The Sherbrooke Twins (Bride) [Mass Market Paperback]

This book, in short, has the flaws of her other work without any of the charms. These flaws include the strange, stilted dialogue which she seems to feel is endlessly witty (curses using animal parts, characters "hitting each other over the head" with zingers or suggestive asides, male characters insulting female characters' intelligence based on their "womens' parts," etc.) as well as the strange tendency towards sexual violence that Coulter has always been drawn to. Many of her erotic scenes over the years have been, effectively, rapes and the love scene in Sherbrooke Twins is no exception. While a little excess passion once in a while can be interesting, a lot starts looking kind of dark and unhealthy. Why does Coulter think her reader wants her heroes to turn every wedding night into a scary, sticky, sore, demeaning experience for her heroines? It's 2004-- it's okay for female characters, even regency females, to enjoy sex right off the bat now! They don't have to get through a gauntlet of pain and humiliation first. They don't have to get abused by hubby just so we can feel bad for them and then revel with them in hubby's guilty and sincere apology (and his generous peace offering of belated foreplay and tender lovin'). I just don't find that all that sexy time after time. In fact, I find it a little medieval and mysogynistic. Paging Dr. Freud!

You'll also find some overused Coulter phrases in this one, such as the infamous "fat as a stoat." Catherine, a stoat is a weasel. A weasel is a relatively thin animal. Why must you use this expression in every novel? Why the constant comparisons to animals in general? And I have to say, though cat racing is cute, and I love cats, why bring it up in every, single book-- even when there is no actual cat racing of any kind taking place?

Finally there is the problem that this book feels like both the Sherbrooke family annual Christmas letter "Dahling made a 1480 on her SAT's and Ryder got a big promotion at work!..." and an infomercial for the next book-- we're hardly interested in the characters of James and Corrie because they're fairly one-dimensional and we learn relatively little about them due to the fact that we're too busy wondering about Jason and worrying about our old friend Douglas. (And as it turns out, had Douglas ever had the opportunity to read any other Coulter regency, he could have figured out preeetty quickly who the "mole" in his household was-- to call the "twist" in this book unoriginal is no stretch.) That may, in fact, be the crux of the problem: the central crises in The Sherbrooke Twins have much more to do with the secondary characters than the primary ones. James and Corrie could have done with their own personal crisis to overcome, instead of an inherited one. We're a little more curious about Jason and his entirely-new dilemma than Corrie's/James' hand-me-down drama, and maybe I'm cynical but it seems like that's how Coulter meant it to be.

Because of the very leading ending, it seems pretty obvious that we'll be seeing the twins again soon. Maybe we'll actually get to know them (and Coriander) in the next novel, which will be less a sequel to this novel than a tardy conclusion, but I'm not going to rush to buy the book and find out.