Mary Jo Putney - The Rake

The Rake - Mary Jo Putney

The Rake, huh?
More like ‘The Alcoholic’ but that probably wouldn’t make a good title for a bodice ripper and supermarkets wouldn’t stock it. 

This must be the first historical romance written along the lines of 12 steps of AA clubs. You can see it in its structure but I am not admonishing Putney for using it. It provided a good frame for an exciting novel which would get more stars from me if the heroine’s secret and at the same time her reason for hiding from the world for a decade weren’t so utterly silly in the end. Talking about blowing things out of proportions!

Read this one if you like your romances a little darker, full of self-destructive tendencies and some violence. Rest assured that this is not one of those sorry stories of a man being changed by the love of a good woman. Those stories are toxic. I AM looking at you Fifty Shades of Fuckery.

In ‘The Alcoholic’, er, I mean ‘The Rake’, the hero finds it in himself to change and embarks on that long journey before he meets the heroine. She might make it a tad more rewarding to be sober but it he is not changing for her or because of her, which is a healthy thing to read in a romance novel. The alcoholism and all the mess associated with it are not glorified but they are, of course, romanticised. But hey, when hasn’t alcoholism been romanticised?