BROUGHAM, n. Even though I read a lot of historical romance, I’m not really up on my horse-drawn vehicles. This one in particular, I didn’t even know how to pronounce. Before we open that can of worms: this is a “one-horse closed carriage, with two or four wheels, for two or four persons” per the OED, and then later the word could refer to an early kind of car, and much later, a Cadillac model.
The brougham is named after Henry Peter Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux, who was Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain in the 1830s, and who designed the first one of these. (Also: an abolitionist!)
His surname is pronounced something like “brew ’em” (US and UK English; Wiktionary’s got audio) or “broom” (UK English), both of which are also perfectly acceptable pronunciations for the vehicle.
But once your name gets attached to an object and lowercased, people are gonna come up with other ways to say it, and that’s what happens here. The vehicle can also be “bro ’em” or, in certain varieties of US English, a single syllable that rhymes with “roam.” Here is an excellent usage example offered to me on Bluesky, and one more.
Anyway, the real point of all this research is to confirm that if you are, say, a fancy rich person in a Sherry Thomas novel, you can get trapped inside one of these things with the person you despise most in the whole world, who is also—somehow—the love of your life.
*slaps roof of brougham* this bad boy can fit so many feelings
And look at that, it’s time to talk about small-r romance, by which I mean Sherry Thomas. (Previously.)
Private Arrangements (m/f, both cis and het, historical) by Sherry Thomas. What am I even gonna say about this 2008 book? One of the all-time greats. It only took me this long to get around to it because the plot involves trying to conceive, which I avoided reading for many years due to trauma. Anyway, if a hot manipulative bitch entrapped me in marriage, I wouldn’t be complaining, but we have to be grateful to the hero of this novel for being just as much of a hot manipulative bitch as his wife, because if these two never hated each other, we’d never get to read about them falling back in love, and that would be a real shame.
This novel has dual timelines—the past when they were young and in love and the present when they’re ten years older and estranged—which is a common form in second-chance romances, but rarely executed with such finesse. Tucked between these chapters is a secondary romance plot starring the heroine’s mother, and all that complexity dovetails perfectly because it’s Sherry Thomas and she can do anything.
Every sentence is a wonder. I had to pause in my reading to exclaim over this book on social media, so here’s a more or less randomly selected sentence to luxuriate in:
Beneath the large Monet that hung above the mantel, two pots of tailed orchids bloomed silently, their fragrance light and sweet.
I spent a long time reciting this to myself. That “silently” is carrying weight. It’s hypallage—the silence of the room is transferred to the orchids—and it perfects the rhythm. Here, Camden returns to his bedroom after a decade away. Gigi, still living in their house, had emptied it while he was gone and has ordered it restored upon his return. She hasn’t stinted—there’s a Monet!—but even with blooming orchids, the one live thing in the space, it feels sepulchral. Camden’s presence in the room cannot undo ten years of his absence.
It’s a little like Gigi put an air freshener in there to cover up the smell of mess. It’s not working.
Even with two romances, one of which has a dual timeline, the most ambitious element of Private Arrangements is that Thomas lets Gigi and Camden be furious and cruel to each other, something lesser romance writers (me, but also pretty much all of us) fear to do. And still I always genuinely believed not only that they were in love, but that they were the only people who could make each other happy. They love each other’s good qualities, but they really dig each other’s flaws. Bitch4Bitch—that’s the good stuff.
More seriously, it’s basic, in romance, to set about answering the question of why or how people fall in love; the harder question, one many books never dare to address, is how people make amends. When you hurt someone, how can you fix it? To be honest, most of the time I have no idea. But Sherry Thomas knows.
After I read Private Arrangements, I couldn’t let go, so I reread His At Night, which is another set of hot manipulative bitches falling for each other. He’s a spy who has been pretending to suffer from a head injury for years so everyone thinks it’s a genuine accident when he’s caught in places he shouldn’t be, and also he’s such an insufferable dolt in public that no one believes him capable of schemes, not even his loving and patient brother; she’s been imprisoned by her monstrously abusive uncle so long that she can now smile convincingly even while dying inside and is so desperate to get out of her uncle’s house that even marriage to an insufferable dolt can be borne. Propulsive and funny. They both get very drunk before they have sex; this is not a historical romance where characters do informed consent. The sex is emotionally charged, thrilling and agonizing and fucked up, exactly as it’s meant to be, and it was refreshing to read something written so fearlessly. After they figure out how to stop lying to each other and everyone else, they get better at sex. Also, the heroine defeating her villainous uncle is very satisfying. This one, like Private Arrangements, has some late nineteenth-century art history in it—some creepy Symbolist paintings!—which is an extra little treat for me.
I tried to read a contemporary romance novel after that, but the main characters were both nice, reasonable people who basically had a scheduling issue, and I just couldn’t. Nothing wrong with nice, reasonable people—I aspire to be one myself. But I would make a boring romance novel character. In this moment of Northern Hemisphere darkness, I only want to read books where the main characters are in actual mortal peril and/or feel like they’re gonna die of feelings. Preferably both. So I had to pick up another Sherry Thomas. You get it.
Beguiling the Beauty is a delicious antidote if you’re suffering a surfeit of nice, reasonable romance protagonists with mundane problems. These two obsessive freaks make outrageously bad choices. They’re spiteful and horny and make a catastrophic hash of something that could have been simple, all qualities I prize greatly in fictional characters. The hero becomes infatuated with the heroine after a glance when they’re both 19, yearns for years while she’s married, (mis)learns from a single conversation with her shitty husband that she’s heartless, believes every terrible false rumor about her—a second marriage? so soon after the first? what a gold digger!—then publicly humiliates her at a lecture he’s giving on natural selection. As vengeance for this humiliation, she follows him on board an ocean liner, wearing a veil and pretending to be someone else, seduces him while forbidding him to see her face, then abandons him after he’s fallen in love with her. Also, and this is very important to me, the initial shipboard seduction takes place during a storm. I love historical romance with my whole heart.
On this stormy night, a bright if quivery light still cascaded from the well, its source the large, silver-branched electric chandelier that swung with the pitch and roll of the ocean liner. Had Venetia arrived an hour earlier, the sound of silverware and muted laughter would have greeted her, the familiar murmurs of privilege and satisfaction. But now the dining saloon was largely deserted.
Deserted, quivery, electric, stormy, pitching and rolling… there could not be a more perfect place to embark on your vengeance seduction. I relished every big dramatic moment of this.
This is a tiny spoiler, but I was delighted that the heroine’s second marriage was in fact a lavender one. She marries a gay friend; he protects her from financial ruin and she pretends to have an affair with his lover to explain why that man is always at their house. Straight historical romances are often very straight, so it feels good to see even minor queer characters who aren’t jokes or villains. I realize this is a low standard, but plenty of books don’t meet it.
I will note, in case you’re me in the past and might need this warning, that the heroine of this one believes herself infertile—and her first husband was awful to her about it—but, in classic historical romance fashion, she just needs the right man to get her pregnant. I never love this development in a book, but I dealt with it.
So anyway, I immediately got in the library queue for more. I promise my 2025 newsletters will review other authors, and that things will get gayer next time, but for now, this was what I needed.
That’s all for this time. I’ll be back in your inbox on January 26.