My first Miranda Neville - this was a skimmable read for me. I'm going to try some other books by her because I think I chose the wrong book to start with. ( )

Miranda Neville is turning into one of my favorite authors. This was an unpredictable Regency, the two protagonists sufficiently different from the stereotypical hero and heroine that I was enthralled.

First, Sebastian Iverley, once known as Owlvery to his cousin Blakeney, has totally ignored the female sex until he catches a glimpse of Diana's pink stockings.He's smitten and clueless but he's a fast learner.

Lady Diana Fanshawe has no need to marry, she's wealthy and widowed. She's pursuing Blakeney, more out of habit than desire, when Sebastian appears on the scene, upsetting her well-laid plans.

Seeing the two of them bumble their way into a romantic relationship and then marriage is an unexpected pleasure. ( )

RATING: 2.5 stars

My introduction to Miranda Neville. Could have been better, that is for sure. The entire plot was a bit contrived and the characters were childish. I was more interested in the secondary characters (Minerva, especially was a great character... please can we have a book about her?), Diana was quite lackluster by comparison and Sebastian was an idiot. :P

Basically I liked the first part, was annoyed when the whole "revenge" thing started and thought it improved a bit by the end (after the marriage).

Overall an ok book. Not enough to make me quit the author entirely, but the premise deserved more. Not High School! Victorian edition. :P ( )

The main male character is a douchebag, plain and simple. ( )

A one-sentence summary of THE DANGEROUS VISCOUNT, in the hero's own words: "Diana and he were adults and both had engaged in antics that were more or less reprehensible."

I'd heard so many good things about Miranda Neville. She has a reputation for writing a more sophisticated and mature sort of romance, and I saw signs of that: she writes about book collecting with a confidence that suggests an amateur's true passion (I was convinced, anyhow) & she describes the subtle warfare of snubbing, one-upsmanship, and veiled dislike as couched in outwardly polite, bland conversation as well as any author I've encountered in the genre.

But. Everything else. Yikes. This is a book about awful people treating one another badly, and I can't think of anything less romantic.

First we have our hero, Sebastian. He has a pretty tragic backstory, abandoned by his mother, raised by an embittered uncle, unsocialized, little loved. Really, poor kid. I felt for him. Unfortunately, these life experiences primed him to absorb his uncle's profound misogyny and he's grown up into an angry, disgruntled woman-hater. He's one part adorably geeky virgin hero and then three parts bitter jerkhole who hangs onto his childhood grudges well into adulthood.

Unfortunately, Sebastian is the more likable of our two protagonists. The heroine, Diana, is also in her mid-twenties, and also living according to a set of life-ambitions she drew up as a preteen. In her case, she comes from a warm, loving, interesting but somewhat ramshackle and eccentric family. As a young, wealthy widow, she chooses to distance herself from their example and speaks about her wonderful family with more than a touch of shame. She wants to be fashionable. She wants to wear the pretty clothes and hang out with the pretty people and marry the popular kid who she had a crush on as a girl.

I'm just going to say that aside from all the awful stuff that Sebastian and Diana do to one another, I have a hard time attaching to protagonists who haven't matured beyond the mindset they developed beween the ages of 10 and 15. Both of them are stuck, and they remain stuck for so long that I never believed that either one of them really grew or changed by the end.

Anyhow. So then there's the actual plot of the book. It starts with some interesting reversals of traditional romance tropes. So, for example, it's our heroine who makes a bet about sexual conquest: she wagers 500 pounds that she can convince Sebastian to kiss her. She seduces him and he falls hard...for her looks. Sebastian's interest in Diana at the beginning is entirely physical, but so intense that he contemplates marrying her.

Until he finds out about the wager, realizes that Diana had toyed with his emotions to make a fool of him (this is exactly what she did - fashion-obsessed Diana happily mocks awkward, bespectacled Sebastian in the early chapters), and vows revenge. In order to obtain his revenge, our hero undergoes the ugly-duckling-into-a-swan makeover traditionally reserved for heroines. He gets new clothes and takes some lessons in small talk and soon enough he's the toast of the town.

And that's how the book derails for me. It starts with shallow Diana doing something cruel, and then bitter Sebastian gets his turn to do something cruel, and as in a true blood feud, each act of vengeance only spurs the injured party to a more vindictive retaliation.

Towards the end of the book, Diana and Sebastian shift gears and try to really build a relationship, but unfortunately, they're still the same people they were at the beginning: shallow and bitter, respectively. Sebastian, in particular, displays such poverty of spirit that I found him repulsive at exactly the moment when I needed to believe he was overcoming his faults.

I might try another Neville to see if I find her more palatable when she's working with a different set of characters. The trope reversals and the social sophistication interested me. The protagonists, with their meanness and deep immaturity, did not. ( )