AAR

[Trish B]

I was in Target today checking out the end of the month releases and I came across Lord of the Night by Susan Wiggs. I've never read anything by this author but the setting (Renaissance Venice) and blurb intrigued me. I determined that this was a reissue of an older book and so I looked up the review here at AAR and it was given an A review which is a good sign. But the sensuality rating was N/A - does this mean there is no sensual content AT ALL in this book?

I'd really like some reader feedback, so it you've read this book, what did you think? Thanks in advance
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Later that night, still 1789!
~"Start the Revolution Without Me!"

[msaggie]

Trish B I read this book about a year ago, and enjoyed it - although it's not a DIK for me. The hero is a widower who is 20 years older than the heroine, and has grown children - however, that is probably historically authentic as older men tended to marry much younger wives. It's set in Venice during the reign of Doge Andrea Gritti. It's got a mystery in it - shades of Umberto Eco's the Name of the Rose. I can't remember much about the love scenes at all - except there were some. Nothing striking that I can remember.

Another compelling book featuring Renaissance Italy is Mary Jane Beaufrand's Primavera, set in Florence, at the time of Lorenzo de Medici. This YA novel is based on the Pazzi conspiracy, and the author says it was inspired by Botticelli's famous masterpiece, Primavera. Compared to other books inspired by famous works of art (e.g. Girl with a Pearl Earring, or Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier), this book is less sumptuous; it is in fact a bit gory (how did Renaissance Italians get rid of their enemies?) - but it does have a HEA for the heroine. And Renaissance Italy comes to life...

[LFL]

I liked Lord of the Night very much, Trish. Here's what I said about it in a post during a discussion I had with friends after reading the book.

"Well, with all the recent talk of this book, I pulled it out of the
TBR (I had ordered it a while back after seeing that Mrs. Giggles had
given it something like a 98 or a 99) and started reading it. It was
hard to put down and quite enjoyable. There was lot to like about it:

THE SETTING: Renaissance Venice. Talk about a gorgeous and underused
setting for such a romantic place. This book delved into a lot of
aspects of Venice, including its convents, its houses of ill repute,
its law enforcement, its government, and the art world. We also
witness its masked balls and its Sea Marriage ceremony. This aspect
was extremely satisfying.

THE HERO'S PROFESSION: The hero is a patrician who is also the Night
Lord, that means basically he is the head of the police department.
He is also on very good terms with the Doge who rules Venice.

THE HEROINE: One of the most interesting heroines I have
encountered. We first see her posing in the nude for Titian. It
turns out that she is an artist aspiring to be admitted to the
academy. Until she earns a place there, she will not be able to
charge for her art. She has just left the convent where she grew up
(her mother had sold her to the nuns who needed laborers) and the
only way she can finance her painting supplies is to become a
courtesan. She lives in a house of ill repute training for that role
and plans to auction her virtue in a masked ball.

THE MYSTERY: Someone is committing gruesome murders with glass
stillettos filled with poison and castrating the corpses after the
fact. The murders seem to be politically motivated. Soon the
heroine also becomes a target.

The first half of this book truly sparkled. The heroine, Laura (I
believe this is pronounced Lah-ura in Italian), was very original.
Many heroines are described by authors as both innocent and worldly-
wise, yet most of the time those heroines just seem like the usual
naive ingenues to me. This heroine truly was unique and different.
I especially loved her obsession with painting which I think was a
good depiciton about how passionate artists are about their art.

The first meeting of the hero and heroine sparkled, the dialogue was
wonderful and the atmosphere charged with chemistry. The hero,
Sandro, had an interesting background and his desire to keep a lid on
his emotions was interesting. Even though he was much older than the
heroine (39 to her eighteen), she seemed mature enough for him. Both
characters were also convincingly Italian.

But a lot of what I loved about this book was its depiction of Venice
and its using the mystery to do that. The mystery itself was very
well constructed -- Wiggs stayed ahead of me most of the time and I
never really figured out more than she wanted me to. This book
really reminded me of Patricia Ryan's SILKEN THREADS in the way that
the setting and the mystery were woven together and the cast of suspects
wide and varied. This was in many ways my favorite aspect of the
book.

Some things were a bit disappointing though. The hero, after getting
off to a promising start, turned out to be less intersting than he
seemed at first. He was still unusual and interesting in his
background etc., but his internal conflicts got a bit repetitive and
he started to seem stodgy to me. In the first half there was also a
lot of tension about the heroine's plan to become a courtesan and
what would become of it. This was resolved halfway through and at
that point some of the tension left the story. Also, the mystery was
put on hold for a while in order to develop the romance.

At this point the book resembled, just for a short while, a more
conventional romance novel. It was still a pretty good one, but to
me, in many ways the non-romance parts were the more interesting.
Still, there was a lot of silver lining here, as the heroine's growth
as an artist was explored in this section and she kept evolving into
a more interesting character. I really liked this heroine a lot.

At the end the book returned to the mystery and got very interesting
at that point! There was also some very interesting political stuff
in the second half. However, the romantic relationship itself had a
new conflict at the end that seemed a bit contrived, and seemed to me
like it was there to fit the conventions of the romance genre more
than the setting or the characters. I would like to discuss it more
but it would be a spoiler.

Comparing LORD OF THE NIGHT to THE CHARM SCHOOL, my other Wiggs
favorite, I would say that in many ways it is more original and
unique, and that I like the heroine better. OTOH, while the hero and
heroine were both interesting and I liked reading about them, their
relationship, after sizzling in the first couple of scenes, was not
tremendously romantic to me. So I would say that THE CHARM SCHOOL
was more romantic, and I liked the hero of that book better. Overall
though, it's hard to choose between them. LOTN gets major points for
originality and freshness and intelligence. I give it an A-."

This was my opinion right after I read the book. I kept it but I have not reread it, so I maybe I should revise the grade to a B+ based on that. I have tried several other Wiggs books and enjoyed some more than others, but this and The Charm School are the only ones I've kept. I believe AAR gave this book a DIK, and Mrs. Giggles also graded it highly.

[Trish B]

Thank you both for your input. I think I may give this one a try.
_________________
Later that night, still 1789!
~"Start the Revolution Without Me!"

[LFL]

I hope you enjoy it, Trish. Let us know what you thought.

[Bree]

I would give "Lord of the Night" a "warm" rating. I think the love scenes are pretty typical of a "warm" read (using the AAR definition).

It's a wonderful book, BTW. I'm glad to see it's been re-released! I've been toting around a beaten up copy of "Lord of the Night" for years and years (and years)... I like to reread it every now and then.

Digression (1): My very favorite Susan Wiggs book is "Vows Made in Wine." Another interesting heroine (she's kind of grumpy, actually, in a way that the happy-go-lucky hero finds charming, which is, in itself, charming) plus another time period (you don't usually see featured in romance.

Digression (2): I've always wondered what happened to Susan Wiggs. She wrote several wonderful books in the early 90s (IMO, although I know she has a loyal current following) and then switched publishers (and editors?) and her style, tone, themes completely changed.

[LFL]

Bree, I haven't read Vows Made in Wine. Is it part of a series?

Re. your second question, I can only speculate, but there was a time when many historical writers were leaving the genre for other genres. It wasn't just Susan Wiggs but Patricia Gaffney, Patricia Ryan, Kathleen Gilles Seidel, Megan Chance, Barbara Samuel and Candice Proctor, to name some, and there may have been others that I'm forgetting.

And among those who didn't leave the genre, many switched from historicals to conteporaries (Judith McNaught and Mary Jo Putney, for example) or paranomals (Mary Jo Putney again), while others lost their contract or changed their books. Judith Ivory/Judy Cuevas, for example, stopped setting her books in France and started including epilogue endings, which she hadn't had before.

This happened around the late 1990s and continued into the early parts of this decade. Historicals stopped selling as well, but I don't know which came first, the chicken or the egg. Candice Proctor (now writing the Sebastian St. Cyr mysteries as C.S. Harris) wrote a long post about why she stopped writing historical romances, but I can't find it on her site anymore.

IIRC, it was because publishers were requiring her to write a series of books set in one setting, and she figured if she was going to do that, she might as well write in the mystery genre where settings are more diverse. Anyway, I can only speculate about what led to the great migration of historical romance authors, and I'd rather not do that so I'll just finish by saying that there seems to be a resurgence now and I hope that kind of thing doesn't happen again.

[Bree]

[LFL]

Interesting about Wiggs' style changing. I loved The Charm School though (esp. the subplot about the freed slave) and didn't love Miranda, so I guess it didn't bother me.

[willaful]

I just read on a romance blog about a three book series by Wigg being reiussed soon under new (inferior) titles, and I'm pretty sure Vows Made in Wine was one of them. I think it was the first in the series.
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"I say, don't read the classics -- try to discover your own classics; every life has its own." -- Rudolf Flesch, _How to Make Sense_