It’s summer and the time is perfect for reading stuff you might not otherwise find yourself reading. As you know, if you are an Okazu Reader, I read just about anything. I’m fond of action and science fiction, and a few summers ago, I read a bunch of classics I had missed as a kid. And of course I read massive amounts of Yuri, which means I am frequently reading romance stories. But here’s my ugly secret – I really don’t like romance stories! (Not so much of a secret, really, since I’ve been saying I want sports Yuri / action Yuri / science fiction Yuri for about 20 years… But here I am reading mass quantities of the one genre I like least. ^_^; )
As you probably also know, I am very active on Twitter. Despite the many flaws of the platform, both theoretical and practical, I find Twitter to be a breathtakingly fun way to learn from people in all kinds of circles I might never otherwise encounter. Which is how I ended up following romance writer Courtney Milan. She and a number of other non-white romance writers were writing about the (sadly predictable) gatekeeping and racism of white women in the romance publishing industry. I found myself following Milan and a bunch of other PoC romance writers, despite my disinterest in Romance as a reading material for myself, and because of my interest in publishing and in learning about a genre I am largely unfamiliar with.
When Milan posted that she had written a senior lesbian period romance and it was only $2.99 on Kindle I pounced at it so fast I surprised myself. Which is how I found myself reading Mrs. Martin’s Incomparable Adventure. It was delightful.
69 year-old Miss Violetta Beauchamps finds herself in a terrifying position of not only being a superfluous woman, but an unemployed, unemployable, poor, elderly, superfluous woman. She doesn’t like the way that looks. Having been summarily (and fraudulently) fired by the man she’s worked for for decades, Miss Beauchamps concocts a swindle. It’s not a great swindle, but as she’s attempting to swindle an even more elderly lady than herself – a fabulously wealthy woman, a woman who won’t miss a few dozen pounds, which is all she needs to survive – Miss Beauchamps heads off to swindle Mrs. Martin. Only Mrs. Martin, at 73, has a mind like a steel trap. She’s rich, she hates the way Terrible Men (including and especially her Terrible Nephew,) treat women.
What happens is a lovely, ridiculous, absurdly delightful story of class, and sexuality, body image issues and sexism…and sweet, sweet revenge. As Milan states:
Author’s Note: Sometimes I write villains who are subtle and nuanced. This is not one of those times. The Terrible Nephew is terrible, and terrible things happen to him. Sometime villains really are bad and wrong, and sometimes, we want them to suffer a lot of consequences.
The climax of the book was gratifying, to say the least. Exceedingly gratifying.
Ratings:
Overall – 9
You may, like me, not be interested per se in Romance genre novels. But for a fun summer read, one that was satisfying on several levels, and in which Terrible Men get what’s coming to them and the elderly spinster gets the elderly widow and they live happily ever fucking after, it was an absolute delight.
