Saturday, January 11, 2014

Dark Moon, by Corey McFadden

Dark of the Moon
by Corey McFadden

Leisure Books/Dorchester Publishing, Mass Market Paperback 1994
BMI (Book Margins Inc.) "Gloria Diehl Book Club" Mass Market edition 1995
Digital republication 2012


Stars -- 2.5/5
Eyerolls -- 3/5

Disclaimer: I read the "Gloria Diehl Book Club" BMI paperback edition of this book, though I'm not exactly sure how or when I acquired it. I do not know the author nor have I ever had any communication with her about this book or any other subject. I am an author of historical romances.

It took me months to finish this book because I only read it at night in bed when I had a few minutes before exhaustion demanded sleep.  Often I had no more than ten or fifteen minutes, and frequently weeks went by between opportunities to read.  That has to be a testament to how uninteresting, uncompelling, and undemanding the book was.

Dark Moon wasn't a bad story, but the plot was very predictable:  Poverty-stricken but genteelly raised young woman takes only available employment as governess in a slightly mysterious and remote manor.  The heroine, Joanna Carpenter, is of course just too-perfect-to-be-true.  Stunningly beautiful despite her poverty, educated beyond the norm by her vicar father, she is also unfailingly gentle and instinctively understanding of the special needs of the two children entrusted to her care. 

After finishing the book I thought -- because I'm a writer and I tend to look for ways to inject drama in an otherwise bland story -- it might have been more interesting if Joanna had come to Queen's Hall and been both slightly afraid and slightly repulsed by the child with what we now know as Down Syndrome, and then learned to understand and see beyond his difference so that she could develop a genuine affection for him.

The hero Sir Giles Chapman is supposedly bitter after his disastrous first marriage, but he falls for the beautiful, innocent Joanna almost immediately.  Their relationship develops rapidly and with little self-reflection or hesitation.  Joanna's "vicar's daughter" purity seems to be all that's needed to melt Giles's frozen heart, though I thought there were all kinds of opportunities for exploration of both internal and external conflicts with much more drama and angst.

The villains, likewise, were caricatures of unrelenting evil and stupidity, unable to do anything right.   They were, in fact, so evil and stupid and incompetent, that I wondered why the hero's failure to recognize their evil and stupidity wasn't explained a little more.  He came across as a bit dense on that issue.

McFadden's writing style is reasonably competent, if not sparkling.  She relies on a lot of narrative -- those page-long paragraphs did put me to sleep on more than one occasion -- and some of her dialogue bordered on info-dumpy, but there wasn't anything worthy of comment.  It was just kind of blah. 

However, the lack of period detail was much more noticeable.  Joanna finds the countryside of Cumberland beautiful, but the reader doesn't get a whole lot of description of what makes Cumberland special and distinct.  Nor is there much of historical setting, other than Lady Eleanor's reliance on lead-based make-up and rancid goose-grease hair care products.

Some of the events seemed contrived, such as Joanna's miraculously being able to drive the carriage without previous experience when attacked by a highwayman, but not outrageously so.  The ending involved a lot of lucky coincidences and contributed much more to the level of eyerolling.

Love scenes were few and vanilla, and all occurred after the principals were safely and legally wed.  Sensitive readers could easily skip them without missing much.

I didn't really understand the Dark Moon title, as it had nothing to do with the book.  Nor was there much about the book that was particularly gothic, despite the title and the back cover blurb.  Written in third-person rather than the traditional first-person for a gothic romance, Dark Moon featured no spirits or suspected supernatural issues, nor was there a secondary "hero" vying for the heroine's affection.

A pleasant enough read if fluffy historical romance is your genre, but not a stellar example.