard sliver of satisfaction darted in her mind. All the shock and the panic she had felt were gone now—completely gone. Unneeded and unnecessary. Instead there was now thin, vicious satisfaction. It was fitting—oh, so fitting!—that he should be here, in the moment of her life’s grateful achievement, when he had nearly, so very nearly, destroyed her life.
But I wouldn’t let him! I clawed my way back and now I’m here, and I’ve got everything I’ve wanted all my life! So go to hell, Angelos Petrakos! Get out of my life and stay out for ever!
Then, casting him away with her damnation, she gazed into Giles’s eyes. The eyes of the man she was going to marry.
On the far side of the room Angelos Petrakos’s eyes were bladed like knives.”
There is a sick fascination with this kind of prose, the kind that wonders what is going to happen next, if she can get any purpler. Well, she doesn’t disappoint in that respect. I was going to DNF this, but I wanted to see where it went, reading with the awed fascination usually reserved for watching a great film director crash and burn. Or a media mogul. I mean, you’ve got to admire a vocabulary like that. But does she have to use it all up at once? Eyes wander all over the place, and, in one instance, they twine together. And exclamation marks are used with complete abandon.
This is the way Modern/Presents authors used to write twenty years ago, as we’re all discovering with some of the reprints that Harlequin is throwing at us. There is a hard core of authors who write like it now, but none with quite as much abandon as Julia James. Read and marvel.
Grade: F
Summary:
He’ll stop at nothing to settle old scores!When Angelos Petrakos spies supermodel Thea Dauntry in a swanky London restaurant, he knows she’s not really the effortlessly elegant woman she seems to be…
For Thea, Angelos’s reappearance is disastrous! Dining with a viscount on the verge of proposing, the last thing she wishes to be reminded of is the street–smart, quick–tempered girl she once was.
A lucky encounter years ago with the gorgeous Greek tycoon enabled Thea to make something of her future. But Angelos can’t forget how she used him—and he’ll stop at nothing to bring her down. Not even seduction…
Read an excerpt.
