giornata, 3/13/25

burton to this taylor, bradley to this suki

Giornata is my weekly media diary, a paid feature, coming out on Thursdays, covering whatever I read, watched, or listened to in the last week!

The Romantic by Madeline Hunter: I’ve adored Madeline Hunter books before, but really only her medieval romances, though where I generally land on her Regencies is “well I am still reading.” The gap is astute and present, but I’m still not exactly sure what it is about her Regencies that just have a ceiling for me.

The Romantic is the fifth in the “Seducers” series and follows Julian Hampton and Penelope, Countess of Glasbury. Julian’s been in love with Pen for years, but she married an Earl at a young age to help her family financially. The earl was abusive and Julian had previously negotiated terms as her family lawyer of a separation that protected Pen, but now her husband wants to exert his marital rights in order to secure an heir.

A few positives: technically, this is a book that involves a woman cheating on her husband, which does happen less often in the genre than the first, though if it does happen, it usually these sympathetic circumstances, where the first husband is exceedingly vile. And Hunter is interested in connecting Regency wealth to the immoral ways it was extracted, particularly slave labor. I think she does this more successfully in The Saint (an earlier book in the series), but I appreciate that she never shies away from sympathetic characters holding period accurate biases, while managing to having something in the narrative condemn or challenge those beliefs. Especially since so many books are marketed now as if earlier romances never did this.

But as a romance? Nothing happens in this book and that is with a murder 2/3 of the way through it. It is from 2004 and it reads like it is from 2024 (derogatory). Julian is impossibly perfect, sacrificing his time and reputation for a woman he’s been pining over for a decade and a half, with no qualms or hesitations. Pen is so afraid of her husband, she easily falls into affection with Julian, all while consistently thinking: “It’s so funny he is showing me this devotion when we’ve only been good friends for so long!…despite the longing glances we experienced when we were teens.” “Of course he wants to sleep with me, all men want to sleep with most women (and also give up their successful law practice in order to court scandal to protect most women.”

This is my dog watching me watch Bram Stoker’s Dracula