I'm giving this one such a low rating partially because of the great depth of my disappointment in the novel. Kinsale is usually an author I really enjoy, but this book had some Issues. It started off promising. Leigh is a woman who dresses like a man and goes off to France to find the mythical Prince of Midnight, a highwayman who once terrified the English countryside. She finds him and is disappointed: he's a recluse living in a crumbling castle, and he's half-deaf and suffers from fits of vertigo besides. Classic Kinsale: a feisty heroine who balks at social convention and a hero with some kind of physical deformity. Except that so many pages go by in which nothing really happens. Leigh and S.T., the titular Prince of Midnight, embark on a quest to kill the Evil Cult Leader who killed Leigh's family. I was hoping for a swashbuckling bildungsroman—Leigh goes to S.T. to learn how to fight, after all—and I liked the tension created in the beginning when S.T. falls helplessly in love with Leigh almost immediately (albeit partly because he's really lonely and she's female) and Leigh is disgusted and thinks S.T is a big fraud. But then there's no swashbuckling. We get almost 400 pages into the novel before there's even the swordfight I'd been hoping for. There's so much potential for dramatic tension as the novel progresses, but it's wasted as Leigh and S.T. mostly just sit around angsting about each other. Most of the novel's conflict rests on a Big Misunderstanding, a romance novel trope I really hate. It's one of the things I find especially frustrating about historical romance, because mostly Big Misunderstandings arise from social convention stopping women from actually saying what they mean. There's no excuse for that in this novel: Leigh wears men's clothes most of the novel and seems to have no problem telling S.T. how much of an ass she thinks he is. But, alas, as Leigh starts falling for S.T., she decides their caper is foolish because she's certain some harm will come to him. He is, after all, wanted for robbery in England, and she quickly becomes convinced that him risking his neck for the sake of a family she's never getting back just isn't worth it, because then she'll lose him, too. She doesn't bother to tell S.T. what her fears are, however. She just tells him not to do it and then picks a fight with him. Since she spends so much time telling him how much she hates him, he assumes she still thinks him an incompetent fraud, which makes him take even bigger risks so that he can prove his worth. And the thing is, this misunderstanding never gets resolved. I was hoping for a epiphany moment when Leigh would just tell S.T. how she felt, but she's never completely honest with him, which made their HEA seem undeserved. Leigh is an infuriating character because she bases her opinions of S.T. on what she thinks he's feeling, and not what he tells her he feels. He makes proclamations of love early and often, she insists he has no idea what love means, so even at the end, when she can finally say out loud to him that she loves him, and he's all, "Hello, I've been in love with you since the second page of this book," she's still like, "You don't love me, stop saying you do." Argh! Also, the early sex scenes are squicky. Leigh gives herself to S.T. willingly, but only because she thinks she owes him and only has her body to pay him with. S.T. doesn't feel right about taking advantage of that, but then does it anyway. The very first sex scene, early in the book, was rape, IMHO, and that made me feel weird whenever these characters had sex again in the novel. It's all so bad that I can forgive the clumsy deus ex machina ending, but the Mega Happy Epilogue was so completely out of left field. These are two characters who spent 500 pages fighting and calling each other unforgivable names, who had squicky, rape-y sex, and then everything is peaches and sunshine at the end? And I actually liked the Leigh who showed up for the epilogue. Where was she for the rest of the novel?One last annoyance: my copy of the book (the Sourcebooks reprint) is loaded with a distractingly large number of typos. Most of them are punctuation errors, but there are some misspellings, and one character's name is Chastity in some chapters and and Charity in others. That just piled onto my annoyance with the novel. Which, for some reason, I finished. *sigh*
Read it years ago but couldn't remember it well. Just now listened to audio, narrated by Nicholas Boulton. Solid 5 stars for his near-perfect impersonations, but only 3 stars for the story itself, mainly because I didn't like the heroine.Laura Kinsale is a superb romance writer, but this story arc was frustrating. Frustrating! The downers went on far too long. Leigh was frequently unlikable. She was cruel for about 80% of the book -- it ruined the romance arc. I wanted to slap her. She was also TSTL, pulling a really dumb stunt that almost got everyone killed.Then there is our hero, a Robin Hood-style highwayman who goes by various names, including ST Maitland and The Prince of Midnight. He is a fascinating character, coping admirably with hearing loss, fugitive status, and vertigo. When in top form, he's sexy, good humored, dashing, a swashbuckling swordsman, and a brilliant horse trainer.However, I felt he let Leigh get away with too much bitchery. Why did he love her?? But he did, and almost from the start, when she hunted him down at his crumbling castle in France, asking him to teach her swordplay, to avenge her dead family, killed by a cult leader. He agrees, saves her life a few times, feeds and clothes her...and she treats him like crap. I wanted him to abandon her. Ugh. Her cruelty during his bath and in the horse-training corral stick in my mind, to name a few ugly scenes.Enjoyed the animals: Nemo the wolf and Mistrial the amazing gray horse. Loved the role Mistrial played, when confronting Reverend Jamie Chilton, the cult leader. Lol. Chuckled a few times in those scenes.Felt the cult plot was extreme, only because it occurred within a community where educated and resistant people lived, including an Earl and his Countess, a Squire, etc. To my admittedly thin knowledge, cults are typically formed outside an established community. Cult members leave their community behind. (By the way, the religious control reminded me slightly of Maddie's dilemma as a Quaker in Flowers from the Storm.)Loved the epilogue, even though the HEA came about by an act of god. Sweet and sexy, and thankfully fairly long, riding on a horse. ;) My favorite books by this author are Flowers from the Storm and Midsummer Moon. I think I really liked The Shadow and the Star, but it's been a while...
What do You think about The Prince Of Midnight (1990)?
I didn't make it further than page 35, but I'm pissed enough about another K&K bud read going down the drain to give it 1 star for now. Might come back to because if there's something I hate it's having paid $$$ for books I end up abandoning. Also, now is probably a good time to attack my massive Toblerone bar. Earlier ramblings:“Okay, so I am not actually "recommending" this one to you, I only wanted to bring it to your attention. Ahem. 1. It has Fabio on the cover (we have never read one with fabio on the cover) 2. People don't like it because the heroine is such a bitch... which sounds like great potential. 3. Pet wolf 4. Crumbling castle”Sounds like a winner to me. >:D
—Loederkoningin
When Lady Leigh Strachan journeys to France disguised as a boy in search of the famous highwayman the Prince of Midnight (really the reclusive S.T. Maitland), she gets more than she bargained for when she convinces him to help her get vengeance for the death of her family. Alas, this one didn't really work for me. I was never quite convinced by the relationship between the hero and heroine, the cult plot was just too bizarre, and the ending was much too drawn out, with a series of misunderstandings and an inability to communicate which got frustrating really quickly. I do wonder if the cult was really less believable than the plot of other Kinsales, or whether I'm simply more willing to accept cracktastic plots if I love the main characters. It's almost certainly the latter, given how much I like Seize the Fire and The Shadow and the Star, which have plots just as improbable if not more so than The Prince of Midnight. I'll probably read it again, but it's certainly not a top-rank Kinsale for me.
—Margaret
I LOVE Laura Kinsale for her depth of emotion and effortless imagery but this book really fell short for me. The best part, by far was the ending , the "liasion a cheval" (quite an erotic fantasy for an equestrienne!!) but the main characters were so irritably inconsistent - running hot and cold throughout.I never liked Leigh at all until the epilogue! And even ST flip-flopped so much that it was hard to know who he really was, other than a masochist for following her.I also didn't care for the religious cult plot. When I began reading, I thought I would adore this book, but it was actually a bit of a struggle to finish it.
—Emery Lee
