Avon, $7.99, ISBN 978-0-06-295616-3
Historical Romance, 2020

Many things have clearly happened since I took a break from reading print books during the the-year lockdown party. Julia Quinn’s First Comes Scandal has been reissued a few times since I bought the original edition, no doubt to remove the pesky white person on the cover in order to avoid confusing readers that know that show first and the books second.

That’s for the best, if you ask me, because aesthetics of the covers of Avon romances has seriously taken a nosedive since I wasn’t looking.

Then there’s that show. Yes, I’ve heard of it, and no, I don’t plan to watch or review it. When it comes to small screen stuff, I prefer fantasy and horror, plus all these long-running shows will eventually decline in quality and I’m not going to put myself through all that heartbreak. Shonda Rhimes and Scandal; enough said.

However, I do wonder what the author will do from here. She’s now the biggest-selling queen of black romances, after all, so it can get awkward to juggle books with white people and the mainstream perception that her books are going to have black people.

If it were me in this position, I’d just start a new series, set in a fantasy world that mirrors Regency-era England, then I am free to have characters of any color, sexual orientation, and even species running around—a nice way to still retain the flavor of previous books that fans have come to love and demand, without being bogged by pesky things like continuity with those books.

One thing I have to love, though. Now, whenever someone accuses me of being racist toward black people, I can say: hey, I read Bridgerton books, you know. Then they will go oops, okay, bye.

Yes, yes, First Comes Scandal. It’s not the most interesting thing to talk about, but I suppose I should, since this is supposed to be a review of it after all.

Nicholas Rokesby is summoned from his medical studies and an upcoming exam by his father, who insists that he rush back to their home Cake… wait, let me check, Crake. Our hero is in suspense all the long and arduous way home, as he wonders why he is being so urgently called back home like this.

Well, it turns out that a dastardly fiend tried to elope with his neighbor and good friend’s sister Georgiana Bridgerton. While our heroine is unharmed, she is ruined. Therefore, Nicholas’s parents decide that a good solution to this would be to marry off their son to her. When Nicholas balks at the idea, his father tells him to stop whining and please do give a response by the next day.

Fortunately, our heroine may be a spinster at 26, but she’s hot enough in Nicholas’s eyes that, all of a sudden, marriage isn’t such a hardship after all. Okay, there is a hard ship in there somewhere, but it’s really not a hardship… oh, forget it.

That’s basically the story. Things move along to the big day and, of course, the honeymoon, and the emphasis here is on banter, not complex plots or dead bodies.

I haven’t read anything by the author in a while, so my first thought as I read this is whether the author’s characters had always been this… child-like, for the want of a better word. This one could easily be a young adult romance, for very young adults if we would take out the mildly sexy stuff.

The characters here talk out loud their thought processes to themselves, and everything here is basically a saunter on a jaunt to show off how precious and cute and sassy and witty they are.

It’s hard for me, as a result, to view these characters are living, breathing human beings. They are instead precious soliloquy and wit generators, and when conflict dares to ever its head a little, the power of plot armor and indefatigable sass compels it to vamoose in the next heartbeat.

These characters and their allies are all flawless, brimming with awesomeness, and what could have been a more nuanced plot of asshole parents forcing a son to wed their favored goddaughter is neutered because Georgiana is precious and cute. There is nothing more right in this world than the inbreeding of perfection to beget more perfection.

Consequently, while this one is readable, it feels as deep as a puddle.

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