The Favored Child by Philippa Gregory

Horrible Dare Challenge: I. AM. FINISHED!!!!

Raych, bravo, bravo. You really know how to dish out pain. This book was excruciating to get through. I cringed, groaned, hurled, and stared off in the distance moaning “Why? Dear God, why?’ I put it down and couldn’t pick it back up again. In fact, I tinkered with the idea of abandoning it entirely…but that would mean shame and ridicule in the book blogging world.

Read my lips: I am not a wussy!

Pride made me read The Favored Child from cover to cover. All 500+ effing pages of it.

Given that The Favored Child is the second book to P.Greg’s Wideacre acid-trip trilogy and I plunged into Book 2 without reading Book 1, I had only the vaguest idea of what’s going on. Some may say I was like a blind man groping in the dark and finding a fistful of incest.

Okay. The plot…

Julia Lacey loves her cousin Richard, heir to the Wideacre estate. Sigh. How do I put this gently? Julia is a spineless moron. Richard is a dick (no pun intended). Their relationship is very much like Sleeping with the Enemy in that Richard does something mildly sadistic like whipping Julia with a riding crop to 100% psychotic like bashing in his horse’s face with a mallet.

Yes. That is Elvis getting his spank on.

Understandably, Julia is somewhat disturbed by Richard’s behavior, but that doesn’t stop her from making excuses for him and later marrying him after he raped her in the summerhouse and snapped her wrist like the stem of a flower petal. Here, I’m shaking the book and screaming: “Julia, you are soooo stupid!!!”

Later, I discover the reason for Julia’s lack of gray matter. Her parents are *whispers* brother and sister. Not even half-brother/half-sister, but full blooded siblings!!! And ZOMG, Richard isn’t her cousin…he’s her brother!!! That’s inbreeding upon more inbreeding.

After Richard robs her of her innocence and knocks her up, she marries him! Wait, wait, Richard didn’t rob Julia of her sweet flowering innocence, Julia gave said innocence away to the legless Gypsy that the villagers call “Ralph the Culler.” Ralph is the same guy Beatrice did the nasty with in Book 1 and who she later lured into a steel mantrap (like the Jaws of Life except used for evil), where he lost his legs and now he’s strutting around on wooden pegs and shooting Richard laser beam looks of hate while shooting Julia laser beam looks of lust.

*Takes deep breath* So if Beatrice is Julia’s mother, then Julia’s sleeping with her mother’s lover who could also be…her father…but thank God that’s not the case because it’s established by the mother Julia thought was her mother that her uncle is her daddy. MY MIND JUST EXPLODED!!!

I realize that this is an incredibly repetitive review in terms of “rape” and “my cousin, my brother, my mother, HIS mother.” By being repetitive, I believe I’ve really captured the spirit of this book. How many Wideacre descriptions did I have to sit through to reach the end? How many times did Julia have to mention Richard’s “peacock blue eyes” or his “royal blue eyes” or his “Atlantic ocean blue eyes”?  So you see, there is a method to my madness.

After the big revelation that Richard + Julia= brother + sister and should, theoretically, stop bumpin’ uglies, Richard still insists on visiting Julia’s boudoir! And by ‘insisting’ I mean rape.

Riding crops are for horses. Not people.

At this point, I loathe Richard so much that I’ve made a list of all his bastardly misdeeds:

• He likes rape!
• He spanked Julia with a riding crop.
• He broke Julia’s middle finger.
• He cut up his black stallion and later, smashed horse’s face in with a mallet and blamed the stable boy!
• He snapped a falcon’s legs AND he gets ‘sprung’ on it. By ‘getting sprung,’ I direct you to these lyrics: “When a girl walks in with an itty-bitty waist and her booty shakin’ all over your face, I get SPRUNG.”
• His “hardness melts away” like ice cream on a hot day when you remind him of the time he was mulled by a flock of sheep. Okay, I could sympathize with him there. Sheep scares the bejesus outta me too. Especially when they ‘Baaah.’  I count dancing Jamie Frasers when I can’t sleep.
• He pushed Julia’s best friend into a river with the intent to KILL.
• Did I mention the rape?
• He shot his foster parents…in the face.
• He shot the driver. And the butler.
• He abuses himself, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.
• He is NOT the favored child. The dick.

By now, I’m WTFing all over the place.

Toward the end, Richard tries to strangle Julia in her sleep and then rape her…again…but his sick little plans are foiled when her water breaks. 20+ pages of gruesome 17th century birth scene later, Julia expels Richard’s “incestuous rape-conceived bastard” from her womb. Immediately afterward, she tries to drown the baby in the river, but happens upon a random Gypsy caravan. Julia gives the baby to the Gypsies, stumbles back to Wideacre Hall, where The Culler is there with his wicked blade (an actual blade, not his God-given blade) pressed against Richard’s tender throat…

Will The Culler, er, cull Richard the rapist bastard?

That’s for me to know and you to find out. Or not.

Read this book only if you want your mind blown all over your face.

As for a rating, I give this book one big vomiting unicorn.