Midsummer Moon by Laura Kinsale

I am amazing myself this summer by actually reading books off my TBR pile - including Kinsale's Midsummer Moon, which I bought a few weeks ago.

It's an unusual book, which is usual for Kinsale, who is an unpredictable writer. It's about Merlin, a female absent-minded genius inventor, and the stuffy duke who falls in love with her, amidst intrugue and family drama and lots of other stuff.

Other stuff, aside, really - this book is about Merlin, and Merlin alone. Which is strange, because she is easily the most inaccessible and contradictory character in the book. She is portrayed as a brilliant inventor, but so very absent-minded that she has no social skills and wonders if one can take a post-chaise to Afghanistan. This is fine if played for gentle laughs, but is unsettling in a heroine, the central heart and soul of a book.

Wandering into disturbing territory is her childlike innocence of sex. Really, wouldn't a woman of scientific bent, with unlimited access to books and educational material, have an inkling of how sexual reproduction works? The scene in which the hero actually has to explain that what they've done is where babies come from not only squicked me out, it stretched my suspension of disbelief.

Still, when Kinsale is on, she's on, as when she describes Merlin's invented flying machine:

Like a montrous white bird it appeared, dwarfing Shelby and the crowd below it, an immense pale shape that loomed for an instant on the horizon and then resolved into wings as the thing exploded into full view, launched from the hill's crest to mount the air... It seemed to hover, like a monstrous demonic angel, casting a shadow that rippled over the crowd and sailed across the trees and lawn. A taut rope, a flimsy string at this distance, connected it for another moment with Shelby's racing mount, and then that fell loose, leaving the thing free to soar as the stallion shied and came to a lathered halt.

Ransom, the hero, who is watching this scene, shows his terror in nearly every packed sentence. "Monstrous", "dwarfing", "exploded", "launched", and of course "monstrous demonic angel" put across the unbearable tension. He sees the rope as a "flimsy string", not strong enough to hold the machine, which is repeatedly referred to in horror as "the thing". Neat turns of phrase like "resolved into wings" and "a lathered halt", as well as great verbs like "rippled" and "sailed" and "shied" fill out each sentence, letting them explode like small strings of fireworks. This is the kind of treat Laura Kinsale gives you when you read her closely.

In the end, I liked Merlin after all. Her internal journey, to keep her passion and her individuality while falling in love, was an interesting one. (On the minus side, however, I wasn't as enamoured of Ransom's use of deception to manipulate her more than once - a device Kinsale used, though less heavily, in Flowers from the Storm).

And I had some sympathy when I got back some contest scoresheets, in which I didn't final not because of my writing, but because one of the judges didn't like my heroine and marked me down. "I dislike your heroine," the judge sniffed, "and would not care to read about her further."

Well, then, to each her own. Not every heroine is going to be liked in this world. Even the brilliant ones.