Heyer books - The Foundling
25 Feb 2009 09:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneThe Foundling would make a great movie, actually. Whether that's in spite or because of the fact that it's not plotwise actually a romance but an adventure is... unclear. See, the premise has a romance worked in - and a screenwriter could easily bring it a bit more into the foreground - but in words on the page, it's all background, with very little screentime. Interestingly, the objects are old friends, so while the heroine (Harriet) never becomes very well known to us, it's a bit like most slash... it asks you to take the pre-existing affection for granted, and just enjoy the dramatic irony as you watch the hero come to realise it.
Heyer usually handles the tender emotions with a delicate hand, which is sometimes to my taste and sometimes not. I often feel that her sensibilities caused her to, er, pull off and leave the reader with blue balls, emotionally speaking - she doesn't often use her little tricks to invoke a smushy, gooey feeling of romantic tension in your insides. (The books where she does are often among my favourites. Like the climactic scene in Cotillion, another book with a clichéd sidekick-type character for a hero, which I reread frequently.) I prefer backing off before the height of gooiness is reached to over-doing the gooiness - I am a cold prickly slasher for the most part, as the saying goes, although my guilty pleasures have to do with warm fuzzy things like h/c, in large part - and Heyer does a brilliant job with the intellectual side of love, in my opinion. (See my last posted review of Black Sheep.)
The hero of this book is Lord Worth, Duke of Sale, an ordinary, shy twenty-four-year old raised by over-protective, mother-henning old servants and uncle, and dying to escape from his gilded cage and get dirty in the real world. This Regency-era Buddha is afflicted by a kind heart which makes him constantly feel sulky, but never inflict true sulking on his cotton-wool-wrappers because he knows that they mean well, and he cannot bear to disappoint. He's also completely unaware that he's in love with his childhood friend, Harriet (called Harry), which is why he's inclined to balk from pure orneriness when his bossy uncle arranges a marriage to her for him and kind of commands him into it.
Meanwhile Harriet, who only gets about 5 pages of POV time, total, has a huge crush on the hero, whom his intimates call Gilly (although his name is Adolphus, we gather. It doesn't matter, because for most of the plot he's going by an assumed name). She is shy, romantic, but rather sensible (and biddable) too, like Gilly, and they're both used to being bullied; in fact, they're an excellent match, which Gilly is able to see even though the whole proposal thing seems so awkward. Harriet almost balks at the idea of the man she loves marrying her for convenience, but her mother, who is as bad as his uncle, yells at her, and she complies without a peep.
Then a madcap mission to scare off a blackmailer targeting his cousin takes Gilly out of town, and he mischievously sneaks out without telling anyone where he's going. On the road he picks up the mischievous runaway son of a wealthy tradesman, and then an empty-headed and beautiful orphan girl who is in desperate need of protection, but too stupid to realise it. Encumbered with these two comedic sidekicks and hunted by the frustrated blackmailer, Gilly endures a number of hijinx and eventually learns to manage other people and to stand up for himself.
Meanwhile, while Gilly, the kind of character whom Georgette usually makes a sidekick, is the hero, she's taken one of her standby hero types and made him into a sidekick: Gilly's cousin Gideon, who is brave, strong, tall, gorgeous, sarcastically witty, a touch proud, and extremely affectionate. (He keeps calling Gilly "my sweet little one" and variations thereof, but I will CUT YOU if you try to slash them, which would demean the purity of their brotherly relationship!) Gideon's is the main B-plot. The book could benefit greatly from having a B-plot with Harriet; she's sort of the opposite of a woman in the refridgerator, because while she's under her own steam the whole time the hero's adventuring, all she gets to do is sit at home. It would be much cooler if she were involved in the escapes and pranks and whatnot. (In fact it would be a bit like Pirates of the Caribbean, I think. Without the Jack Sparrow. Though there is a silver-tongued rogue as a hilarious secondary character - he alone would be worth buying the book for. I won't spoil you as to his precise role.)
Heyer usually handles the tender emotions with a delicate hand, which is sometimes to my taste and sometimes not. I often feel that her sensibilities caused her to, er, pull off and leave the reader with blue balls, emotionally speaking - she doesn't often use her little tricks to invoke a smushy, gooey feeling of romantic tension in your insides. (The books where she does are often among my favourites. Like the climactic scene in Cotillion, another book with a clichéd sidekick-type character for a hero, which I reread frequently.) I prefer backing off before the height of gooiness is reached to over-doing the gooiness - I am a cold prickly slasher for the most part, as the saying goes, although my guilty pleasures have to do with warm fuzzy things like h/c, in large part - and Heyer does a brilliant job with the intellectual side of love, in my opinion. (See my last posted review of Black Sheep.)
The hero of this book is Lord Worth, Duke of Sale, an ordinary, shy twenty-four-year old raised by over-protective, mother-henning old servants and uncle, and dying to escape from his gilded cage and get dirty in the real world. This Regency-era Buddha is afflicted by a kind heart which makes him constantly feel sulky, but never inflict true sulking on his cotton-wool-wrappers because he knows that they mean well, and he cannot bear to disappoint. He's also completely unaware that he's in love with his childhood friend, Harriet (called Harry), which is why he's inclined to balk from pure orneriness when his bossy uncle arranges a marriage to her for him and kind of commands him into it.
Meanwhile Harriet, who only gets about 5 pages of POV time, total, has a huge crush on the hero, whom his intimates call Gilly (although his name is Adolphus, we gather. It doesn't matter, because for most of the plot he's going by an assumed name). She is shy, romantic, but rather sensible (and biddable) too, like Gilly, and they're both used to being bullied; in fact, they're an excellent match, which Gilly is able to see even though the whole proposal thing seems so awkward. Harriet almost balks at the idea of the man she loves marrying her for convenience, but her mother, who is as bad as his uncle, yells at her, and she complies without a peep.
Then a madcap mission to scare off a blackmailer targeting his cousin takes Gilly out of town, and he mischievously sneaks out without telling anyone where he's going. On the road he picks up the mischievous runaway son of a wealthy tradesman, and then an empty-headed and beautiful orphan girl who is in desperate need of protection, but too stupid to realise it. Encumbered with these two comedic sidekicks and hunted by the frustrated blackmailer, Gilly endures a number of hijinx and eventually learns to manage other people and to stand up for himself.
Meanwhile, while Gilly, the kind of character whom Georgette usually makes a sidekick, is the hero, she's taken one of her standby hero types and made him into a sidekick: Gilly's cousin Gideon, who is brave, strong, tall, gorgeous, sarcastically witty, a touch proud, and extremely affectionate. (He keeps calling Gilly "my sweet little one" and variations thereof, but I will CUT YOU if you try to slash them, which would demean the purity of their brotherly relationship!) Gideon's is the main B-plot. The book could benefit greatly from having a B-plot with Harriet; she's sort of the opposite of a woman in the refridgerator, because while she's under her own steam the whole time the hero's adventuring, all she gets to do is sit at home. It would be much cooler if she were involved in the escapes and pranks and whatnot. (In fact it would be a bit like Pirates of the Caribbean, I think. Without the Jack Sparrow. Though there is a silver-tongued rogue as a hilarious secondary character - he alone would be worth buying the book for. I won't spoil you as to his precise role.)
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(no subject)
Date: 26 Feb 2009 03:25 am (UTC)Also, heh, I always giggle at the way it's impossible to be blonde in a Heyer 'verse and not blue eyed. You can be beautiful and intelligent or beautiful and stupid, but the beauty, the blue eyes, and the specifically guinea-gold coloured hair are not actually negotiable.
(no subject)
Date: 26 Feb 2009 11:27 am (UTC)I don't really blame her, though. I think impatience with airheads (regardless of gender in fact), while unfair, is endemic to many more practical and businesslike people (whatever their actual IQ-type intelligence, which I think is not Heyer's favourite - her smart characters are frequently practical but un-bookish).
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Date: 1 Nov 2009 01:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 1 Nov 2009 02:33 pm (UTC)