Okay, I finally got A Civil Contract by Georgette Heyer and braced myself to read it, as reviews were all positive, but from them, I learned I should not expect a great romance and it would be bittersweet, so I needed to be in the mood for that.

That was not true. I love everyone who told me it was awesome, but that was totally a romance.

Below: my defense of A Civil Contract as not just romance but Romance, and an awesome goddamn Romance. With farming!

(I have feelings, okay? Paragraphs of them. PARAGRAPHS. With citations! Because...Wednesday?)

( spoilers, so many )

I am willing to take contrary arguments, but they're wrong, telling you right now. Romance, people. All the romance. With farming!

(Also, note: this entire plot was used by another author in To Catch an Earl by Rosina Pyatt, and when I say plot, I mean Harlequin version. If you've read it, compare and contrast to A Civil Contract; it's kind of hilarious, though yeah, it goes Harlequin very quickly, it still sticks to the outline (the differences are very, very Harlequin-additions). Like a lot.)

Much, much recommended:

The Unknown Ajax by Georgette Heyer - I love her work in general, but this one is fantastic. Hugo may be my favorite hero since Freddy in Cotillion, being sensible, practical, brilliant, and with an impossible sense of humor. And in a lovely turn of events, the heroine is just as sensible, extremely smart, and adorable.

Also, there are smugglers. And shootings. I am all about smugglers and shootings.

Kindle E-Books From .99

And books!

Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase - 99 cents

Captives of the Night by Loretta Chase - $2.99

Okay, for context on this, these are part of a loose shared Regency universe.

1.) The Lion's Daughter
2.) Lord of Scoundrels
3.) Captives of the Night
4.) The Mad Earl's Bride (short story in Three Weddings and a Kiss, totally worth buying the book just for it
5.) The Last Hellion

The The Lion's Daughter is not even in print anymore and that makes me want to cry because the bad guy from that one is fated to be completed in Captives of the Night with him being atoney and heroic and I kid you not, solving mysteries for repentance and er, the hero who falls in love with an artist. Angsty, tragic backstory, sketchy background, overthrows pashas in his spare time, kidnapping....but now he works for teh British government and it's kind of hilarious.

I love all these books (except the first one, dammit, not having read it), but Captives is by tone and subject matter and character and plot completely different from most of Loretta's work and if you read Scoundrels and Captives back to back, it will be a hard 180. It's extremely complex both emotionally and plotwise and don't get me wrong, it's romantic as hell, but it's not Romance really; what it is about is two very scarred people who worked very hard to make themselves decent lives in horrific circumstances; Loretta's heroines are always fairly independent, but Leila is my favorite for how hard she worked to create herself and make the best of her life despite a ruined childhood and a hideous marriage to a monster before his death made everything fall apart; Ismal's a hero who literally was a monster once upon a time and then decided to change. Neither of them need saving in any practical way; what they want is to be free.

The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer

And okay, my squee of the day...

Siren Song, Winter Song, Fire Song, and The Silver Mirror all by Roberta Gellis, all on Kindle, 1.49 each.

Also available is the entire Roselynde series, but it's not on sale yet and I'm still squeeing over these.

Okay, to explain; all of these are set during Henry III, and especially the second could be said to be, borrowing from hradzka with artistic license, it's woman inheriting keeps and organizing the shit out of them from the ground up. All three are very much focused on women being extremely competent, self-sufficient, and possessing a staggering number of skills in a time where in the lower nobility and knights your home is literally a castle also had to be the equivalent of an isolated town that had to provide pretty much everything you needed or you did without

One of my favorite things about Roberta's medieval books is how much time she spends showing women working; all her noble medieval heroines run one to several large castles, sit in justice, do budgeting and accounting, see to their textiles and sewing, riding out to visit serfs, oversee meals, food storage, are decent physicians, and basically outline (not all at once obviously) the daily life of a woman of the middle and lower noble classes where you had servants and serfs but not on the level of great wealth, vassals, and less direct responsibility for the household and more time to sit around reading poetry and being boring. Without really hard anachronistic behavior, she has some of the most interesting and hardworking women I've ever read who were raised and trained very thoroughly to be self-sufficient so as to get along fine while the men go off to war for years.

Honestly, these I'd recommend just for how well Roberta describes medieval women's lives and duties, especially when the story sets them in contrast with the lives of women in the upper nobility and royalty.

Not on sale, but also recommended is Great Maria by Cecilia Holland, which covers Maria's life from being the only daughter of a Norman knight in Italy who makes a living robbing people who are on pilgrimage to right before she and her husband's coronation. Also pretty much entirely a world of women with a fantastic view of Maria both running a variety of households as they slowly conqueror a large amount of Italy.

For me, I read them at a time I was very young and most of the books that focused on women also made them warriors or sorcerers or working against traditional gender roles as I saw them, or they were royalty/higher nobility; it was very cool to also have women who weren't secretly trained to be expert swordsmen or sent off to be mages or chosen to save a kingdom or being bartered in marriage in tight political situations on the cusp of battle being focused on and their work just as highly valued in the story and their roles to be shown as necessary. Not to mention realizing how much they actually did to assure everyone ate regularly, had decent clothes, were paid properly, oversee disputes, and have fascinating, full, interesting lives even if they didn't ride to war. Female competence in any role is awesome.

Okay, so Georgette Heyer has officially become a hit or miss for me in reading--so far, I've hit three of her books that bored me to tears. Which is so depressing.

Still favorites: The Grand Sophy, Cotillion

Lots of fun: Faro's Daughter, Frederica, The Reluctant Widow

Okay but forgettable: The Nonesuch, The Corinthian

WTF: The Convenient Marriage, A Lady of Quality

Current in WTF: A Lady of Quality - holy God was that boring. I mean, it actually caused me physical pain to continue reading, mostly because I wanted to see if the two secondary characters would get married. Which they did not, but I hope they will; they were the only interesting people. Compared to how well she did Frederica, and Sophy was utterly, utterly brilliant a character, not to mention Cotillion's utter amazingness in breaking a lot of tropes regarding the hero in Regency Romance (Freddy: most awesomely practical, down to earth hero in history, and so well dressed while he did it!).

This is frustrating. Argh. I'm trying to nail down the difference besides characters, but I have a feeling it has a lot to do with the plot she shapes around each character. I can't tell which one she starts with in storytelling, but I have to admit, Lady of Quality doesn't irritate me as much as The Convenient Marriage (shudders) but at least that one was interesting.

I'm going to need to find a supplemental author for light reading--aka, anything I can read in under five hours. *sighs* Dammit.

Note: Georgette Heyer's romance novels contain sexism, classism, some racism, and occasional bouts of anti-Semitism in stereotyped fringe characters (I can remember only once, but it was freaking memorable), so readers be aware. It's historically accurate, but for me it was still really jarring and really unpleasant, even if it wasn't more than a couple of pages devoted to the plotline, it stuck with me.