Title: Appetites & Vices Series: The Truitts #1
Author: Felicia Grossman
Published: February 18, 2019
Genre(s): Romance: Historical
Page Count: 300
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Banking heiress Ursula Nunes has lived her life on the fringes of Philadelphia’s upper class. Her Jewish heritage means she’s never quite been welcomed by society’s elite…and her quick temper has never helped, either.
A faux engagement to the scion of the mid-Atlantic’s most storied family might work to repair her rumpled reputation and gain her entrée to the life she thinks she wants…if she can ignore the way her “betrothed” makes her feel warm all over and stay focused on her goal.
Former libertine John Thaddeus “Jay” Truitt is hardly the man to teach innocent women about propriety. Luckily, high society has little to do with being proper and everything to do with identifying your foe’s temptation—an art form Jay mastered long ago. A broken engagement will give him the perfect excuse to run off to Europe and a life of indulgence.
A historical romance novel about an autistic-coded (in my opinion) Jewish heroine and a reformed rogue, set in 1841 Philadelphia drawing rooms? “Oh yes,” I said to myself. “Sign me up.” Felicia Grossman’s debut novel brings exciting new possibilities to a genre full to the brim with dukes, wallflowers, and British imperialism. Appetites & Vices really just throws down a gauntlet merely by existing. “Here I am with my neurodivergent, Jewish heroine, with my incurably damaged hero, with my not-so-fluffy family dynamics. What are you going to do about it?” challenges this book.
And of course, amid the (seemingly) unfamiliar aspects, Grossman features some of everyone’s favorite tropes. Fake engagements, secret illegitimate children, misunderstood heroes, impossibly grand gestures, etc. Never fear!
Alas, there was a problem with this book, and it is a curable defect: lack of polish. Appetites & Vices is the author’s first book (at least under this penname), and the quality of the prose isn’t quite there. At the level of sentence construction, I felt there were missing commas everywhere, as well as dangling participles, etc. I was honestly confused at points, just unable to understand what the book was getting at. And, yes, this detracts from the story and makes it hard for me to engage with the plot. But it’s not, like, y’know…homophobia or whatnot. (Disclaimer: I read an advanced copy, so perhaps some typos and missing punctuation were fixed.)
I really just think this book was needlessly messy—and not a “families and relationships are complicated” kind of messy. I mean that once the Dark Moment occurs, when the emotional conflict detonates, the protagonists are feeling so much. They feel so many things, and their emotions ping off of each other like bullets in a closed room with nowhere to land. There are feelings everywhere, all at once, and it’s too much, and the disparate threads are not brought together. It’s like the characters are rowdy children who got away from the author—Grossman is supposed to be in charge of her characters. But the last third of the book is a noisy tangle of angst and confusion and shock and everything. The emotions are leading the way, and as a reader, it was difficult to focus on any one crisis to empathize with, because there were so many crises.
I didn’t, personally, like the Grand Gesture at the end because it was massively overstated and public and sugary-sweet. That’s completely a matter of personal preference, so it’s neither here nor there.
I do like the characters. Or, rather, I like Ursula—Jay I could really take or leave. Ursula is a socially inexperienced woman who desperately wants friends, but the fact that she cares so much is obviously offputting to most, especially to the prim and proper gentile ladies of Philadelphia. The fact that she’s Jewish and has a temper doesn’t help matters. I liked that Ursula fought for Jay’s reputation, even at the cost of her own—even when she had nothing to gain and everything to lose. I liked her brand of combined honesty and accuracy that is well-intentioned but often gets her in trouble. I like that she likes taking care of people and animals. The star of this book is, without a doubt, Ursula, and she shines out even when the prose or the storytelling falter.
The long and short of this is: Appetites & Vices is a necessary addition to a genre that is often unwilling to diversify. The mechanics of this book are not quite as well-oiled as they should be, and that is why my rating is low. I won’t up-rate a story just because the idea of it is lovely, even if the execution isn’t. Still, I would probably recommend this book to particular kinds of readers, and I would very probably continue to read the author’s future titles.
