September 2023 reread: stayed up all night rereading and Lemonade is just as effectively terrifying the second time around!

This was excruciating to read and yet I couldn't stop. ( )

what a completely impossible task to try and speak my thoughts on this book!! all my feelings are all jumbled up but i'll try my best to be sort of concise lol. spoilers to follow!!!




Christopher is a completely vile and infantile and sad man. Traumatized at a very young age by the death of his mother, it is his life's mission to avenge her death. With the knowledge of who his sire is, and the help of his cousin, Christopher spends 13 some years fostering a plan to humiliate (and then kill) his father. As an adult, Christopher has had 20 years to harbor a deep resentment and coldness for everyone near him. (A con-man himself and he immediately judges and condemns Anna as a "social climber"!) Hypocrisy is second-nature to him, and it's not really within his capabilities to think twice before passing judgement, especially when Anna is involved. And so, within a single night poor Anna's fate is sealed. A spilled lemonade and her subsequent revenge is all it takes for Christopher to become obsessed. (spoiler: this is a terrible thing for Anna!) Like I said, Christopher is an incredibly immature man - who could have raised him to handle his feelings better? - and his revenge plans begin to unravel pretty quickly as he focuses too much attention on humiliating Anna. Upon cornering her in the library at a party, Chris forces her to bow to him and apologize for her rudeness towards him. This is the first time we really see the lengths Christopher will go to force submission from her. Her terror of him becomes complete, and after this night she tries and fails to avoid him.

Daniel is Christopher's half brother, who is (kind of surprisingly?) in love with Anna. In order to defy Leopold, their father, he proposes to her. She accepts, but after a few hours realizes that she isn't really in love with him. Saddened by the broken off engagement, Anna goes to a childhood hangout spot. And it's here that the story truly plummets for sweet Anna. Christopher, hearing the news of her engagement to his hated half brother, discovers her hiding spot. They immediately begin fighting; Anna overcome by her fear of him tries to escape the moment he appears, and Christopher, so overcome by his own confused anger pounces on her. He is so blinded by his rage and his desire for her, he wants her submission so badly - he is completely at the whim of his own emotions, unable to stop himself from his actions.

He used and hurt her body as if it were a shell with no feelings, enjoying the damage he inflicted inside, as though cutting her with a glass or a blade, cutting her into pieces of pulsating flesh, then cutting her some more- always more.

Christopher then insists on marrying her, and despite her bone deep fear of him, she has no other option - they marry.

She lowered her head, avoiding his eyes, even while she was marrying him.

Their marriage is an awful, frightful thing. Christopher is still pursuing his plans for patricide, and oblivious Anna is in a constant state of terror that he will force himself on her again. One of the few instances of Christopher's competing desires appears in how he interacts with her siblings. He insists that the moment Anna disobeys him he will have the children sent away (the threat always being or worse), but yet... would he? Anna's lives in near constant anxiety that he will punish her through them, but hopeful he won't given how kind he is capable of being towards them and her father.

Eventually they reach an accord of sorts, when Anna overcomes most of her fears (with Christopher's relentless insistence) and they begin to sleep together. Even though Christopher still threatens and demeans her, he really hates how he's driven her to despising him the way that she does.

"Husband! She lowered her voice, and her eyes flashed with hatred. "You know that I would have loved to kill you instead of marrying you, but I can always take care of that!" (It's nothing, Christopher. Your heart is breaking a bit, but it's nothing.)

The interesting thing is that once they consensually begin sleeping together, Anna's emotions and thoughts become deeply conflicted in much the same way his are. She hates him for what he's stolen from her, and she hates the way he continues to trample on her. But at night, his walls fall and he is honest in his desire and adoration of her. He is sweet and caring. Can she reconcile one man with the other? Ultimately- she can't.

The climax and quick finish is the real stinger here for me. Christopher's scheming finally culminates in the confrontation with his father. On one hand it doesn't go at all as you'd suspect, or want it to, and yet... perhaps that's okay. In a book so reliant on the act of revenge, this ending can feel like a surprise at first. But I think once you ask what Christopher needs as opposed to what he wants, it turns out that maybe this is really the letdown he had to have in order to be humbled. Maybe it's karma for the way he's treated and Anna, or maybe that's just the way the dice fell; but either way Christopher must now walk back to his life, and deal with the consequences of his actions.

Christopher closed his eyes, exhaled softly, and slowly moved his finger on the trigger. He touched it, feeling the cold metal under his finger. There it was, ready, and justice had waited for so many years - too many years. His mother had been thrown into the river to rot in a tomb without a name, massacred in life and in death. He could not kill her a second time: he had to shoot.

For the first time in years his eyes burned with invasive tears, which rolled down his face and caressed his skin. It took him back to the inevitable moment he dreaded the most. The moment when he had to face himself.

For a story as lush in detail as this, it's pretty disappointing how quickly it wraps up. There isn't a gratifying scene where Christopher becomes a better man, changes completely, and repents for his old ways. There is no groveling, no begging. Nonetheless, there's a way to read this as an HEA (though I don't really know if I could say for whom it ends happily.) Christopher doesn't avenge his mother and Anna doesn't get away from the man who has so unjustly abused her. And yet, and yet! - he comes back for her and she accepts him.

I'd like to believe Christopher does face himself, and does atone for his grave mistakes. But, there's no way to tell if he really does or not - we know who he is, and Anna knows as well; she loves him regardless. ( )

I admit, I picked this up out of perverse interest in how a rapist could be the hero. Sure, I’ve read bodice-rippers with dubious consent to outright assault, but that tends to come with some remorse and groveling. I wondered what kind of groveling I would get from a “hero” who knowingly, hatefully, violently rapes the heroine.

And now I am putting this as DNF. And I never DNF. But I’m three-quarters of the way through this beautifully written monstrosity and the hero is just still a flat-out, unrepentant piece of shit who continues to abuse and assault the heroine. Sure, there is the occasional snippet of inner monologue where the hero despairs of the heroine’s fear of him, but he just follows that up with threats and emotional abuse. When was this written?! It’s not even angsty, the conflict is just horrible toxic unapologetic assholery. I can suspend my inner feminist for some trash, but this was beyond the pale.

I find it impossible to talk about this book without spoilers, because the way it presents certain topics has to be discussed freely and directly and has serious implications.


The opening scenes, the ball, the unfortunate glass of lemonade that marks the beginning of the downfall, everything up to the party at the Edwards' house is so promising. We get an unusual, quirky heroine who seems capable of breaking the stiff mould and her charming friend, both lively, sharp girls who share a warm, honest friendship and navigate the social waters of a small Victorian town together.


And then it all comes to pieces with a gruesome, extremely graphic, soul-shattering scene of rape. It's absolutely sickening and marks a sharp turn in the novel. In my eyes, there's only one possible way this could end that would redeem the book: Anna recovers and dedicates her life to ruining Christopher, killing him, destroying him. It's the only thing a disgusting rapist like him deserves.


What happens instead? She marries him in an attempt to protect her family and eventually falls in love with him, and he with her. Wait, what?


There is hardly anything in the depictions of these characters and their choices that's even remotely realistic. Fine, maybe their being slave to rules of etiquette and worrying what everyone would say, that's definitely a thing that held true and still holds true as a factor that influences decisions. But what of the individual and their motivations?


Is Christopher's story of vendetta against the man who seduced his mother, left her with child and then abandoned her supposed to endear him to the reader? How does a man who dedicates his life to avenging the memory of a woman then go on to hurt another woman even more? It doesn't check out!


And everything up to Daniel proposing to Anna leads us to believe she genuinely loves him and is suffering because he doesn't reciprocate. And then all of a sudden it turns out he loves her and she doesn't? It's frustrating and insults the reader!


And Lucy, Anna's oldest and dearest friend, who's with her all the time and with whom they have a practically telepathic relationship, magically moves to the sidelines after the rape? Not only does she barely react to the change in her friend, but she also doesn't see the toxic relationship between Anna and Christopher, which is evident even if you don't know that he raped her? And Anna chooses not to tell her best friend she was raped, and by a man Lucy already dislikes?


It's like the frustrations just pile up, and you end up wanting to finish the book out of sheer spite, just to see how it will end and if there's a way to kill Christopher in case Anna can't do it.


All in all, it's so much wasted potential and misguided character portrayal. I can't understand how a woman can write something like this. If the generic happy ending for a romance book is supposed to be "boy gets girl" (because girls are naturally possessions to be had), this ending is "rapist gets victim" and it frustrates me to no end. It's like the author had all the possibility to write an intelligent Victorian revenge thriller with unusual characters who stand out, but ruined everything with her "bodice ripper" fantasies. Anna was raped by Christopher and betrayed by her author.


On a side note, I found it unbelievable that this book was originally written in Italian. The English translation reads like an original and is very skillfully done. This is arguably even more unfortunate, because it presents such terrible content with such vigour and conviction.


Representation in media is everything: it's always inextricably bound to real life, to a cultural context, to a social setting, and to shaping desirable and undesirable behaviour in society. And toxic books like this one deny everything women had fought for and still fight for. ( )

It has been a while since I have read historical romance. However, this is different then I remember. Yes, there is the feel of a bodice ripper but there is also so much more in it. Whereas those seemed more lighthearted or just hinted at the debauchery, this book went a little further into what I happened a lot more during those times. A woman is forced to the dictates of society, having no real power of what her life is, and falling at the whims of patriarchy at its finest. There is no #Metoo moment. She cannot say if a man touches her inappropriately because her reputation would still be ruined.

The characters were solid. The anti-hero- does some repugnant things but does manage to redeem himself. it was in the groveling process and the why's as to the motivations behind it that the story lost its sparkle, so to speak. Still a good book. Was it my favorite? No, and that had nothing to do with a certain scene in the book, it was in the characters themselves, both primary and secondary. ( )