The Book Gourmet

Sebastian Malheur has been in love with Violet Waterfield for half his life (if not more), but she only wants him for his penis. And not in the way he wants her to want him for his penis.
For the past five years he's been presenting her scientific discoveries as his own, since she's a woman and no one would take her seriously. But now his "celebrity status" has started to chafe. He feels like a fraud, he's at the end of his tether as far as his strange relationship with Violet, and he's had it. He's quitting.


I hated the heroine. Hated her! We've spent half the book in her head, seeing how she thinks herself cold and stone-like, how she has no feelings, that there's just emptiness inside...WITH NOT EXPLANATION AS TO THE REASON WHATSOEVER! And then you expect me to feel sorry for her, empathize, understand her once she finally spilled the beans? Sure, she's had a shitty hand dealt to her, she's suffered through years of spousal emotional abuse, but she also spent HALF THE BOOK emotionally abusing the hero. Tit for tat? I don't think so.

Violet ruined the book for me.

I loved everything else. Sebastian, the hero, was an absolute teddy bear, a martyr in his own right, trying to make everybody around him feel better (no wonder Violet latched onto him, the emotional vampiress that she was), even at the sake of his own happiness, and I really wanted him to be happy. Pity, he chose the wrong woman for that.
The writing, once again, was excellent, though it (and the pacing) suffered due to the insufferable heroine. I liked the absence of politics in this one, though I must say the trial in the end was utterly and completely chauvinistic, and the supporting cast was once again great (I loved Violet's mother).

But, as I wrote earlier. The heroine ruined the book for me. I couldn't stand her for the first half of the book, and though that dislike lessened a little in the second half (thanks to her hero), I really couldn't get into her story.