skygiants

Since my absentee ballot never arrived, today I took an early-morning bus down to Philadelphia to vote! Now I am sitting in 30th Street Station, tired but aglow with virtuous citizenship.

Anyway. That being done, I think it is time to stick my head in the sand for the rest of the day and post about the fluffiest thing I have read recently, Julia Quinn's A Night Like This, which I picked up in desperation from the cheap airport bookstore when I realized I was out of reading material on the flight home from DragonCon.

This is a Regency romance novel with a plot that goes something like this:

HERO: I've been away from home because of my Dark Past, WHO IS THIS STRANGE AND SEXY LADY?
HEROINE: I am your cousins' governess! I also have a Dark Secret.
HERO: If you wanted you could also be . . . my GIRLFRIEND. In defiance of social mores and all that but this is a fluffy Regency so who cares about those!
HEROINE: I care about those, because yes, on the one hand, you're very hot, on the other hand, I could lose my job, so please go away.
HERO: I can't go away. I love my cute little cousins. I have to spend EVERY DAY around my cute little cousins. For REASONS.
COUSINS: . . . you never loved us that much before we got a hot governess. We're just saying.
HEROINE: >.<
(THE PLOT: I'm here! I involve, like, a villain and a murder plot and REVENGE and kidnapping and all kinds of dramatic stuff, but you'd never know it from the first three-quarters of the book.
REGENCY MORES: We are also here! But you'd never know it from the last quarter of the book when everyone's like "sure, follow your heart I guess!" and nobody actually cares.)

So predictably, I did not care about the plot, but I was fully entertained by all the fluffy wacky family hijinks to do with governessing and the cousins, including The One Who Wants To Be A Great Playwright and The One Who Wants To Be A Unicorn.

Equally predictably I had very little patience for the hero, because a dude who sticks around when a lady has made it very clear that it would negatively impact her life for him to stick around is not a dude who gets a lot of respect from me.

This sort of seems to be a pattern when I read historical romance novels that are not written by Georgette Heyer, but on the other hand my sample size is I think about two? So I'm still keeping my mind open!

(Okay, that are not written by Georgette Heyer or by qian.)