Book Rant: The Secret History of the Pink Carnation [Lauren Willig]

RATING: This book is a farce! A FARCE!

The rather misleading book cover.

The main premise of "The Secret History of the Pink Carnation" is espionage during Napoleon's reign. (Or at least, it's SUPPOSED to be.) Eloise Kelly, a Harvard graduate student, flies to London and delves into research about English spies as her thesis. She eventually finds out that the Pink Carnation is a woman spy. 

I was looking forward to history, romance and feminism. And since the author is a graduate from Yale, and is a PhD from Harvard, I was naturally expecting something written by a modern version of Gaskell or Brontë. I was looking forward to something well-researched and informative yet light and fun to read.

What I got instead was a poorly-written, rather insipid, absurdly implausible romance novel set in the 19th century. The two main characters were hormonally overcharged, unbelievably idiotic and clumsy, to the point where I kept asking myself how the hell they survived as spies. Amy and Richard groped each other wherever and whenever they went, during trips, before and after fights, during surveillance, during missions. Throughout the novel, Amy's bosom was constantly heaving, her bottom constantly wriggling, which causes Richard to have a perpetual hard-on.

The narrative switches between past (Amy) and present (Eloise). Eloise's story is when she's not reading Amy's letters for research, she's fantasizing about Colin Selwick, Richard and Amy's rather snobby descendant who wants Eloise out of his family's private matters. However, the friction between the two modern characters that was supposed to work out as sexual tension - in the hands of a more talented writer, perhaps - simply fell flat on its face. Thus, the narrative didn't work out at all. It felt like two separate novels - "Amy's Heaving Bosom" and "Eloise's Forbidden Fantasies" - being mashed into one.

I have to admit, I didn't finish the book. I COULD NOT. And I cannot help feeling like I was bamboozled. I was conned into buying this indescribably asinine book! (One has to admire its marketing though, what with the author's credentials and all). 

I was glad to have picked up this book for roughly a dollar, because it was intolerable, and if I had bought it full-priced, I would've felt really, really bad. Based on the cover and the blurbs, I was expecting a well-researched historical romance, but ended up with a bodice-ripper - and a poorly written one at that. Thanks to this novel, I am now a FIRM believer of the saying "Never judge a book by its cover."

[12/17/2012]: I just found out that NINE books and TWO novellas have spawned from this INANE drivel! Que horror!