Review of Bridgerton, Season 2

 

 

Spoilers in this review.

 

The beauty of Season 1 of Bridgerton was that it was so unexpected.  My kids had given me a rare treat on Christmas day a couple of years ago -- I got to choose what we would watch on TV.  When I turned on Netflix and saw there was a Regency romance I think I actually squealed with joy.  And then I refused to give up the clicker for the rest of the day.  My kids drifted away, passing through the living room only to cover their eyes on their way to the kitchen.   

Season 2 was entirely expected and for that reason alone watching it was a calmer experience.  The plot is also more sedate than Season 1.  It took me a couple of weeks to watch it the entire season.  But that allowed me to savor it more.

Like Season 1, the plot is charming, the costumes beautiful, the cinematography lovely.  While I was not entirely convinced by the love story between Anthony (the Bridgerton of the title) and Kate, which seemed to be based more on animal attraction than affection, it was very fun to watch.  I appreciated that Kate's sister Edwina, who Anthony had originally proposed to, went through appropriate stages of ingenue, brat, and older but wiser.  And their sponsor, Lady Danbury, played by Adjoa Andoh, stole the screen every time she appeared.

I enjoyed the subplots and can't wait for Pen -- the Hollywood ugly (she's zaftig and is forced to wear yellow, which actually looks fantastic on her) young woman who writes a gossip rag under a pen name -- to get her own season.  

My major quibble with this season is that Kate and Edwina's upbringing in India, and cultural differences that would come with that, are non-existent beyond Kate's preference for Indian tea.  Their home city (Bombay, maybe?  I can't remember because it doesn't matter) appears to be London's twin.  

My minor quibble is that all the adult Bridgerton brothers look exactly alike.  About three episodes in I was usually able to distinguish Anthony from the others.  But as for the one who paints, and the one who went abroad and takes snuff (or is that the one who paints?) -- I have absolutely no clue how to tell them apart.  

Overall I loved this show.  I hope Netflix survives long enough to bring us Season 3.  

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.

 

Review of very fun Regency romance Brazen and the Beast by Sarah MacLean

 

 It's been a minute since I've read a Regency romance.  I've been distracted by serious books, about politics (there was salary discrimination against women in the 1990s), and Western civilization (our culture is now dominant because the Catholic church banned cousin marriage, which made clans less powerful and larger institutions more powerful), and waking up in a different body every day (this one, which I did not enjoy as much as this one).  So I was ready for some fun.  Brazen and the Beast, by Sarah MacLean, absolutely delivered.  

The book opens with heroine Hattie going to a male brothel (why is there not a better word for that?) to divest herself of her virginity so she will be ruined and her father will stop assuming that she will someday marry.  

This brothel sounds like heaven for the women who frequent it.  I hope the employees are treated well.  We never get to find out because Hattie's interlude is interrupted by our hero Whit, aka Beast, who offers to do the honors.  

At the beginning of this scene I was thinking, wouldn't it be nice if Hattie loses her virginity to the gigolo picked out to her specifications by the very, very competent madam, and has a great time.  Then, when romance blooms with Beast she's bringing some experience to the table.  But MacLean wrote the interaction between Hattie and Beast so well that I had a foolish grin on my face the whole time I was reading it.  It was kind of perfect. (Spoiler: it took a few more tries for Hattie to part with her virginity -- and when she did light bondage was involved.)

As in so many Regency romances, Hattie is an anachronism -- an upper class career woman who is very good at her job and wants to run her own shipping conglomerate.  And Beast -- well, he's so secure in his alpha maleness that he's incredibly supportive of that goal.  Not to mention totally hot.  And very, very in to making sure that sex is not just consensual but absolutely welcome.  I think I love him.  I know that I love Sarah MacLean.  I can't wait to read more of her books. 

 

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.

 

So a detective and a minister walk into a bar: Review of PBS show Grantchester

 

I don't generally enjoy mysteries in any form, whether book, television, or movie, and my taste is a bit too lowbrow for most PBS shows.  So I can't comment  about where Grantchester, a PBS mystery series available on Amazon Prime, falls in the pantheon.  I can say that it is weird, in a way I suspect but don't know that most PBS mystery shows are, and engaging enough that I watched the whole series and actually paid for the most recent season.

 SPOILERS AHEAD

 

 

The first few seasons follow the adventures of Sidney, an Anglican minister is a small town outside of Cambridge, England, and Geordie, a police detective stationed nearby, in the 1950s.  Sidney is an alcoholic suffering from PTSD as a result of the one battle he fought during World War II.  He pines for a woman, Amanda, who pines for him, but, alas, they are star-crossed lovers.  Amanda is married, and then divorced, and -- despite the entire Church of England having been founded because King Henry VIII wanted to get divorced and remarried -- Anglican ministers are forbidden from marrying divorcees.  So Sidney mopes a lot and drinks a lot.  At one point he tries to quit his job (which he seems to spend very little time at), but his housekeeper, Sylvia, and his curate (assistant minister), Leonard, convince him that his tiny little church cannot possibly survive without him.

Geordie, the detective, is an asshole.  He also suffers from PTSD from the war, and also drinks a lot.  He's married with four kids, and is a terrible husband and father.  When his infant son has a potentially fatal fever, he stays away from the house because dealing with the possibility of his son's death is just too hard for him.  Aw, poor man.  So he leaves his wife alone with their dying son.  

Sidney and Geordie team up to drink and to solve murders -- because, like in all TV shows about cops, in this world police solve murders by actual detective work instead of waiting for a witness or informant to tell them whodunit.  And what a lot of murders there are.  It's like Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Sunnydale around here.  If Sidney and Geordie were not already suffering from PTSD, they surely would be after they realize that every time they go to a nightclub, party, river, or lecture, someone ends up dead.  At some point you would think that someone would realize that they are the common denominator in all these deaths. 

Sidney gets written off the show after the fourth season, in a way that is an insult to his entire character  arc.  Luckily it turns out that his little church can survive just fine without him.  Along comes Will to replace him, another whiny minister who is somehow allowed to ride along on all of Geordie's investigations. Will is different from Sidney because he rides a motorbike and has a family of origin. Also, he likes rock and roll instead of jazz.  And he's hotter.  The bodies continue to pile up.  Leonard, the curate, and Sylvia, the housekeeper and best thing about the show, get some more character development.   

The show is overall very, very silly but also kind of delightful.  And now that I've watched an entire PBS series (thus far), I can stick my nose a little higher in the air.  

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.

Meditation on Mommy blogs, and thoughts on The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

 

 

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson is a memoir that takes itself seriously by a writer who takes herself seriously.  Nelson writes extensively about philosophers and lectures she has attended and given.  This is not the type of book a blog devoted to smut about naked sex slaves (which I write) and Regency romances (which I read) would typically address.

But it's my blog and I get to do what I want.

To the extent that The Argonauts is about anything concrete in terms of plot, it's about Nelson's relationship with her husband, Harry, a transgender man (or, more accurately, a nonbinary person who was born a biological woman and transitioned to a biological male) who started taking testosterone around the same time that Nelson started to take hormones to assist with getting pregnant.  The love story between Nelson and Harry, although not very detailed, is very sweet.  It begins with a Seinfeld-like scene where, for an uncomfortably long time after they start dating, Nelson is not sure what pronouns to use to refer to Harry.  (He/him, she eventually learns.)  In due course they get married, Nelson becomes a stepmother to Harry's son, and Nelson and Harry have a child together.  The book mentions all this, but devotes much more time to Deep Thoughts (which I do not mean snidely).

Nevertheless, many times as I was reading the book I rolled my eyes and thought, "This is a Mommy blog."  Nelson writes about how pregnancy changed her body, about how giving birth was really, really hard, about how special it is to be a mother of a newborn.  All in beautiful prose, but still . . .

Which leads to the question, why do I sneer at mommy blogs?  I myself am a mommy -- well, now that my kids are older a mom (picture this being said with an eye roll by my teen).  I am the category of mommy who was pregnant and who gave birth and thought it was really special to be with my newborn.  

And yet, I have no desire to read about anyone else's experiences with this.  Maybe because it is all so common.  I can compare and contrast Nelson's pregnancy and childbirth experience to my own, but I don't find doing so particularly interesting.  Even though Nelson writes very nice prose, she doesn't have anything new to say about these things.

Does it matter?  I love reading memoirs, but isn't it also true that one person's early years as the child of an alcoholic are pretty much like another person's?  Certainly Regency romances have only a handful of interchangeable plots and stock characters, and I read them all the time.  

I think, in the end, it's part of the human condition that the bond between a mother and her infant is intensely personal and intensely interesting to the mother who is by necessity all-consumed by the bond -- but it is also so universal that reading about the experience is like looking at Facebook pictures of a blizzard.  It snowed!  Yeah, I know, I can look out my window and see that.  

Is this opinion sexist?  Probably, yes.  But the good news is, you don't have to read my naked sex slave smut if you're not interested, and I don't have to read about your childbirth experience if I'm not interested.  To each her own.  

 

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.

 

 

Review of terrible Netflix princess movie The Royal Treatment

 

I love a Hallmark Christmas movie and the spinoff Netflix romances as much as anyone.  And I fully understand that part of their charm is that they are terrible.  

But sometimes one of these movies comes along that is terrible because it is charmless.  Take, for example, Netflix movie The Royal Treatment.   It stars Laura Marano, best known for her role in the perfectly okay  Disney show Austin & Ally, and Mena Massoud, who I have never heard of but also has a Disney background and is very cute. 

The biggest problem with the movie is not the standard plot -- commoner with a heart of gold falls in love with doltish but very hot prince, and the prince's butler/tutor/mentor turns out to be awesome -- but Marano's very, very distracting accent.  Her character, Izzy, is Italian-American and lives somewhere in New York City.  The Bronx, maybe?  I guess her accent is supposed to reflect that, but it's a weird mishmash of fake Boston accent, fake New York accent, and fake do-gooder princess accent.  There was not a single time that Marano spoke that I I was not pulled out of the movie by the way she was saying her words.  

Other than Marano's accent, the movie was just standardly offensive.  Happy dancing poor people!  Schools for low-income kids saved by hand-me-downs from rich people!  A hair salon that constantly catches on fire due to dangerous wiring but the health department doesn't care and the landlord doesn't have to do anything about it!  A person with no qualifications or experience offered a job leading a human services agency, because she is nice!  A European chef who is too incompetent to know how to cook spaghetti!  

I understand that the point of movies like this is not to be good.  But they could be.  What if Izzy, a business-owner responsible for the livelihood of several employees, actually understood the first thing about running a business?  What if one or two the people in the slum in the prince's kingdom of Lavania had an actual character trait?  I'm not talking about hard edges and -- heaven forfend -- lefty politics.  I'm just talking about a plot that is . . . a little more plot-like. 

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.

Review of K-Drama Because This Is My First Life

 

After I watched Squid Game with the rest of the world, Netflix added K-Dramas (South Korean dramas) to my feed.  I was not familiar with the genre and gave Because This Is My First Life a try. The show was a very sweet romcom with insanely good looking actors and  . . . very . . . slow . . . pacing.

The main characters are heroine Yoon Ji-ho, an unemployed TV writer having a crisis of identity, and hero Nam Se-hee, a computer programmer who seems to be mildly autistic but may just be a bit Vulcan-like in his refusal to deal with emotions.  In a meet-cute, Yoon Ji-ho (I'm using complete names in this review because I'm not sure of the appropriate way to refer to them) moves into the spare room in Nam Se-hee's condo without either of them realizing that they are opposite genders.  Yoon Ji-ho would be homeless without the room.  Nam Se-hee desperately wants a good roommate who will help him take care of his cat and make his mortgage payments.  Bowing to family pressures, they enter into a marriage of convenience.  

Naturally. misunderstandings and love follow, but there is more to the story.  Yoon Ji-ho thinks through what she really wants from  a partner and from  life, and decides that she is not willing to settle for less.  Nam Se-hee works through an old trauma involving his parents and a prior love.  Their character development is sweet and well-done. 

There are two other couples the show also follows, all friends of the two main characters.  The standout is Woo Su-ji, a friend of Yoon Ji-ho who absolutely dominates the screen every time she appears on it.  She has a crappy corporate job where she puts up with daily sexual harassment in the hope of professional advancement.  Her love interest, Ma Sang-goo, who is Nam Se-hee's friend and boss, is incredibly supportive and helps her come to believe that she both deserves and can have a better career and a better life.  

As much as I liked the characters, actors, and intertwining plots of Because This Is My First Life, I would have liked the show a lot better if each episode was half the time.  It seemed like each shot was done twice, each piece of dialogue repeated.  I grew so bored with the pacing that it was a struggle to finish watching. 

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.

Review of Regency romance How to Survive a Scandal by Samara Parish, a promising first novel

 

The trend in Regency romance novels is for the heroines to be outsiders to the ton, the clique of titled, usually very rich families who spend their time going to balls and trying to marry off their debutante daughters to equally rich, titled men. Some of those outsider heroines are untitled women with actual jobs (or at least are apparently untitled); others have the requisite pedigree but are socially awkward or are more interested in creating dictionaries or editing feminist magazines than getting married.

How to Survive a Scandal by Samara Parish refreshingly goes in an entirely different direction.  Its heroine Amelia is at the top of the ton's heap, a diamond of the first cut (as they say).  At the beginning of the book, she is one of the mean girls that wallflowers in other books hide from.  She can overpower anyone with a raised eyebrow.  She can destroy an aspiring debutante with a cutting remark.  When she tries a new dress style, everyone copies her.  Most importantly, she has every expectation of marrying a duke she does not know well, and she is absolutely fine with that.

When, due to circumstances that are never really explained, she is rescued from freezing to death by  apparently untitled factory owner Benedict Asterly and found in an accidentally compromising position with him, she is forced to marry him, move to his country house, and adapt to his non-titled ways.  

I was rooting for Amelia to absolutely lean in.  It really seemed that she was going to take the talents she had developed her entire life -- the ability to run a huge household, to bend people to her will, and, in short, to be an absolute boss -- and apply them to her new life.  And she does, kind of.  She updates Ben's house, opening closed rooms and hiring and training better servants.  She brings her organizational abilities to Ben's factory and vastly improves it.  

But the book never quite lets Amelia be as amazing as she could be. The second half of the book focuses on Ben, the much less interesting character, and his whining about, oops, he's titled and super rich after all.  

The book also has very murky politics.  The French Revolution and the reign of terror serve as a backdrop to the action.  The English nobility is sorta kinda evil because there's one old titled guy who sexually harasses maids and is going to take away farmland from tenants.  Ben is -- sorta kinda -- presented as the better alternative, with his factories that will provide jobs to people.  Yet there are random scenes that show his employees almost dying because the factory's working conditions are so dangerous.  And what is the profit that Ben will make compared to how much he will pay his workers?  

How to Survive a Scandal also has less complicated plot points that are never resolved.  What's really going on with the sexual harasser lord next door?  Is he behind the sabotage on Ben's factory or is his role just coincidence?  Why is Amelia's former fiancee such a jerk to her?  (It's obvious that the sequel will be about him and his love interest, but does that excuse him from never having a frank conversation with Amelia?)

This book is Samara Parish's first novel.  She has definite promise.  Just like I hope for Amelia, I hope that Parish leans into her strengths.  

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.