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Lord Winter hates and fears English high society, disappointed his dysfunctional family by refusing to marry and provide an heir, and spends his time dashing about in dangerous parts of the world having adventures and regretting that he was too young to get involved with the wild adventurer Lady Hester Stanhope, whom he regards as a feminine ideal. He also has a Dark Secret and diabolic eyebrows.
Zenia is Lady Hester Stanhope's bastard daughter who has been raised bywolves Bedouins and her semi-crazy, dysfunctional mother in the Middle of Nowhere, Arabia. All she wants is to be a proper English lady and never have another adventure or see another grain of sand as long as she lives.
Clearly, they're perfect for each other.
When Lord Winter, on a quest to find the Arabian mare String of Pearls, meets Zenia at her mother's funeral, he mistakes her for a teenage Bedouin boy. Zenia, who doesn't understand how English society works (her exact misapprehension is too complicated and goofy to get into here), agrees to take him on a dangerous desert journey on the condition that he take her to England afterward. Stuff happens, a prince mistakes Zenia for the disguised queen of England, and Lord Winter realizes that she's female when they're both locked up and supposed to be executed the next morning. They have sex, they get rescued, Lord Winter is separated from Zenia and apparently killed, she realizes that she's pregnant and returns to England to seek out the father she never knew, and also Lord Winter's family.
That's Part I. The sheikh-of-the-desert setting and story has an inherent absurdity, but its dangers-- physical and emotional-- are compelling reading. I found Lord Winter, in particular, to be a very sympathetic character, and while I am inherently prejudiced against fictional characters who don't want to have adventures and do want to immerse themselves in the stilted rituals of high society, I could see how Zenia had had it with the desert.
Then Zenia gives birth in England, Lord Winter returns two years later, and the book falls apart as they proceed to be absolutely horrible to each other, often for no good reason, and to use their daughter as a weapon against each other. Kinsale's need to maintain conflict once the characters were no longer fighting for their lives against outside forces produced a story in which I ended up disliking both of them, and also thinking that they were utterly unsuited for each other and would be miserable together.
I had a similar, although less intense feeling about Flowers From the Storm. I like Kinsale's romantic couples when they have external forces to battle against together, but once the conflicts become primarily between the couple themselves, it makes me uncomfortable and I start thinking that they can't really be suited for each other-- they're arguing too much, and about deep-seated personality traits that can't be changed or compromised between, and not in a lighthearted, fun, Beatrice and Benedick type way either.
I think this is why, Kinsale aside, I tend to prefer romances to have strong elements of other genres, or to exist within other genres, or to be comedies. In comedies, the tone means the conflict between the couples can be playful and even fun for the couples themselves, even if they don't immediately realize that this is the person they want to bicker with for the rest of their lives. In books which are primiarily sf or fantasy or mystery or whatever, the couples can interact with each other in a friendly or at least non-hostile way while they try to resolve a different conflict side by side.
My trouble with stories which are straight romance, or in which conflict between the romantic pair is significant, is that it's often either driven by misunderstanding, which seems stupid on the part of the characters and ham-handed on the part of the author, or by genuine irreconcilable differences, which to me invalidate the happy ending.
The only types of major psychological inter-couple conflict which don't bother me, that I can think of, are conflicts driven by resolvable psychological issues, or conflicts of honor. Bujold does both of those beautifully: Mark and Kareen love each other, but Mark is terribly damaged and needs to fix himself before he can have a real relationship; Miles and Ekaterine love each other, but a) they both have good reasons why they shouldn't pursue it, b) Miles tries too hard and screws it up and hurts her without meaning to, in a way which gives Ekaterine good reason to believe that he might not be a good person to marry. Bujold also does external-driving-internal conflict-- soldiers on opposing sides, for instance-- beautifully.
The other way romance can work for me is if the story is one of discovery, where the characters don't realize that they love each other until the end. But they can't be jerks to each other up to that point, though.
I think for me, the best relationships are based on friendship. That's why Megan Lindholm's Ki and Vandien series really works for me, and so do Barbara Hambly's romances, and why I spent the entire second half of The Dream Hunter wishing Lord Winter and Zenia would have one single uninterrupted moment where they just enjoyed each other's company without ripping each other's clothes off or threatening to kidnap each other's child. But they never do.
Zenia is Lady Hester Stanhope's bastard daughter who has been raised by
Clearly, they're perfect for each other.
When Lord Winter, on a quest to find the Arabian mare String of Pearls, meets Zenia at her mother's funeral, he mistakes her for a teenage Bedouin boy. Zenia, who doesn't understand how English society works (her exact misapprehension is too complicated and goofy to get into here), agrees to take him on a dangerous desert journey on the condition that he take her to England afterward. Stuff happens, a prince mistakes Zenia for the disguised queen of England, and Lord Winter realizes that she's female when they're both locked up and supposed to be executed the next morning. They have sex, they get rescued, Lord Winter is separated from Zenia and apparently killed, she realizes that she's pregnant and returns to England to seek out the father she never knew, and also Lord Winter's family.
That's Part I. The sheikh-of-the-desert setting and story has an inherent absurdity, but its dangers-- physical and emotional-- are compelling reading. I found Lord Winter, in particular, to be a very sympathetic character, and while I am inherently prejudiced against fictional characters who don't want to have adventures and do want to immerse themselves in the stilted rituals of high society, I could see how Zenia had had it with the desert.
Then Zenia gives birth in England, Lord Winter returns two years later, and the book falls apart as they proceed to be absolutely horrible to each other, often for no good reason, and to use their daughter as a weapon against each other. Kinsale's need to maintain conflict once the characters were no longer fighting for their lives against outside forces produced a story in which I ended up disliking both of them, and also thinking that they were utterly unsuited for each other and would be miserable together.
I had a similar, although less intense feeling about Flowers From the Storm. I like Kinsale's romantic couples when they have external forces to battle against together, but once the conflicts become primarily between the couple themselves, it makes me uncomfortable and I start thinking that they can't really be suited for each other-- they're arguing too much, and about deep-seated personality traits that can't be changed or compromised between, and not in a lighthearted, fun, Beatrice and Benedick type way either.
I think this is why, Kinsale aside, I tend to prefer romances to have strong elements of other genres, or to exist within other genres, or to be comedies. In comedies, the tone means the conflict between the couples can be playful and even fun for the couples themselves, even if they don't immediately realize that this is the person they want to bicker with for the rest of their lives. In books which are primiarily sf or fantasy or mystery or whatever, the couples can interact with each other in a friendly or at least non-hostile way while they try to resolve a different conflict side by side.
My trouble with stories which are straight romance, or in which conflict between the romantic pair is significant, is that it's often either driven by misunderstanding, which seems stupid on the part of the characters and ham-handed on the part of the author, or by genuine irreconcilable differences, which to me invalidate the happy ending.
The only types of major psychological inter-couple conflict which don't bother me, that I can think of, are conflicts driven by resolvable psychological issues, or conflicts of honor. Bujold does both of those beautifully: Mark and Kareen love each other, but Mark is terribly damaged and needs to fix himself before he can have a real relationship; Miles and Ekaterine love each other, but a) they both have good reasons why they shouldn't pursue it, b) Miles tries too hard and screws it up and hurts her without meaning to, in a way which gives Ekaterine good reason to believe that he might not be a good person to marry. Bujold also does external-driving-internal conflict-- soldiers on opposing sides, for instance-- beautifully.
The other way romance can work for me is if the story is one of discovery, where the characters don't realize that they love each other until the end. But they can't be jerks to each other up to that point, though.
I think for me, the best relationships are based on friendship. That's why Megan Lindholm's Ki and Vandien series really works for me, and so do Barbara Hambly's romances, and why I spent the entire second half of The Dream Hunter wishing Lord Winter and Zenia would have one single uninterrupted moment where they just enjoyed each other's company without ripping each other's clothes off or threatening to kidnap each other's child. But they never do.