How to Seduce a Scoundrel [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

I was looking forward to this installment, as I greatly enjoyed Mrs. Dreiling's first book.
Sadly, this one was all over the place, without focusing on anything in particular enough to explore it thoroughly.
When they say the heroine is innocent, they MEAN innocent. 21 years old going on 14 for all her girly hopes and dreams and knowledge of the world and I-can-handle-it attitude. This was basically a high school fantasy (along with very supportive and equally clueless friends, mean bullies, giggly drunks and amateur anonymous writing) plastered in 19th century high society.
The hero and heroine had a good chemistry and all was very promising until he started widening the gulf between me-older-stuffy-guardian, you-little-naive-girl.

I have to stress that Julianne and Hawk were good characters, kind and loving, who truly learned from their mistakes. Julianne, for all her naivete and girlish attitude, was smart and just needed to grow up quite a bit before her story was told. It was annoying to have everyone underestimate her and shelter her from everything and everyone. So it's not so much her fault that she set out to write that silly and ignorant pamphlet, considering she used what little knowledge and help she had at the time.

Hawk and Julie's relationship advanced slowly and it was very choppy. Sporadic kisses followed by dozens and dozens (and dozens) of pages of "I should be flogged, I can't desire my best friend's sister", then a sudden change to flirting and asking for kisses, dialogue and arguments that were all over the place and couldn't stick to a single topic, it was all very frustrating. It read like a rough draft that was handed in too soon.

This is my review, but I always advice to give the book a chance because you might find it right up your alley. I've read many books that were pretty good in spite of low scores and other books that were complete crap in spite of high scores. Although I didn't like this book, I still like the author's style and I will keep reading her work in the future.

The book description is slightly misleading, which always annoys the heck out of me. The publication of the scandalous document occurs late in the book, well after Julianne's "shenanigans" nor does Hawk set out to uncover the writer's identity. I did like the idea of the publication and would have enjoyed seeing it as even larger part of the story than it was.

Lady Julianne has had a crush, as we modern folks would put it, on her older brother's good friend, Hawk, since she was a small girl. For years, she has dreamed that he would fall in love with her and propose, despite all evidence to the contrary. She made her debut in society four years ago and has rejected a dozen marriage proposals, holding out for Hawk, the man she thinks that she loves. He, on the other hand, for reasons that take Dreiling far too long to reveal, has no desire to marry.

Hawk treats her as his friend's baby sister, and not as a woman. As the book goes on, his thinking changes and he views her physically as a woman but gives little or no credence to her thoughts or feelings. That changes slowly over the course of the book, but even so, he's not an enlightened male. I know that women being treated as adults and reasoning, thinking beings is a relatively recent development in world history but I really could have done without that particular bit of historical accuracy. At one point, after Julie gets drunk, Hawk was so arrogant and condescending that I wanted to throw the book out my window. To be fair, Julie spends much of the book acting immaturely and childishly and she was surprisingly naive. I found it hard at times to believe that she was 21, she acted more like a modern-day 15 year old. I also found it unlikely that her family would have tolerated her still being unmarried at her age; that was unusual back then and we aren't given any reason to believe that her family is progressive, or even just eccentric.

Most of the book is a dance; Julie and Hawk circle around each other, flirting, teasing, enraging, tantruming, but always coming back to each other in some fashion. There are secrets, which Dreiling takes too much time to reveal and by the time they were revealed, I didn't really care. The book could easily have had a third of it cut and been the better for it. It meandered, drifted, repeated, and took forever to tell what was really a simple love story. It gets dressed up in family issues and societal morals but it really boils down to can these two individuals grow up, accept responsibility, and convince each other of their love.

I would love to know the exact definition of a Scoundrel because Marc, Early of Hawkfield, did not act like a scoundrel in this book. Yes, Hawk was crass at times and bossy. To me, he comes off as a jealous lover throughout most of the book. Julianne has had a crush on Marc, also known as "Hawk", since her coming out 4 years ago. When he is charged with being her guardian during her season, Julianne thinks that this will finally give her the opportunity to get Hawk to see her as a woman and not the young girl that he teases so mercilessly.

I really wanted to enjoy How to Seduce a Scoundrel. I liked that Hawk and Julianne have a history. She's known him since she was 8 years old and he was 18. Hawk likes to tease Julianne and because of her spunky attitude, she teases him back. With that type of history between them, I expected more tongue-in-cheek teasing. There was some but not as much as I expected.

How to Seduce a Scoundrel had very little action. The plot moved very slowly. There was very little going on; just a bunch of chatter. Julianne's waffling back and forth about her feelings for Hawk and her plan to write a pamphlet on seduction got old very quickly. The attraction between Hawk and Julianne was not that steamy. At one point, I wondered about the supposed attraction between the two. I enjoyed the side characters Julianne's friends, Amy and Georgette and Hawk's great-aunt Hester. They provided hilarity and levity into the plot.

How to Seduce a Scoundrel got better during the last 20%. The cat and mouse game between Hawk and Julianne finally comes to a head, Hawk's dark past is revealed and everyone finally comes to their senses. I'm sad that it took so long for the story to become interesting and the pace of the plot to pick up. I didn't buy the sexual attraction between Hawk and Julianne. I believe I would have liked this book more if there was more going on. Like I said, there was too much chatter and not enough action. And I don't mean action as in sex; action that helped moved the plot along. The story dragged too much to hold my interest. I'm sure readers of the previous book will enjoy this one. It just didn't work for me.

D-