4 STARS ”I love you,” he said. “Just believe it.”This was my first book by Loretta Chase, and it won’t be my last. I loved the story. It seemed a bit long, but my interest actually increased as time went by. It was a little slow at times and a bit confusing. But it all played out brilliantly in the end. The story was set initially in Albania and along the Ionian coast of the Mediterranean, and Corfu, and then advanced to England for the conclusion of the book. The hero, Varian St. George, also known as Lord Edenmont or even more formally as Varian Edward Harcourt St. George, Baron Edenmont of Buckinghamshire, England, was a hopeless libertine. A rake. He gambled away his fortune and was making his way across Italy, surviving solely on his devastating good looks and unfailing charm. Varian is very ornamental. He is darkly beautiful in that brooding way so fatal to feminine sensibilities… and sense. So while in Venice, he seizes an opportunity to advance his cash flow by taking on a glorified “babysitting” job, escorting Sir Gerald Brentmor’s twelve year-old son back to England.But the job turned out to be just a bit more than he could handle. Percival Brentmor, said twelve year-old boy, was quite the industrious young man. And after eavesdropping on a conversation of his father’s, Percival was convinced that his father was involved in a nefarious arms smuggling ring, that was going to endanger his much loved Uncle Jason, who was well known as the Red Lion in the neighboring country of Albania. Sound complicated, well it was. A bit. Percival… who I absolutely ADORED, managed to convince Lord Edenmont to sail to Armenia first before heading back to England, in order to retrieve a crucial piece of evidence against his father. Which, no doubt, offered a hefty reward purse. But of course the plans they had made were completely derailed the moment their ship reached port. Instead they were greeted by a band of rebels in hot pursuit of none other than Uncle Jason’s daughter …his cousin, Esme, as she was attempting to flee the country. Esme Brentmor who of course was our heroine, was the main reason I didn’t give this book a 5th star. Esme was a hot-headed, self-righteous, red-headed spitfire, who had no trouble passing herself off as a boy, and running her mouth like one too. Being Jason’s only child, and having lost her mother at an early age, she was raised in many ways like a boy and had trouble fitting into society’s ideals of feminine behavior for the age. “Men don’t know what’s pretty and what isn’t. Make a man happy to look at you, and he believes you’re Aphrodite.”There were times I liked her, there were times I was supremely annoyed by her, and times where I just thought she was a spoiled bitch. She had a wicked tendency to work things out in her head, and she always seemed to get it wrong. Always screwed things up for herself. Her pride was her tragic flaw. But in the end, I embraced her aggressive nature, and let Varian have her. “Very well, I yield.” He opened his arms. “Come. You may cover my adorable face with kisses.” Varian, however, I loved. He was a bit of a dandy, fastidious about his appearance, and loathsome of anything resembling hard work or danger, but he owned it, and his self-deprecating nature made him even that much for charming for it. Esme thought so too. He was utterly irresistible. And his patience with Esme’s bizarre behavior put him even higher on that pedestal! Drawing her back onto the pillows with him, he threaded his fingers through her hair. “Most important, on this journey we discovered each other,” he went on. “I want to go on discovering, Esme - children, family, home - all of life, all of love - with you.” Anyway, loved the book. A bit long, but worth it in the end. Looking forward to the next book in the series. ”Because you accept me as I am, don’t you? You haven’t tried to reform me, only to hold onto me. I don’t want to reform or tame you, either, only to keep you safe with me, always.”
The fairy-tale trope of girls only ever having fathers, the mothers dead and gone, has a slightly more benign reason in Chase's novels since only the fathers could be so reckless and indirectly force the heroines into their adventures.This I mainly said first to not shout out my disappointment. I didn't like her last one either, but then Scandalous Ways was actually very much like this novel, as was Captives of the Night where this is mentioned but slanted IMO. I shouldn't have expected a treat, since the young woman who loved this best of all also hates Mr. Impossible and is a fan of Carlyle. This novel reeks more of those conventions, even of Beverly, with the unpalatable heroine that right till the end moans about how awfully ugly she is while everyone is struck dumb by her surpreme beauty at sight. I really hate Esme and never once found anything endearing or appealing about her, and when Chase's strengths were that the couples are endearing and strong together, made for each other clearly even when misunderstanding each other and most importantly: saying the unexpected, reacting in unexpected ways - then this surely is her worst novel.Not once - until the very last page! when Varian jokes about why they can't have children and I at least love him for a second (oh, and earlier when he says making love is the only thing he's any use at, that's as in CotN + YSW and I wished more of it) - is there anything anti-cliche or unconventional, yet it is said that Esme is so. There are perhaps too many things going on for the length of a romance, but none of them get enough space and worst of all - she claims at the end that their journey had shown how the couple had grown together when there was never the least growing or change, no development at all. This hurts me to the core because I valued Lord Scoundrel so much that I now daren't reread it for fear I'll see it differently now.Another Beverly/Carlyle horror in this novel is that Ismal, who reappears twice more later on, is indeed much more interesting, while later some of his talents disappear and are not talked about when he's the hero. Varian is only said to be a whore and wastrel, not ONCE does he show himself to be, so Esme going on about him being that is even worse than people who knew him saying it, and his redemption is unnecessary - all the more so since in the end they have money flowing in from half a dozen sources instead of both being paupers - TOO MUCH! No impact.The sex is also described in metaphors, similes and language too lacking in specifics. NONE of Chase's wonderful exploring of the male body by the female.The boy Percival is the most interesting (although his story is then reused in Lord Perfect) and Varian's brothers are so as well. I'd like to reread these one day in order, but I'm not sure I can - Chase used a similar plot in her earlier, less explicit yet better romances, Joyce did it more convincingly as a journey of discovery, and this Albanianess seems like nothing but a romanticised expatriate - crap. I'm too disappointed to do this coherently, ain't I? I still hope Chase has ups and downs rather than a) a downward spiral or b) me not being able to read her as original and good anymore.Esme sucks. I wish I dared to write to authors honestly, and that it would have an effect.
What do You think about The Lion's Daughter (2006)?
I liked this book way more than I thought I would. In fact, I loved every page of it. I'm a huge fan of Loretta Chase's Scoundrels series, of which I thought there were only 3 books. I was shocked to find that not only was there another book, it was actually the first in the series and somehow I'd overlooked it altogether. I wasn't sure it would hold my interest but I downloaded it anyway due to my obsessive compulsive need to read EVERY book in a series and own all the books. Needless to say, even though Lord of Scoundrels continues to be my favorite of this series, The Lion's daughter is a VERY close second. This book was amazing.I particularly loved the hero, Varian. His dry wit had me laughing on almost every page and his handling of the spitfire heroine was at times hysterical, at other times tender, and often a bit brutish ... but that's only because she forces him to act this way. I liked that the heroine was the one with the strong will and personality and the hero in the beginning is something of a wastrel and an all around punk-ass bitch. I was prepared to dislike him, but he made it damned hard and by the end I was half in love with him myself. He really rose to the occasion when faced with having to fight for something, and his transformation from the beginning to the end was truly worth 'watching'.The plot itself is complicated, or at least seems so at first, but if you hang in there, the pieces of the puzzle come together and everything becomes clear. I enjoyed the setting of Albania, making this book unlike any other Regency romance I've read. It gave the book an exotic flavor ... though to have the heroine be full-blooded ALbanian instead of half Albanian, half English would have made this far more interesting, I see why she had to be for certain elements of the plot to work. From time to time the hero and heroine drove me nuts with all the 'miscommunication' that went on between them. So much introspection and speculation of what the other might think or feel and of course they were almost always wrong. Even with those minor annoyances this was a five star read for me, probably because their chemistry was so amazing that it made up for their shortcomings.Yet another amazing book by one of my favorite authors!
—Elise Marion
"3.5 stars" I didn't realize until after reading Loretta Chase's Lord of Scoundrels that it was part of a series, and when I discovered this, I decided to go back and pick up the books that I had missed. Since Lord of Scoundrels is one of my all-time favorite romance novels, I had high hopes for The Lion's Daughter. Unfortunately, it got off to a really slow start for me. Nearly the entire first half of the book is about the hero and heroine's extremely long (or at least it seemed that way) journey through Albania. This part of the story is also heavily laden with historical facts and details about the country and the political climate at that time which in my opinion, only served to bog down the pace even further. I was just about to set the book aside and read something else when the journey came to an end, and that is the point where I felt the real story began. Up until then, I had a hard time becoming invested in Varian and Esme's relationship or believing that they were truly falling in love, but after that, both characters started showing more vulnerability which improved them quite a bit. Esme was a little difficult for me to like throughout the entire story though. Early on, she was just so stubborn and indifferent that she seemed almost emotionless. She had a major inferiority complex when it came to her looks and made several hot-headed decisions based in part on believing things about herself that simply weren't true. Even though Varian was a libertine who had frittered away his family fortune, I still found him to be more charming and likeable in the early part of the story than Esme was. When his vulnerabilities started to show it only increased his likability, but overall I still found him to be just an average hero, not really a stand-out. The political intrigue in the book could have been really interesting, but I thought that it was overdone to the point of being incredibly complex and confusing. Even though the story got off to a very slow start and could have been much better overall, the last half had enough excitement to hold my interest and make it worth my while. If I had read The Lion's Daughter first, I don't know if I would have continued the series, but already knowing that at least one other book in the series was phenomenally good, makes me interested continuing it.
—Julianna
This is such a crowded, mixed up book.Okay to start with there are at least three different instances where the heroine eavesdrops on a conversation, overhears someone saying something (that is some sort of falsehood or manipulation), believes it, then runs away feeling betrayed. No, seriously, exactly this sequence of events happens over and over and over.Then there's this super weird and contrived early subplot where the hero thinks that the heroine is much younger than she is so he's in gales of self-loathing for being attracted to her. But nothing significant ever comes of it! After a bit he finds out her real age and it's never brought up again?? Nor did it appear to have any real effect on the progression of their courtship. There was a whole thread about how much the heroine hated being treated like a child, so I guess Chase was attempting to tie that in, but really that thread worked fine without the useless age confusion and seemed mostly unaffected by it anyway.And THEN there are also multiple confusing plotlines about smuggling and many years old betrayals and revolutions whose not being immediately resolved hinge on the protagonists (particularly a 12 year old boy) bizarrely keeping unnecessary secrets.The most frustrating thing about what a clusterfuck this all is plot-wise is that the very basic plot (Albanian-raised half-English girl and dissolute bankrupt rake have a tempestuous relationship and he attempts to restore his finances/etc and be responsible because he feels like he doesn't deserve her whilst she is overwhelmed by insecurities due to how "wild" and not "properly feminine" she is) is fine! And most of the actual relationship between the hero and heroine is engaging, funny, and emotional.There's just a whole bunch of other utterly unnecessary crap (sometimes amusing, often less so) crowding the book that you have to dig through. Also, though it features a few different queer characters, it has some really side-eye worthy stuff happening there narratively.
—R.
