How to Seduce a Scoundrel
Ms. Dreiling’s latest novel How to Seduce a Scoundrel is only 396 pages long, but to me it seemed endless. By the time I reached the sappy sentence fragment that comprises the last line of the book, I felt as though I had been reading haplessly for days.
The heroine of this turgid tale, Lady Julianne Gatewick, has loved Marc Darcett, Earl of Hawkfield — everyone calls him Hawk — since she was a child. He, much to her dismay, sees her as the little sister of his best friend. Julianne, a twenty-one year old with the maturity of a hormonal teen, is devastated when Hawk announces to the world (while at a ball) that he has absolutely no interest in her as a bride. His rejection leaves Julianne no choice but to pursue him idiotically for the next 300 pages of the novel.
This book has little to recommend it. Julianne is a twit — a twit who is, of course, the most beautiful woman in London. Hawk is a mass of seething contradictions congealed into a hero whose actions seem at best baffling and at worst unethical. The preeminent thing in the novel — and there’s very little competition — is the advice of Hawk’s aunt Hester, a widow with five deceased husbands, who tells Julianne the way to a man’s heart is through his “nether regions.” Julianne takes Hester’s advice and proceeds to spend much of the novel trying to get Hawk to try to bed her. Then, when he is finally dazed with the sort of desire she’s always felt for him, she plans to dump him and thus soothe her wounded pride. This, of course, makes no sense given that she’s loved him for years.
Julianne flirts with Hawk; Hawk kisses her and then regrets it; Hester tells Julianne to persevere; Hawk lies awake at night fantasizing about Julianne and cursing his wayward cock. Intertwined with all this frustrated lust is an unlikely additional plot line in which Julianne anonymously writes a best-selling pamphlet on how to seduce rakes like Hawk. Her insights, often gleaned from Hester’s wisdom, read as though she’d slept her way through the ton — rarely has a dithering naïve virgin had such insight into a rake’s horn-dog psyche.
Neither plot did anything for me. Julianne and Hawk have the requisite hurdles to cross — he has a dark past that prevents him from allowing himself to love — and they take forever to do so. Their relationship moves at a glacial pace and, when it does move forward, it does so with awkward lurches rather than viable change. Julianne and her giggling girlfriends gather together to drink, gossip, and work on Julianne’s treatise and, as they do so, come across as bad extras in a straight to DVD teen movie. Line after line in the book had me gritting my teeth. At one point, Hawk says to Julianne without a trace of irony, “I am bad, Very bad.” He could have easily been talking about this book.
As the book drew to its heavy handed close, I was unsurprised to see that, yes, Hawk learned how to love, Julianne indeed seduced her scoundrel, and Aunt Hester found a new beau. Only the latter made me smile. Well, that, and finally finishing How to Seduce a Scoundrel.