One of the things I love most about romance twitter is periodically getting swept up in other people’s enthusiasm for a book, to the point where I abandon all plans and start something new. I can’t do this with the reading I do for work, so I try to allow myself to do it as often as possible with the reading I do for fun.
Which is how I ended up in the middle of Laura Kinsale’s For My Lady’s Heart. And reading over and over again this set of lines from the first time the hero sees the heroine.
“He could not tear his look from her hand as it hovered near her lips; he saw her slight smile for her ladies – so cold, cold… she was bright cold, he was ferment. He couldn’t comprehend her face. He hardly knew if she was comely or unremarkable. He could not at that moment have described her features, any more than he could have looked straight at the sun to describe it.”
Laura Kinsale, For My Lady’s Heart.
We talk about meet-cutes a lot, Aarya over at SBTB has coined the phrase meet-disaster… but what even is this? Meet-overthrow? Meet-devastation? I don’t know, but I love it
The bolded part just *sings* in my brain. This use of “ferment” as a noun is somewhat uncommon, but part of what I’m loving about this book (which in uses a bit of Middle English in dialogue) is how it makes you feel the meaning of things you can’t always properly define. A bit like our poor hero Ruck in this scene….
I’ll be back with my next close reading in about a week. It’s a deep dive into the wedding scene from Courtney Milan’s The Governess Affair (it’s free and short, so you can totally read ahead). Weddings involve three things: saying yes, pledging forever, and starting something new. I’m going to talk about how Milan writes a wedding that turns all three of these upside-down, and by doing so reimagines consent outside of traditional patriarchal frameworks.
And who doesn’t love that?
Close Reading Romance 