The Wife is a die hard Science Fiction fan, well, more of a Sci Fi fan than an SF fan. I have found that most people are like The Wife, in that they find one genre they love and they stick to it. The Wife makes the occasional foray into Vampire novels, but she wouldn’t read something like, say, a spy/romance novel set in the Napoleonic Wars.
I however, would.
The Seduction of the Crimson Rose is the 4th book in the Pink Carnation Series. More tales of daring does and battles for justice. The reviews on Amazon don’t seem too impressed with The Crimson Rose, the problem being a common one-the author has set the bar high in her past books and anything less than a gold medal performance is seen as a disappointment. To me the Pink Carnation books are fun and often silly, even if there is the occasional near death experience and it is a bother that Women’s Lib is still some time off in the future.
One of the standard devices of historical fiction is to have a present day researcher find a long lost notebook, suitcase, steamer trunk-or what have you, which contains the Secret Writings of some unknown person who managed to alter history without anyone every finding out who they were. Our present day foil is Eloise Kelly, who started out just looking for some material for her dissertation and ended up in a modern day romance, of sorts, herself. For me the problem with this type of story is that I completely forget the modern world and can’t remember who or what is going on once we are zapped back to the future.
Events in the Past are the great stuff in the Pink Carnation books. These books are slightly updated additions to the tales of the Scarlet Pimpernel-seems that’s some sort of a flower. Who knew? And so all of our spies, heroes, and villains get to be named after slightly more common flowers. Well, there is that Purple Gentian-another flower that I am not at all familiar with. Well, I never claimed to be a botanist, did I?
The heroes in the Pink Carnation books all seem to be women and married couples, with the occasional man trying to be a hero and finding himself in need of being rescued-who marries one of the heroines. Well, they are romances after all. But there is a lot of fun stuff, lots of sword fights and name calling and skulking around at night and blowing things up. I could see Johnny Depp starring in a movie made from one of the Pink Carnation Books, and Angelia Jolie would be a good swash buckling hero.
In the meantime, the books are a good read. I like the audio books-and Kate Reading does a fine job of narration on these titles, though her men do tend to sound a bit foppish, even when they are not meant to. It is just hard for women to talk like men and men to talk like women while narrating an audio book. Kate Reading does a wonderful job with the many odd accents and old style sentence that make up novels set a couple of hundred years ago.
The Pink Carnation books are fun and I look forward to many more in the future.
- Starfield – A Few Months In - December 23, 2023
- Still Just A Geek by Wil Wheaton - November 1, 2022
- Starfield First Impressions of Gameplay Reveal - June 13, 2022
