Review: Once and Always
So I love things set in Victorian Era England, I love the time period and the dress and just everything about it pretty much. I also enjoyed reading the Infernal Devices by Cassandra Clare and (although it’s not in England) I always enjoyed watching the flashback scenes to 1864 in the Vampire Diaries. Thank you to the lovely website of Goodreads, without whom, I wouldn’t have found the absolute gem known as Once and Always by Judith McNaught. However, I have read some negative reviews on this book, and although everything in the review makes sense, and I can’t help but agree in some way, I overall really liked the book.
First off, McNaught creates a very real world for a time period in which no one is alive to recount – such as the ‘seasons’ and coming out to society and such. I had no idea that these even happened until I read this book. That’s also what I love about historical fiction; the fact that you can learn things as you indulge in a story.
Anyways, I felt that the personalities and minor characters of the story are well written and fit within the plot well. If I’m being honest, I do love a story where there is hate between the two, but then slowly they end up falling for each other.
The version of the book I (illegally – oops) downloaded didn’t have proper grammar and punctuation or any speech marks at all, and some of the words were repeated and ran together, which made the book a lot more difficult to read than I would’ve liked. However, despite this fact, McNaught has a good style of writing and wasn’t too difficult to understand or too sophisticated.
Moving on to the characters, Jason is described as incredibly hot and desired by most women (aren’t all male protagonists though?). We find that later in the book, he has endured a rough childhood and also a rough first marriage. This therefore, is the reason in which Jason is as cold as he is, and his unwillingness to let Victoria in. However, I did get a little iffy about the amount of times in which Jason got unnecessarily angry at Victoria for the littlest of things – such as the swim in the lake, or trying to lend a hand around the house. Overall, Jason was an asshole, there’s not putting is lightly, but I do like that fact. I love a good asshole in a story, he just can’t be too much of an asshole to handle, and I think that McNaught did a pretty good job.
However, I did love how passionate and dominant Jason was whenever he was with Victoria – especially in the bedroom. When this came to be, I was like:
Anyways, there is actually quite an age gap between Jason and Victoria, him being thirty, she her being only eighteen. To me, that is a huge age gap, but it was quite irrelevant in the story and I’m not even sure why I’m mentioning it here. Moving on to Victoria, she is described as a very beautiful girl (as all female protagonists are, haha), but I found her quite naive. Although she was young, it was clear that she obviously didn’t know much about anything to do with the world – her parents’ relationship for example. Although her hope for Andrew coming for her was kept alive for quite a while, and I think that other readers would find that this is quite cute and devoted, but I just found all the references to Andrew quite annoying, I felt as if she could’ve been more open minded about it all. Victoria is also a determined person; feeling the need to earn her keep and her constant will to not be subject to Jason’s wrath – which is admirable in a way.
Also, can we just take a second to talk about Charles and his meddling? I mean, he announced a betrothal without the knowledge of either party, and he also faked being very sick in order for Jason and Victoria to marry. He also kept Andrew’s letter from Victoria even though she was adamant about going back to America with him. I felt that Charles was a good character in a way, however, he did do some things that I wasn’t fond of – but in all honesty, what character doesn’t?
Overall, I did enjoy the book and the elements within, and the outcome. And I was very excited when I saw that it was the first book in a series, but I was disappointed to learn that the series wasn’t a continuation of Once and Always. Despite my dislikes about a certain few things within the novel, I rate Once and Always a:
