Mistrial by Desire

[psocoptera]

Trial By Desire is the Courtney Milan book I've liked least of all her books. I was keen to read it after meeting the leads in Proof By Seduction, and I thought the idea of a hero who's struggling with what we today might identify as something in the bipolar disorder family was very interesting. But, unfortunately, in practice, he mostly came across as a dick - he believes that sleeping in the freezing cold helps him, like, practice the strength of will to deal with his mood disorder, and so he won't even discuss or consider whether any sort of compromise might be possible so that his wife can sleep with him without being freezing and miserable. She gives up and buys heavier nightgowns and stockings but I was still expecting the resolution of the book to involve people getting to NOT BE FUCKING FREEZING and the fact that it didn't made me feel like it broke the romance-novel compact and didn't deliver a happy ending. There's another scene where he wakes her up in her own room hours before she had wanted to get up, yanks the covers off of her so she's, again, freezing, and insists she rush through getting ready to go out, for reasons he won't tell her. I know some romance readers love that kind of high-handed stuff but UGH I just wanted her to tell him to go fuck himself. Possibly I have extremely strong feelings around cold and sleep, like, seriously, romantic happily-ever-after love for me is a warm and cozy feeling and if the physical sensations evoked by your book are coldness and exhaustion (oh, and pain, there's a really horrible walking on a broken leg bit of heroism), that is just fundamentally incompatible with me feeling the romance. This was Milan's second book and so maybe it's not surprising that it's her weakest - I think the first book had a stronger hook, and since then it's pretty much been all uphill - and even a bad Milan book is still a pretty good romance novel. Oh, also the cover is *terrible* - the newer edition has a much better cover, but if you do a google search for "trial by desire" you should be able to see it. What even is going on there, is he supposed to look like he's part lion? Because there is something really weird about his face, he looks like some sort of feral, dirty-faced beast man about to rip out her throat with his teeth or something, and this is not urban fantasy, that is not what's going on here.