And we proceed with “The Lady’s In Love With Her Cat” aka “Rich, Radiant Love”.
And… we also get to the author’s bullshit version of formatting. See, she really likes to separate her books into separate books, and calls them like “Book I”, “Book II” and the like, but they’re not actually long enough to be books in of themselves. In fact Book I is all of 25 pages or something ridiculous. In essence, it’s useless pomp to the third degree, and I hate it.
We start off with another delectable set of prose… two whole verses of it to differentiate the stupid formatting of this ridiculous book!
Daughter of destiny, daughter of fate
Daughter of passion, daughter of hate
Daughter to whom the world must bow
Claim your birthright – do it now!
OH HOW MYSTERIOUS. WHO COULD THIS BE TALKING ABOUT? THIS CAN’T BE SOME AWFUL RHYMING FORESHADOWING OF THE REST OF THIS BOOK, CAN IT?
Part 1 of book 1 gets YET ANOTHER STUPID GODDAMN VERSE:
All that I ask of heaven,
All that I ask of life,
Is that you hold me first in your heart,
Take me and make me your wife!
Does this sound like, at all, co-dependent to any of you? Anna, learn to fucking love yourself instead of desperately needing some chode patrol to put you on a pedestal. Christ Jesus.
We break into late September, 1673, with Anna… on a boat? What in the fuck?
[page flipping noises]
Okay yeah so um… Anna is on a boat now. With BRETT DANFORTH. And they’re married? And they’re sailing from Bermuda to New York now, to go live at Wey Gat/Windgate. Probably pretty solidly now that he managed to marry the heiress to the Wey Gat fortune. I just… how the fuck did we get here?
[more page flipping noises]
So apparently we got here via a bunch of contrived shit. Uh… so Anna’s adoptive dad gets remarried, he dies, it’s a literal Cinderella situation with Anna now being their indentured servant. And they steal all her shit and money and whatever and now she’s not an heiress. And someone tried to kidnap her at night, and BRETT DANFORTH saved her. Then she stole her cat and a dress and a pair of shoes and her inheritance candlesticks, gave her cat to her best friend, put on the outfit she stole (that was technically hers to begin with), and married BRETT DANFORTH.
Does… does that make any sense to you guys? Cause it doesn’t really make much sense to me.
Anyways, they’re naked in bed together after having THE SEX!!! BRETT DANFORTH mumbles a bunch of cryptic shit in his sleep that Anna hears, which is a really hamfisted way of providing conflict for this story, but whatever.
Suddenly, we’re on to the next part! And what do we have? MORE SHITTY RHYMING VERSE!
Some vengeance comes from God himself
And some from hell, deep down
But none wreak vengeance, high or low
Like the man from Boston Town!
Sorry, but no, Arthur is a whingy little fuck who can’t not hold grudges and I have a very strong feeling that BRETT DANFORTH is going to merc his ass into next Tuesday. Fuck Boston boy.
So we’re introduced to Arthur Kincaid, cousin to Walter of Bermuda, who is from Boston and wants to fuck Anna really badly. We’re given a flashback to when they first met, where he acted like a priggish shit, and Anna trolled him eternally about how Bermuda is WAY more refined and interesting than stupid old Boston.
Arthur, as is appropriate for a romance novel antagonist, has a COMPLETELY sociopathic reaction, becoming violently angry and fantasizing about ripping Anna’s dress off of her in public. We’re then treated to the reason WHY he’s in Bermuda: he’s a fucking serial rapist! He gets off on sexually abusing and raping every female servant in his house. He even went so far as to throw one down the stairs, leaving her permanently crippled, and burning two of them nearly to death: one by throwing her in a fireplace, and one by throwing a bottle of brandy at her and then a lit candelabra. It wasn’t until the LAST girl, who worked for a tavern, that anything happened to him, only because someone scary enough to threaten his rich dad threatened the kid. So, off to Bermuda with him.
Well, now that Anna has gone with BRETT DANFORTH, Arthur is furious. He had bought Anna’s articles of servitude, and intended to own her and make her his sex slave that he could sexually torture until she eventually died. WHAT A NICE GUY AMIRITE. But BRETT DANFORTH ruined that all by paying off her articles in entirety, leaving her a free woman. #1670sProblems
Arthur decides he’s going to go to New York and retrieve Anna. Oh, did I mention that he’s already married and is dragging his poor wife, Mattie, with him? Her mom almost drags her ass off the boat because she gets a bad feeling, but because this is a stupid romance novel, she doesn’t do anything, and now we’ll have to sit here gritting our teeth over the shit Mattie must be going through, married to a sociopathic serial rapist.
While on the boat, Arthur makes a complete fucking ass of himself and has the entire crew and passengers thinking he’s the “guy who yells at his wife in public” starter pack. We get a tease that a couple old spinsters are going to kidnap her under the pretense of being old rich women who have no company, but of course we’re told that Arthur is too much of a creepy fucking sex pervert to let his wife be anywhere he wasn’t.
This book is quickly making out to be worse than “Fifty Shades of Grey”. At least Arthur isn’t being touted as the main romance interest.
Now we’re magically onto Book II. See, I told you the formatting is senseless. AND WE ALSO GET EVERYONE’S FAVORITE, SOME NEEEEW RHYMES!
A toast to our island beauty
Adrift on a ship of sighs,
For a man could read fathoms and fathoms
In Anna’s turquoise eyes!
I really, really do not fucking know why these have to be in here. They’re insufferable. They all end with a fucking exclamation point. They all rhyme and use really harsh contrivances to make them work. I hate them. I hate this book.
OH GOD DAMN IT, THERE’S ANOTHERONE?!
The curtain now is ripped aside,
The tragic past’s dark veil.
Now she knows why he married her-
And why his plan must fail!
I am a stupid douchebag jerk
Who spoils the book in rhyme
Please hire a decent merc
And take me out, fast time
You give quality, you get quality. Fuck you, lady.
We’re on to Anna on the USS BRETT DANFORTH, with her husband BRETT DANFORTH. They can’t have a conversation without him sucking on her nipples, which is highly stupid. He informs her that they will be getting married over in New York, and he bought her a wedding dress and everything. It’s a big shady to-do: the seamstress will only speak Dutch, they’re going to be calling her a different name during the ceremony… if Anna wasn’t such a bubble-headed dunderfuck, she’d be questioning this shit, but OFC she isn’t.
She does start to realize this is some fuckery during the ceremony, and instead of actually finding out any useful information about this hasty ceremony with no family involved (and literally everyone making fun of the length of Anna’s dress, because it’s too fucking long because she’s a picky old fashioned whiner), she mopes, whines, makes snotty faces, and then TOTALLY forgets about anything she was going to ask BRETT DANFORTH about because he starts sucking her titties again.
After they do another sex, they get dressed and watch as they take off upriver to Wey Gat. People are waving goodbye to the newly married couple, and there are two people staring. One is Evil Miguel, and BRETT DANFORTH is just like “o ya he’s claimant to the castle, lol” which has Anna like !!!! until she sees Erica and her stupid fox-hair and she freaks out.
They go back to the cabin as Anna is like THAT BITCH CAME FOR ME, BRETT DANFORTH and he’s like ???? and she goes “that pink necklace of hers, she got it off her brother who blackmailed it and this sapphire and gold ring that was my mom’s off my auntie who i lived with” and BRETT DANFORTH is like !!!! >:U and whips out a bag and holds up the ring and goes “Is this the ring?”
Anna is cry and is like OMG YES!!!!!!!! HOW???? and BRETT DANFORTH tells her “Claes gave it to me just before he died, it’s yours now, also your name is Georgianna van Rappard in reality, that whole Anna Smith thing was a fake name to hide you”. Anna is just sort of like “thanks for the info” and is trying to process all of this sudden fuckery of her life.
BRETT DANFORTH leaves her this packet of information from her dead aunt and leaves her to read it. Anna reads it and finds out that she’s NOT actually the van Rappard heir. She’s a bastard child, according to her dead aunt, and her supposed dad never actually fucked her mom, though he was married to her. The guy originally accepted Anna as his child and heir, but flipped out after a while and threatened to send Anna away to Holland, where her real father lived. The real dad shows up to try to save Anna and her mom, and they crash through the ice-covered river. They were all presumed drowned, because nobody knew Anna had already been smuggled to her aunt and was safely away when the ice cracked.
Anna goes to discuss what little BRETT DANFORTH knows, keeping out the convenient bit that she isn’t actually the van Rappard heir. They discuss the death of her mother, whom her legal father erected a gigantic monument gravestone to on his property. But also one for Anna, the bastard child, and Anna’s bio dad, for some fucking reason that literally nobody can determine yet but everyone mentions as really fucking weird. Because that’s REALLY FUCKING WEIRD. And then he committed suicide! FUCKING WHY? None of this makes any sense and I’m sure it’s supposed to be part of the mystery but it’s just aggravating!
Anna asks BRETT DANFORTH if he would have even married her if she wasn’t the van Rappard heir and he’s like “nope, lol” and so she cries.
That’s it for now, folks! More to come later tonight.
Garbage Romance 