There is nothing fresh or new about a Regency romance about a heroine who paints with -- shocking -- oils, instead of watercolors. But it is unusual to have a heroine who works really hard at painting. Viscount in Love, by Eloisa James, would have been a great book if it had leaned more into heroine Torie's painting. At the end we learn SPOILERS
that she is such a great painter that she had been part of the Royal Academy (or something) since she was 16, which is a huge honor. And throughout the book we have her internal monologue on her thoughts about her paintings and what she is trying to accomplish and how she wants to make them better. But there is so much we never learn. Who taught her to paint? Did her dismissive father hire tutors for her when she was young? Did she spend a lot of time at exhibits, or with other artists? At one point she comments that she would never have become such a great painter if she were not illiterate (she has undiagnosed dyslexia) -- but I want to hear so much more about this. There's a documentary about Stephen Hawking called A Brief History of Time (much more interesting than the book Hawking wrote of the same name, which is about physics and of which I understood not a word. Well, maybe a word here and there but certainly not a sentence). That documentary demonstrated that Hawking would never have been a great theoretical physicist if not for his disability. For example, according to the documentary, turning a page was so difficult for Hawking that he wouldn't do it until he was sure he understood every word on the page before him. How does Torie's illiteracy similarly lead to her genius as a painter?
Also, I'm no art historian but even I know that Impressionism started in the late 1800's, as a reaction to photography. Now that people had a different way to obtain accurate likenesses of themselves, painters were freed to interpret their vision of the world more freely. Torie seems to have anticipated this movement by at least half a century.
Much of the plot of Viscount in Love is a distraction from the Torie-as-artist story. Hero Dominic was engaged to Torie's sister for three years before she dumped him and he immediately set his sights on Torie. The scandal and ickiness of this is not given enough space to breathe. Torie and Dominic and Dominic's adopted children get into a dangerous situation at a giant market. This episode doesn't add much to the story, except showing us that Dominic can handle himself with a weapon. Yay, him, but without a future dreaded kidnapping that fact is irrelevant -- a Chekhov's gun that never gets taken down from the wall. (But, points for the lack of kidnapping.)
There appears to be a whole back story about Torie being outed as illiterate between the first chapter of the book and the main action two years later, but we don't hear much about this. Maybe it's in a different James book, but this is the first book in this series.
But, again, all of this is just a distraction. I may be prejudiced as I am very fond of writing about artists, basically as a stand-in for writers. (My characters Animal and Rose in my smutty naked sex slave book Mindgames are artists, for example.) But if you're going to have an artist acknowledged by the leading artists in society as one of the greatest artists of her time, you need to do something with that.
For my review of other Eloisa James books, see here.
Note from Jasmine Gold: As the name of this blog indicates, I write erotica. Check out my dark, dystopian novel about naked sex slaves, Mindgames. Your darkest fantasies, with a phenomenal plot and characters you will come to think of as beloved friends. Available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited and in paperback. Or read my book of short stories about hot, consensual sex, The Mature Woman's Guide to Desire, available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.
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