This guest review comes from Lisa! A longtime romance aficionado and frequent commenter to SBTB, Lisa is a queer Latine critic with a sharp tongue and lots of opinions. She frequently reviewed at All About Romance and Women Write About Comics, where she’s on staff, and you can catch her at @thatbouviergirl on Twitter. There, she shares good reviews, bracing industry opinions and thoughtful commentary when she’s not on her grind looking for the next good freelance job.
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Emma Gets Even was like a time machine trip back to the 1980s for me, when I snuck my great aunt’s bodice rippers and then started building a collection of my own as an adolescent and teenager. I disliked degrading romances even then, when they were a prevalent form of storytelling, and I like them less now that I can get more nuanced storytelling even in my D-level reads. We have a great heroine here, some mostly-incredible writing (I want to see something from the author that’s anything but, well, this plot), and both are wasted here because the hero is, to put it frankly, a great big heaping moldering pile of festering trash with something gushy stuck at the bottom of the pile. I couldn’t root for the romance at all, even if our heroine is an imperfect person herself.
Drury Lane actress Emma Witworth is a widowed second-generation performer who experiences lust at first sight when she sees rake and earldom heir Anthony Phillips across a crowded room during an after-show society party. He plies her with Shakespearean quotes and flattery and soon they’re en flagrante delicto in a not-so-private room. Her theatrical career is ruined when her powerful mentor, Dotty, catches her in the middle of a makeout session with him. Dotty makes sure that Emma’s dismissed from her position.
Emma doesn’t know that Dotty and Anthony had already made a bet regarding Anthony’s seduction of Emma, with Dotty believing her protege would resist his advances and Anthony confident he could swive his way through any woman thrown at him. Emma finds out and is incensed because their bet means that her hope of gaining a wealthy male patron is befouled. Anthony promptly disappears into a haze of alcohol and wild sex. Emma, fallen from an actress to a scullery maid, begins plotting her revenge upon Anthony.
And so begins Emma’s determined ruination of Anthony.
She infiltrates the Stoics Club, a place where independent sex workers ply their trades and he and his friends take their pleasure, so she can suss out his social vulnerabilities while climbing her way back up her own social ladder. She plots a theft of an accounting ledger filled with the names of all of Anthony’s allegedly-reputable friends. She takes on a variety of guises to get closer to him and his associates. And in the process, she unwittingly works for an evil man who abused a courtesan so appallingly, Anthony takes up her plight among his fellow noblemen and demands justice for her. This is meant to make him somewhat honorable. It doesn’t.
As Emma chases Anthony and Anthony is frustrated by his confused feelings for these many Emmas, banter and fellowship blossom. Can true love somehow follow?
Let me set a scene here: we’re first introduced to Emma and Anthony via a moment where she is play acting as another woman as part of her revenge scheme. He thinks he recognizes her from a past assault upon his person, and tries to force himself upon her, declaring that the mark she left on his thigh makes him think of her whenever he fucks another woman and woe, he cannot swive at his former Olympian levels. He doesn’t know that it was another woman who stabbed him at the time and robbed him and his friend of something very precious. He thinks it’s Emma, and he knows that since his encounters with Emma, he cannot think or bone anyone else. He’s very upset about this.
This scene sets up the ugly slap-slap-kiss-kiss relationship that lingers between them. Immediately afterward, I was sucked back into the past so all of the backstory could be explained. But I spent so much time back there that once the plot returned to the present, I’d learned enough that I didn’t really want to follow them anywhere. He may have a “decent” reason for treating Emma so roughly, but my opinion of Anthony was poor from the get go.
The sad thing is that I really liked Emma as a heroine. She’s tough, determined, plucky, scrappy – and pigheaded, single-minded and a little selfish. She’s complicated in her quest for revenge, which made her a fascinating person to me. She’s also not ashamed of her own libido. She’ll use her body to get closer to her objective and it means nothing to her. I liked that kind of mercenary coolness in a heroine. Her ruthlessness hides a soft person: Emma is clever, intellectual, and interested in the arts (though when the book veers into her and Anthony discoursing on this topic, they sound like they’re huffing their own farts).
She even stabs a stalker to death!
But I really, really couldn’t stand Anthony. On top of being louche uselessness personified for roughly half the book, he’s a bitter fatalist whose Deep Intelligence is shown off by the narrative with literary quotes and musical nods. We’re told he knows multiple languages, is self-taught in subjects like astronomy, and secretly has all of these intellectual pursuits he enjoys when he’s not tupping sex workers in multiple combinations. But this intelligence is mainly displayed through his name dropping artists or musicians or whistling Vivaldi or the like.
Meanwhile, his actions are that of a slack-jawed fuckwit. He does nothing more than wager, drink and fuck his way through England, going from pleasure club to pleasure club and adventure to adventure. This might be fun in another book, but here it just repeats and repeats and becomes boring. I LIKED this grotty world I was plunged into, and the imperfections of the hero and heroine – but Anthony’s Other Qualities kept getting in my way.
Of course, he’s got daddy issues. Of course, he’s only slightly better than his father because hey, at least he doesn’t tolerate members of the pleasure club physically beating the courtesans. So he’ll hump anything that moves, but at least he won’t assault it.
Unless it’s Emma, whom he will knock down and force kisses upon and demand sex from even as she kicks him in the dick. Anthony believes himself more noble than he is because he sought revenge for the maligned sex worker by having sex with the abusive lord’s wife, then stealing the lord’s heraldic flags as an act of revenge (I was amused that said heraldic flag had the same slogan that Anonymous continues to use).
Now I don’t mind a rake being a rake; I wouldn’t even mind him fucking other women in the book, up to a certain demarcation point. But Emma has instantly conquered his stalwart male appendage, because early in the book he tries to participate in an orgy, but he can’t enjoy it because, again, Emma’s tongue has ruined him for all other women, oh, no, what is wrong with his willy?
On top of this…
Anthony and Fitzwilliam get stabbed near their bollocks (an act I heartily applauded) and nearly die as a result of this misadventure. Anthony later sees Emma naked while she’s wearing the same wig as well, and he STILL DOESN’T FIGURE OUT THEY WERE TWO DIFFERENT WOMEN FOR A GOOD YEAR PLUS after she explains it to him. Anthony has rocks in his brain, big ol’ boulders.
This is the origin of the scar from the opening scene. Anthony now has a mark on his thigh from being stabbed, and seeing it makes him hard because he thinks of this woman – who he thinks is Emma – blowing him.
True love, y’all! And none of them learn a damn thing from their experiences.They’re still wenching and drinking months later.
I also fear the narrative believes that his friends are charming on some level; they most assuredly are not.
Of course, Anthony Finds His Inner Commitmentaholic about halfway through and decides to court one of Emma’s identities, but this is going on way too deep into the book for him to recover my esteem. When she dumps him, he decides that he can CHANGE, baby.
While he immediately goes back to wenching the second she dumps him, he does decide to turn around several character flaws:
Anthony just fucks his way through the book, and if a hero is humping another woman – let alone doing so with his friend beside him – I am quite disinclined to disbelieve in a book’s HEA.
To quote Emma,
“You, Anthony Philips, are a dissipated, drunken, soft, spoiled boy. I hope your cock falls off!”
And this is the man she ends up spending the rest of her life with.
Now I don’t want a candy sweet world where people aren’t allowed to be mean to each other. I don’t want a world where people are perfect and flawless. I DO want, at bare minimum, a heroine and a hero who are not fucking stupid as posts and have at least one redeeming quality. Emma did – several in fact! Anthony did not. There is nothing worth recommending Anthony to anyone, no matter how pretty he is presented or how abruptly earnest his attempted courting of Emma proves to be, or how good a swordsman he is.
We’re told again and again Anthony has integrity but I couldn’t tell you where it is. Even Emma tries to convince herself and the reader that he’s a sad, lonely boy who’s somehow really socially awkward and who just needs some love. I didn’t believe it.
Yet the writing style here is magnetic; there are some lovely passages in which Emma talks about her acting craft, how she’s inspired by those who came before her to be better. I found this scummy world compelling and fascinating…
A: No man of that period would phrase it that way, or care, or know if it’s even true until he was falling down with the Pox.
B: This man has been getting condom-free blowjobs and fuckings from sex workers for years but now he cares?! This woman KNOWS he’s getting condom-free blowjobs and fuckings! She’s seen him!
C: He does not pull out the first time but he does the second. And presumably the third and fourth (!!) times.
D: THIS HAPPENS IN A GRAVEYARD.
In case you’re wondering about the ending:
Anthony himself ends as a “champion for indigent females,” raising funds through a charity boxing match in which he gets his face pounded in. Romantic!
In short: it’s a shame we’re stuck with Anthony.
I desperately want to try something else by Josie Johns because she can write, and moved me greatly, and caused me to have emotions. I really do want to read more of her work. But Anthony ruined Emma Gets Even for me beyond any hope of redemption, proving that a ferocious, complex heroine cannot alone save a romance.
