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Flowers from the Storm (1992)

af Laura Kinsale

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1,0065420,453 (4.2)91
The Duke of Jervaulx was brilliant and dangerous. Considered dissolute, reckless, and extravagant, he was transparently referred to as the ?D of J? in scandal sheets, where he and his various exploits featured with frequency. But sometimes the most womanizing rake can be irresistible, and even his most casual attentions fascinated the sheltered Maddy Timms, quiet daughter of a simple mathemat… (mere)
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Viser 1-5 af 50 (næste | vis alle)
additional review think-y thoughts: I have to get this out of the way - My favorite character in this story is Maddy (and her father). I've read some real bullshit takes on Maddy and her character arc. I'm sorry, who was it that wouldn't bow to the king of England? Oh that's right Maddy-fuck-your-aristocratic-worldy-nonsense Timms (Maddy would NEVER say or think that lol because she is a better person than I could ever be). So when people call her annoying or pious, I'm calling it sexism and bullshit. I do not know what romance readers want anymore when they say "I like strong heroines! Just not any of the ones that are actually strong or steadfast!"

I am uncertain about how I feel in regard to the romance between Maddy and Christian - it felt rushed? Which sounds weird considering this book is over 500 pages. I guess the romance-y moments didn't trigger the romance-y feelings within me until the last few chapters of the book and that is where it felt rushed (to me). Romantic, yes! But rushed (for me). And look! This is a me issue! I have never connected strongly and emotionally with Kinsale's prose. And I do not say that to mean she writes "bad prose" rather, her style does not move me the same way something from Judith Ivory or Sherry Thomas or Patricia Gaffney moves me. I am often impressed by Kinsale's technical achievement (and I was here!) but it just never takes me further than a deep appreciation for her craft.
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initial reactionary review: This was such an emotional ride for me! I was anxious and incapable of sitting still then entire time and I have more thoughts about why this ended up a 4 star read for me and not a 5 star - all of which doesn't really matter because this is an important book and I am glad I read it! But those thoughts will have to wait until after the hihos! ( )
  s_carr | Feb 25, 2024 |
Audio and kindle

I'm like a 3.5 here. I liked a lot of things about it but I didn't fall in love with either main character the way that I want to in a romance. This had a lot of hype from romance folks on Twitter and it couldn’t quite live up to that….buy it’s still pretty good for a 30 year old book.

It’s essentially beauty and the beast. The handsome, rakish, Duke is humbled by a stoke and our demure Quaker lady becomes his nurse and helps bring the gentleman back out. There’s a lot of conflict and a bunch of baddies trying to cause trouble for them. They have a lot of misunderstandings and arguments.

A lot of the book is told from his POV and weirdly it helped me understand the stroke recovery of my Senator (John Fetterman) who made a lot of news with his auditory processing problems after his stroke. I was already sympathetic but this shed more light on it and helped me imagine what it must feel like. A surprising bit of insight from a romance.

I think the audio is good but warn that it’s a difficult one because so much of it is his frustrated, jumbled, mix of words as he struggles to understand people and to talk and I can imagine that It could come off as super annoying.

I also don’t know much about Quakers and they have a lot more rules than I thought they did. I appreciate some aspects of religion (I’m a lapsed catholic myself) but I also really hate what organized religion does to women by making them feel so ashamed of falling in love. ( )
  hmonkeyreads | Jan 25, 2024 |
Very good, duke has a stroke and gets committed to an asylum, but his salvation comes from a Quaker woman who falls in love with him. ( )
  msmattoon | Aug 24, 2023 |
what a brilliant book. ( )
  aeryn0 | Jul 23, 2023 |
Flowers From the Storm is a stand-alone, historical, Regency romance that tells the story of Christian Langland, Duke of Jervaulx, and kind Quaker nurse, Archimedea “Maddy” Timms. Christian is widely known as a brilliant mathematician but also a dissolute rake, who lavishly indulges in worldly pleasures. Maddy is devout in her faith and the daughter of another equally brilliant mathematician who has been working on a new formula with Christian. The two meet when Christian and Maddy’s father present a paper together at an academic gathering and then have dinner at Christian’s home afterward. There, Christian makes note of Maddy’s beauty, while she thinks him a wicked man. The very next morning, Christian is involved in a duel, during which he collapses on the field, having had an apoplexy (what we would commonly refer to now as a stroke). He barely survived and now has limited verbal function and violent episodes, so his family has him committed to a mental asylum, where he is mistreated and feels helpless until Maddy comes along. Her cousin runs the asylum and she has just started working there, when she chances to run across Christian in his cell. She understands what he’s trying to communicate when no one else does, and believing she’s had an Opening (or calling), she convinces her cousin to allow her to be Christian’s nurse, even though it’s considered unorthodox. Slowly she begins to make progress toward helping him recover, hoping to prepare him to go before a judge who will decide whether he’s sane enough to actually be a duke anymore. Although the hearing doesn’t go well, it leaves them with a small window of opportunity, which Christian’s aunt hopes to exploit to quickly marry him off to a suitable bride so that he can impregnate her with an heir. However, Christian doesn’t want just any woman, he wants only Maddy, and although Maddy isn’t supposed to marry outside her faith, when her back is against the wall after a series of wild adventures, she makes the impetuous decision to do just that. But being wed to a duke and even falling in love him doesn’t mean that she’ll ever feel comfortable in his opulent world.

The story opens with Christian in bed with his mistress who is pregnant with his child, but he doesn’t seem overly concerned that said child will end up being claimed by another man, namely her husband. This basically shows the sort of person he is, and it’s the husband returning home early that leads to the duel at which Christian collapses. Afterward, his family essentially turns against him, with his devoutly religious mother believing it’s his rakish ways that have caused this calamity and his sisters and their husbands only concerned with whether he’ll be able to continue providing them with a never-ending stream of money. Add to that the fact that he can barely speak, and even then, only in what amounts to gibberish to most ears, and Christian feels very alone. When people can’t understand him, it also causes frustration and anger, which makes him lash out violently, resulting in his family having him committed and petitioning the court to declare him insane. Then along comes his Maddygirl who becomes a lifeline to him. She doesn’t believe that he’s actually mad and patiently takes the time to try to understand his muddled attempts at communication. However, following the debacle of a hearing, Christian’s she-dragon aunt, who’s at least somewhat on his side—though for her own reasons—gives him two options: marry and produce an heir quickly before the next hearing or go back to the asylum. Since he would rather die than go back, he agrees to a hasty wedding, but ultimately it’s only Maddy that he wants. After all but kidnapping her, and with the help of his two best friends, they go on an adventure, during which Maddy is finally persuaded to wed him. But convincing her to share his bed and stay with him forever when everything about his lifestyle goes against her beliefs will prove challenging.

I have to admit that Christian is a unique character to the romance genre and for that reason alone I appreciated him. I’ve read other romance heroes suffering from physical afflictions, but I can’t recall any who’d had a stroke and couldn’t communicate, and I can only think of one other that had been committed to an asylum. As one might expect, it isn’t a walk in the park. Even in a facility like the one depicted in this story that was adequately staffed and run by a Quaker, the patients, especially ones deemed violent like Christian, were locked up in cells and treated abominably by the orderlies. Of course, since little was known back then about mental illness, patients like Christian were often misdiagnosed as mad and much of what passed for “treatment” was also abusive. For this reason and because all of his family except his aunt seemed eager to have him declared insane, I sympathized with him a great deal. I also understood in the beginning that many of his violent outbursts were the product of frustration and anger over not being understood and possibly some damage to the part of the brain that controls inhibitions. However, even after he begins to recover, he sometimes still lashes out. There’s even a moment where he accidentally injures Maddy while trying to hit someone else, and while a part of me understood why he did it, it still made a me a little uncomfortable. He does eventually say that Maddy makes him want to be a better man, and gradually he does start to make strides in a more positive direction, but there’s still an arrogance about him that made him a little hard to like at times. One other thing I appreciated about him was his mathematical genius. That only comes into play a few times, though, and I would have enjoyed seeing more of it.

Maddy is a devout Quaker woman who always follows the rules of her faith. The first time she meets Christian, she doesn’t really like him much and thinks he’s a wicked man. However, when she sees him reduced to the vulnerable state he’s in at her cousin’s asylum, she can’t help but feel for him. After seeking the Light, she feels that she’s being led to become his nurse and manages to convince her cousin to allow it. At first, she’s a little afraid of Christian’s violent outbursts, but gradually she comes to trust that he won’t hurt her and makes progress on helping him recover. However, it’s not quite enough to prove to a judge that he isn’t insane. Knowing that Christian would do anything to avoid going back to the asylum, Maddy helps his aunt with the hasty wedding plans, which go awry when he runs away with her in tow. He tries to convince her to marry him, trusting that she would never send him back, but although she has feelings for him by this time, she doesn’t think that she should marry “a man of the world.” Eventually she capitulates, because she’s fallen in love with him and thinks it’s the best way to help him, which is what she still feels is her calling. But when she realizes that the affluence of his station goes against everything she’s been taught as a Quaker, she doesn’t think she can ever fit in his world, even if they can pull off making everyone accept that he isn’t insane.

Maddy is a simple woman who doesn’t care about wealth or position. She only cares about Christian’s well-being and making sure that his family doesn’t railroad him back into the asylum. For that reason alone, I thought she was the perfect person for him and I never doubted that she loved him. However, sometimes I felt like her religious beliefs started to get in the way of this being a truly heart-stopping story, at times making it feel more like a Christian inspirational romance even though it clearly isn’t. I recently read another book in which a Quaker woman ended up marrying “a man of the world” and it didn’t lead to anywhere near this much conflict of both the internal and external variety. I know a lot of unexpected baggage got dumped on Maddy near the end, too, but I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed with a choice she makes at that point. I begrudgingly admit that it led to an emotional conclusion, but still it was a little frustrating for my tender heart. As for Maddy’s insistence that she couldn’t be both a Quaker and a duchess, while on some level that was true, I couldn’t help agreeing with Christian’s aunt when she confronted her about that. So while I did like Maddy, I didn’t end up loving her the way I have with many other kindhearted, caregiver-type heroines.

For years, I’ve been hearing rave reviews for Flowers From the Storm, and if the sheer number of romance-author blurbers this book has are any indication, it’s clearly been well-received within the genre. I’ve personally had mixed results with other Laura Kinsale books I’ve read in the past. There have only been a couple and while one received four stars from me like this one did, the other only rated a meh on my scale. Therefore, I went into reading Flowers From the Storm not really having any clue how it might pan out. I had hope that it might live up to all the hype for me, but ultimately I’d have to say that while I liked it and thought it was a good story, I didn’t end up loving it like many other readers have. Part of it might be that Ms. Kinsale has a more literary quality to her writing style that IMHO doesn’t lend itself well to the high emotions I expect from a romance novel. I also thought the book had an uneven pace, with parts of it kind of plodding along before something exciting happens, then it’s right back to that languid pace until the next lively moment. At a chunky 553 pages, I couldn’t help but feel that perhaps it drug on a little too long. Another thing that isn’t entirely to my taste is that Ms. Kinsale really leans into the angst, conflict, and drama in her stories. I normally love a good angsty romance, but her books take it a little further than most others I’ve read. While this one didn’t depress me like one of her other books did, it does have a rather heavy feel throughout. I do, however, give her credit for writing a very lovely ending for the story. While it may seem like I’ve given the book a strong critique, I did, as I mentioned earlier, appreciate the uniqueness of the story elements. I also applaud her for depicting the reality of mental health issues of the time and the conditions inside asylums. While it didn’t officially receive keeper status from me, I would still recommend Flowers From the Storm to anyone looking for a romance read that’s a little outside the norm. ( )
  mom2lnb | Apr 16, 2023 |
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tilføjet af AoifeT | RedigerDear Author, Jeannie (Apr 19, 2019)
 

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The Duke of Jervaulx was brilliant and dangerous. Considered dissolute, reckless, and extravagant, he was transparently referred to as the ?D of J? in scandal sheets, where he and his various exploits featured with frequency. But sometimes the most womanizing rake can be irresistible, and even his most casual attentions fascinated the sheltered Maddy Timms, quiet daughter of a simple mathemat

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