Friday's Child, by Georgette Heyer
Jul. 23rd, 2014 03:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rowynI finished Cotillion just before I went to visit ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
alltoseek, so naturally I was raving to her about how much I liked it. She has long been a Heyer fan, so she bestowed Friday's Child upon me before I left.
This book is also part comedy, with lots of silly Regency-era scrapes and escapes from same. Friday's has a lot more romance to it than Cotillion, but I actually much preferred Cotillion.
This is largely because I found the male protagonist in Friday's difficult to take, mainly because his treatment of the female protagonist for parts of the book is, by modern standards, abusive. He's not a monster by Regency standards, but he's described on multiple occasions as doing things like boxing her ears and shaking her violently. It's the kind of minor violence that was common during the time period but it's squicky to read about it now. The emotional relationship is also rocky: much of the book's tension comes from the female protagonist making some social gaffe that she was understandably unaware of, and the male protagonist exploding at her until he realizes it's not actually her fault she wasn't taught all this as a young girl.
In fairness to the story, the male protagonist does eventually figure out that he's a jerk and has been treating her badly, and the resolution suggests he'll do better going forward. Still. At one point the female protagonist is being pursued by a very nice man who loves her quirky ways and doesn't want her to change. I found myself sorry that it wasn't feasible in the setting for her to ditch the male protagonist in favor of this guy, who really deserved her more.
The other thing that bugged me is there's a lot of terrible "romantic advice" in it, stuff about playing hard to get and suchlike that reminded me of books like The Game and The Rules. In fairness, the protagonists were usually repulsed by this advice and had to be tricked into it by their friends, but the way it ... kind of ... works and the semi-endorsement of such manipulative tactics was ick.
This aside, the book has many good points. The supporting cast was entertaining, well-meaning, and generally likeable. There's lots of funny bits. The protagonists get along well for a substantial chunk of the book, some times because they are both tripping merrily along the same foolhardy path, but it's still amusing to read. Some of the romantic parts are genuinely touching, especially one point where the male protagonist says he'll give up the female protagonist so she can be happy with her more-deserving suitor.
I'll give it a 7, and will read more Heyer later. For now, I'll take a break from Regency romance: it really is a crapsack world, and modern Regency novels keep reminding me of that. (Austen rarely does. I don't know why that is.)
alltoseek, so naturally I was raving to her about how much I liked it. She has long been a Heyer fan, so she bestowed Friday's Child upon me before I left.This book is also part comedy, with lots of silly Regency-era scrapes and escapes from same. Friday's has a lot more romance to it than Cotillion, but I actually much preferred Cotillion.
This is largely because I found the male protagonist in Friday's difficult to take, mainly because his treatment of the female protagonist for parts of the book is, by modern standards, abusive. He's not a monster by Regency standards, but he's described on multiple occasions as doing things like boxing her ears and shaking her violently. It's the kind of minor violence that was common during the time period but it's squicky to read about it now. The emotional relationship is also rocky: much of the book's tension comes from the female protagonist making some social gaffe that she was understandably unaware of, and the male protagonist exploding at her until he realizes it's not actually her fault she wasn't taught all this as a young girl.
In fairness to the story, the male protagonist does eventually figure out that he's a jerk and has been treating her badly, and the resolution suggests he'll do better going forward. Still. At one point the female protagonist is being pursued by a very nice man who loves her quirky ways and doesn't want her to change. I found myself sorry that it wasn't feasible in the setting for her to ditch the male protagonist in favor of this guy, who really deserved her more.
The other thing that bugged me is there's a lot of terrible "romantic advice" in it, stuff about playing hard to get and suchlike that reminded me of books like The Game and The Rules. In fairness, the protagonists were usually repulsed by this advice and had to be tricked into it by their friends, but the way it ... kind of ... works and the semi-endorsement of such manipulative tactics was ick.
This aside, the book has many good points. The supporting cast was entertaining, well-meaning, and generally likeable. There's lots of funny bits. The protagonists get along well for a substantial chunk of the book, some times because they are both tripping merrily along the same foolhardy path, but it's still amusing to read. Some of the romantic parts are genuinely touching, especially one point where the male protagonist says he'll give up the female protagonist so she can be happy with her more-deserving suitor.
I'll give it a 7, and will read more Heyer later. For now, I'll take a break from Regency romance: it really is a crapsack world, and modern Regency novels keep reminding me of that. (Austen rarely does. I don't know why that is.)
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Date: 2017-02-08 07:23 pm (UTC)Cuz Austen was living it. It seemed less crapsack to her and more "the way it is". And she was writing humor, so she's less likely to point out the crapsack parts of the world.
Heyer includes a lot of tropes that to me emphasize the craptasticness: like the "loyal and adoring servant" - god I hate that one. It just makes me think of all the times they weren't, and how rarely they were (loyal, sure; adoring? not likely).
Also, Heyer was living during the Empire's decline. She really thought the world ought to be more like it was in the Regency era. She really thought servants would be adoring of their masters because they were employed. Mostly this is because she was born in a world where she ought to have had one of her (wealthier) heroine's lives, but since the English upper classes had all wasted their wealth on crap like in the Regency era, she had to live like any other lower middle class plebe, and it annoyed her to death. She was the English equiv of Margaret Mitchell, and totes would've done the slavery-defending thing Mitchell did in Gone With the Wind if Heyer'd been American. For pretty much the same reason.
Anyway, it's about authenticity. Writers writing about their contemporary world always sound diff than writing about some historical world. So you are always aware you are in a historical world. They work so hard to immerse you in details, which contemporary writers don't, because contemporary writers write for a contemporary audience, and assume their audience knows all this stuff, so they leave it out. So you are constantly reminded you are in this historical world, and not in your own ordinary world.
Anyway, I have no idea why I gave you Friday's Child. Cotillion is far and away the best of Heyer, of you kinda already started at the top, but there's gotta be better than Friday's Child.
Frederica comes to mind. Sprig Muslin - it upends some tropes, like Cotillion, and the (female) protagonist is so sensible with a great sense of humor. I might have been thinking about Charity Girl, which I always mixed up in my mind with Friday's Child, but Charity Girl is better.
Anyway, to read Heyer, you kinda have to go into a fantasy mindset. Imagine it's the Regency equiv of the SCA, something like that *g*
(why I am commenting on a years-old post of yours is cuz I was recently reading a fanfic the crossed over to the Vorkosigan saga, which I've never read, and I was trying to remember if that's the series you were lamenting about being unremittingly nasty and brutish, but kept reading anyway. The ficcer is someone whose work I really like, and she's also published original novels, which I'm debating whether to get.)
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Date: 2017-02-15 02:43 pm (UTC)I'm not sure which series it would've been. Possibly a TV series -- Lut and I have watched some that were like that. Book series, maybe the Mistborn trilogy, by Brandon Sanderson, or GRRM's Song of Ice and Fire, except that I didn't keep reading it (I read through book 3 but had forgotten a lot and did not have the interest to re-read by the time book 4 came out.) I read the first three books of a horror series, I Am Not a Serial Killer, by Dan Wells, which might also fit. Except that's horror so you're pretty much expecting it.
I bought a bunch of Heyer when the publisher did a $1.99 ebook sale on all her work, of which Frederica was one, so I'll give that one a try next. :)
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Date: 2017-03-06 02:50 am (UTC)I gotta look into Bujold. Among others *g*
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Date: 2017-03-08 06:08 pm (UTC)It's fantasy, not sf, but the post-apocalyptic world trope is sf in feel so I can see why you'd've remembered it as sf, from my review.
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Date: 2017-03-17 01:20 am (UTC)