The Lord Next Door

Author: Gayle Callen
Published: December 2005
Letter Grade: C

I'm rather reluctant to give this book either a lower or a higher grade. I picked it up because I had read two other books by Callen, and I'd enjoyed them a lot, and I liked the epistolery nature of the prologue. I'm a sucker for letters in books.

Basically, the hero and heroine, David and Victoria, get together because David's having serious trouble finding a wife due to his father's old mistress having wild orgy-like parties at their house, and because Victoria's father's death left her family totally destitute. This being Victorian England, what is the solution? Marriage!

I'm not trying to say anything bad about the plotline mind you--it's a well-loved plot devise employed by a lot romance authors. I've used it myself in my story ideas. "Marriage of Convenience" is almost as widely used as the "Reformed Rake" cliche. Almost. Nothing is quite as widely used as that.

So, really, what I'm trying to say is this: once you've read a couple hundred romance novels, you've read almost every plot devise known to man (well, woman. Except Leigh Greenwood. But we won't get into that) and a few only known to the animal kingdom. (See While You Slept by Wendy Burge. Ugh.)

But yeah. The book was all right. It entertained me. I enjoyed it. I'm getting a bit tired of how authors use "not having sex right away, even when characters are married" as a way to build sexual tension. It's really truly annoying. There are other ways to do it, without beating the poor, dead horse.

I liked the prologue, about how David and Victoria wrote to each other as children, though she thought he was a servant named Tom, or whatever. That was kind of weird. And I didn't like how it was resolved. Actually, it didn't feel resolved at all. She kept wanting him to read their childhood journal, but he doesn't until the very end, and only the part that's supposed to tie up the last of the conflicts.

That part bugged me, too. What could have been a really sweet, caring moment just came out... mediocre. Like "Oh. That's pretty shitty. Can we have sex now, please?" Well, maybe not THAT bad. But it felt like after all this build up to this moment, and it just felt flat. Like how I wrote my most hated chapter of "Lost": like Callen was just trying to get it over and done with.

I liked the characters themselves. They were fairly believable. I wasn't too fond of how their relationship issues got tied up so neatly, especially David and his father. It seemed like there should be a lot more emotion in it, considering their interactions to this point.

I should really review before I give a grade, because this book just got knocked down two grades. Was a B- when I started...

I bought the second book in this series, too, when I bought The Lord Next Door. Hopefully this one will prove better. The other two books I read by Callen were wonderful, I loved them. But this one... meh.