Some Like It Scandalous

I love how I got to know more about why make-up is so important to a woman's freedom and sense of pride in this book. To imagine that cosmetics were considered sinful once upon a time!

After reading oodles of historical romances set in the Regency or Victoria periods, it's refreshing to read about the Gilded Age.

Our hero and heroines' love affair is believable and lovely. I particularly enjoyed the hero's development, how he gained his confidence as he got out f his father's shadow.

❤️

For the first 30% of the book, I absolutely hated the hero. He was a pretty, ambitionless, bully and I was hard-pressed to find reasons why I should root for the heroine to fall in love with him. Although the author did a relatively good job of rehabilitating him, I don't think I fully bought it; especially because after his rehabilitation, he was never seen interacting with his friends. After the first few pages, the hero's friends are conveniently out of the picture and instead he spends most of the time with the heroine and her friends, immersed in her life. While I think this served to show the hero in a better light, it was hardly realistic. He didn't move to a new place and therefore, he would definitely have had to encounter his old friends and reckon with what the “new him” would mean for those old relationships. Would he stand up to them and call out the ways in which they were and continue to be horrible to people like the heroine? Would he revert to who he used to be when he was around them? I think in order to really buy this change, it would have been good to see him in some of his old spaces, with his old friends. Or at the very least, making new friends who share his new interests (whether male or female).

Additionally, I found the heroine's business personally conflicting. I know that in that time period especially, her business and her products must have been empowering for women. However, I have always hade a mostly hate-sometimes love relationship with makeup and I think this largely bleeds into my reading of the book and curbs my enjoyment. I understand that for someone who was told from a young age that she wasn't beautiful, these products would have been an amazing confidence booster but I think in general I prefer narratives where the ugly duckling character evolves to place zero importance on looks as opposed to feeling beautiful in the end. Perhaps this comes from the privilege of being someone who while not considered attractive, has never been bullied for her looks. However, in general, I believe there's too much emphasis being placed on everyone feeling beautiful when I think as a society we should be moving away from the great premium we place on beauty.

Finally, I couldn't help thinking about the fact that cosmetic businesses like the heroine's, which may have started off as empowering, have contributed to the insane beauty standards that women today have to measure up to. I know it's unfair to retroactively place this burden on historical figures. However, these were the thoughts that were running through my mind as I was reading the book and they stopped me from having an enjoyable immersive experience.

I will probably read another Rodale book because I think my less-than-stellar reading experience had more to do with my own personal issues than with the book's quality