Chivalry is Dead: The Travesty that is A Knight in Shining Armor

No matter what time-travel romance I read lately, I just can't seem to hit the right note. Reading A Knight in Shining Armor by Jude Devereux just made me want to hit something, period.

Female readers usually come to romance for (the romance, yes), but also to see female-centric plots with confident and interesting heroines. This was an epic fail on that front. Dougless goes from pleasing one asshole (Robert, the live-in boyfriend who manipulates her for her money) to Nicholas, the ostensible romantic lead. Except she also does everything to please him, even when he treats her like the dirt beneath her shoes. Nicholas never ever forgets the class difference between them, and while they spend close to a hundred pages on a twentieth-century shopping spree, she's conducting the transactions and carrying the bags. She always walks behind him, not beside him, and multiple times she says explicitly how she's struggling to keep up with him. Towards the end, he tries to push her to be the mistress to the woman he will marry. So again- this is not love. This is a side-piece. He does indicate that he has a low opinion of adulterous women. And yet he has no qualms about his own (multiple) infidelities. So, not exactly a chemistry matchup that I was rooting her. In this book, the best case scenario would have been for Dougless to ditch not one but two chauvinistic pigs, and realize her own self-worth. There are some especially cringe-worthy lines, to the tune of "I was just pleasing the wrong person," and Nicholas (the actual love interest, not the "jerk!") saying that he "loves a woman's no, because it usually means yes." !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yeah, so. Seeing red. Now let's top that off with some utter ridiculousness, shall we? Whether it's used as a romantic plot device or not, the concept of time-travel is one of science fiction. Time after time, romance writers fail to recognize this, or at least fail to think that how this supernatural mechanism works in their universe has to make some kind of sense. Here, there's a strange and off-putting mix between it being God's will, and being activated by sexual activity. Call me stupid, but the medieval version of Jesus would not send people back and forward through time to find each other after extramarital affairs. Also, the use of the doppleganger effect to solve any lingering loneliness of the characters is trite. Apparently, it's the outside that counts. As long as the new guy looks like the old guy, I'm sure you'll fall in love with him all over again, or, really, for the first time.

What was once overwhelmingly red coating my vision is now black.

K Rating: 1/5

Holy fucking God. Can someone please do this right???