Title: Sinful in Satin
Author: Madeline Hunter
Series: Rarest Blooms #3
the good does not outweigh the bad
I cannot tell you how many times I checked to see how close to the end I was, and how often I let out a bored groan when I saw how much was left. It…plodded…along…saving the “big” reveal for about three-quarters or perhaps two-thirds into the book. And either the reveal wasn’t all that exciting in itself or the time it took getting to it robbed it of its impact, because it was just like… Okay. So what? Wait, was that supposed to be shocking?
There was no chemistry between Celia and Jonathan. It seemed like for half the book they merely acknowledged that the other was somewhat handsome…then all of a sudden, they can’t keep their hands off each other. It almost seemed out of character for them to want each other with such abandon. I didn’t quite buy Jonathan’s character altogether. He seemed poorly realized and a bit superficial. He was supposed to be this bad*ss spy but he was so mild-mannered and uninteresting that I had a hard time remembering he was this super-slick, ultra savvy chameleon of a secret agent.
It bothered me that Celia was so against following in her mother’s footsteps, and Jonathan supposedly respected her as a lady, yet they never once discussed marriage (or even considered it in their thought processes, if I remember correctly) until after a lot of casual sex. She wanted so badly and fought so hard for people to respect her as a virtuous individual, then Jonathan comes along, and she decides he was the lesser of two evils and just gives up her virginity as if she hadn’t horded it like the Hope diamond. When she told Jonathan about her issue with… whatshisface (he really made an impression, huh?)… her old suitor, how the guy was blackmailing her to become his unwilling mistress, I thought for sure Jonathan would propose to her so he could kill two birds with one stone, afford her the respect of a matron and get her away from whatshisname by legally paying her debt as her husband, since she wouldn’t take the money from him as a friend. But apparently it wouldn’t have served the plot or built any anxiety for her dilemma. Whatevs.
The subplot of Jonathan claiming his elusive birthright was, in a word, asleep. Jonathan didn’t seem to care about it much, save for showing a teeny bit of resentment when riled, so I didn’t care much about it, either. His attitude also made the issue of marrying Celia toward the end a bit of a stretch. I was like, Really? You didn’t care about the Earldom before you wanted to marry the love of your life, and now that you do want to, you’re allowing it to give you pause? Another whatevs.
It was mentioned, at least twice, that Celia’s mother had dangled Celia’s coming availability as a mistress before a legion of lecherous men—mother of the year, she is—and I kept expecting wannabe rapists to come out of the woodwork once it was known who Celia was and where she was living, but they never came. Seemed like a…not a missed opportunity, and not a loose end, but something of both. False foreshadowing. And as a side note: I know the author tried to make it credible and give it sound reason, but I could not believe a mother would train her daughter to be a mistress. Maybe it was the easy way through life, maybe it was expected (–aren’t we always being told not to shy from challenge and not to succumb to others’ expectations? What awful life lessons for a mother to teach her daughter!–) but what kind of mother wants her child to allow dozens of strange men to use her body? I didn’t buy it. I hated that woman. That letter at the end, where her mother says, If you’re reading this, you married for love, and even though I wanted and trained you to be a classy mistress, I’m actually proud of you. I was, again, like, Really? You expect me to believe that? Whatevs #3.
There were a few redeeming qualities to the book, though. Overall, I liked Celia. I respected her efforts to remain virtuous and fight the tide of expectations. I liked that she was rather upfront and honest, looking at the world without rose-colored glasses, although at times her embarrassed reactions contradicted her matter-of-factness. She opened her own business, sort of, and that was admirable. Jonathan, for all his ambiguity, was a nice guy. I loved that out of the goodness of her heart Celia invited Marion and the other woman to work in her home so they wouldn’t have to be ladies of the evening.
This book almost seemed like filler for the series. Like the author had already set up a fourth heroine, had already announced the series as a quartet, then didn’t know what to do with this character when she got to that point, so she half-*ssed everything to fulfill her required word count and get the character’s story out of the way. Perhaps that’s not the case, I hope it’s not, but if it is, I’m insulted that she expected me to care about a book that she didn’t.
