Mine Till Midnight

I'm not quite sure how to review this one - there were some elements I really liked, some that I didn't, and a pretty troublesome amount of racism/othering of the Roma hero. I guess let's start there; Cam, the hero, is Roma and there is a LOT of use of slurs to refer to him, details behind cut: mostly g*psy, but also at least a few instances of things like "half-breed," since his father was Irish. No slurs from the heroine, but the narration uses the g-term and also there's quite a bit of exoticizing of his “dark” coloring and eye color (I read in print so I don't have exact quotes, but it was pretty constant throughout the book). This was published in 2007, so it's 14 years old as I write this - not ancient, but old enough to have aged poorly in this regard, at least. I'm not sure if there's a good way to write a Roma main character without veering into this weird sort of fetishization, but even if there is, this isn't it.

Okay, other things I wasn't really here for. There's a lot of possessiveness/jealousy from the hero, particularly towards the end of the book, stuff like him getting upset because she was talking to another man (an architect! Doing some work on the Hathaway estate! What a shameless hussy, right), which I absolutely hated. Benefit of the doubt, maybe it was meant to be funny, but if so, it didn't land. It was also explained as being because he's Roma, and ... again with the racism, sadly. I also didn't really love the supernatural element here, honestly. I feel like it would have been more effective to have Leo just mourning Laura and that leading to his depression/substance abuse, instead of bringing in the Roma legend and having him be literally possessed/haunted/whatever it was.

All that said, I did like a lot of this book! I liked Amelia and her determination to keep her family together and provide for her younger sisters, and I liked all the sisters (Leo was kind of an ass throughout, but there were Reasons). I enjoyed the connection to the Wallflowers series, and I thought it made sense in this case instead of being shoehorned in like “hey look, here are these characters you liked!” Lisa Kleypas is still one of my favorite historical writers, and I'm still going to read the next book in this (and probably finish the series, honestly), but I don't think this one is one of her best. Start with the Wallflowers or Ravenels series instead.

Honestly, I'm pretty divided about this book despite the great ratings it's gotten on Goodreads so far.

THE BAD:

- Instances of non-consent framed as “desirable”. This book was first published in 2007 and it shows. It's hard to imagine similar plot elements being published by a socially savvy writer in more recent times
- Insta-love/lust is never a great plot choice in my opinion
- The third arc of the book took a rather strange turn, especially with Leo's storyline

THE GOOD:

- Unlike many romance novels where most characters (aside from the MCs) are just glorified background scenery, I appreciate that this book takes the time to develop the personalities, problems, conflicts, and backstories of the other characters, which really does a huge favour for the storyline
- Although MCs have an insta-love problem, they do spend an ample amount of time conversing with each other after that, and their subsequent chemistry isn't unrealistic
- The female MC isn't so much of a Mary Sue - we can see why people can get annoyed with her and her overbearing personality. She does acknowledge and, to a small extent, try to improve herself by the end of the book, although there could be more character development here (the same can't be said for the male MC)

All in all? It's not a bad book, and one of the more well fleshed-out romance novels that I've read. It's definitely going in for the melodrama rather than a light-hearted romance, but I enjoyed that there were substantial sub-plots that kept the story from being too monotonous and fixated on the one relationship between the female and male MCs. Goodness knows, I'm actually slightly more interested in one of those subplots (I have been enamoured with Win and Merripen from the start) than the main characters' story.

Oh, you know. Just starting off 2023 with a romance novel! After a spate of really awful lending library finds, I invested in Kleypas' Hathaways series, and this is a good start. I really liked Cam from Devil in Winter of the Wallflowers series, and he's the male half of this novel's love interest. He's smart and sexy and completely unabashed about expressing interest in his paramour. He's also Roma, as is another character I'm sure will reappear in the series. I'm completely unqualified to comment on the accuracy of Kleypas' research, but there's more (pleasant) didactic stuff about Romani culture and prejudice against and persecution of them in England at the time than you would expect for a romance novel. The main issue with this novel is the heroine! Kleypas typically writes less neurotic protagonists than Amelia Hathaway, to be honest, and she's a character who really takes her outsized sense of obligation to her family to annoying, not endearing, lengths. I don't think she has much of a developmental arc in that regard, which is another nice feature of other Kleypas novels. Still! I was suitably entertained and will certainly read the rest of the series.