Title: My Fair Captain
Series: Sci-Regency: Book One
Author: J.L. Langley
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Length: 244 Pages
Category: Sci-Fi
At a Glance: In the end, this book didn’t live up to what I know a well executed erotic romance can be. The -verse is functional, but it could have been so much more.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: When Intergalactic Navy Captain Nathaniel Hawkins goes undercover to investigate the theft of an IN weapons stash, the mission raises painful memories from his past. Using a title he fled nearly two decades earlier, Nate once again becomes the Earl of Deverell, heir to the Duke of Hawthorne, in order to navigate the ins and outs of a Regency world. But planet Regelence—where young lords are supposed to remain pure until marriage—has a few surprises for Nate, not least of which is his attraction to Prince Aiden.
A talented artist, Prince Aiden Townsend isn’t interested in politics and the machinations of society gentlemen, and he adamantly rejects the idea of marriage and a consort. Aiden wants the freedom to pursue his art and determine his own future. But the arrival of the dashing and mysterious Deverell awakens feelings of passion and longing the young prince can’t deny.
As Nate uncovers a conspiracy reaching far beyond the stolen weapons, his future is irrevocably altered by the temptations of a life he never thought he could have. Drawn into the web of intrigue, Aiden is in danger of losing his life… and his heart.
Review: J.L. Langley’s My Fair Captain is set in a futuristic historical world. It may be the 49th century on the planet Regelence, but the puritanical mores in this -verse are borrowed straight from the 19th, and while I was interested to see where the author would take her characters and how the blend of two such juxtaposing time periods would influence her story, it all left me feeling rather irritated in spite of some rompish elements and a few light and playful moments.
Nathaniel Hawkins is a ship’s captain in the Intergalactic Navy, something that is more narrative detail than evidenced through action. He has been disowned by his family on the planet Engelor for reasons which are exposed in the Prologue, eighteen years earlier, and involves one of the rare women in the story. As the older man in this age gap romance, Nate assumes, as one would expect, the role of the sexually experienced alpha to Prince Aiden’s virginal yet lusty ingénue. There’s a bit of mystery and intrigue introduced in the story when a cache of weapons is stolen, along with the sketch pads Aiden uses to create his art—they keep going missing, which adds a bit more intrigue to the mystery—but it’s the whirlwind courtship and the circumstances that lead to a hasty marriage that remain the focus of this novel.
In 2008, when this book was originally published, My Fair Captain was most likely a pretty standard offering in the gay romance genre (it predates me by a couple of years), and as much as I tried to put myself in the mindset of a reader ten years ago, one who hasn’t seen the evolution of the genre and the strides it’s made over the years, I couldn’t. In essence, this novel is a het romance with two male leads that commodifies a man’s purity and equates it with his value as a potential husband, so you can probably guess how well that sits with me. I don’t enjoy the concept of sex signifying impurity in reality, so it stands to reason it doesn’t work for me in fiction either. The idea that this world is structured around a man’s virtue remaining unsullied until the age of twenty-five is then overturned when the author breaks her own canon for the sake of a few errant throbbing cocks and so that Aiden doesn’t have to wait until he comes of age to lose his virginity.
Regelence itself is structured as a patriarchal society. Women do exist there but are demonstrably irrelevant to the story. It seems females are present in this -verse either to serve men, to accuse them of actions they didn’t commit, to act as a mischievous toddler who’s little more than set dressing, or to supply the eggs necessary for male couples to bear children, which are then genetically modified to be born male and gay; though not all zygotes are modified to be male, of course. Someone does need to keep supplying those fresh eggs. The boy children born to these couples then take on the role of fair maiden in the story.
There’s an additional budding romance thrown in at story’s end which seemed a non-sequitur as I don’t see it mentioned in the blurbs for either of the next two books, though maybe it’s being planned for a new addition to the series at a later date. I have to say that I was more charmed by and interested in the potential of this relationship, in just a brief few pages, than I was in the entirety of Nate and Aiden’s romance.
In the end, this book didn’t live up to what I know a well executed erotic romance can be. The -verse is functional, but it could have been so much more. My Fair Captain will no doubt be right up some romance loving readers’ alley, though, so if you do give it a go, I sincerely hope your experience is more pleasant than mine.
You can buy My Fair Captain here:
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The Novel Approach Reviews 
I -loathe- this book with a passion. I was so excited to read it- SF! Regency! Gentlemen Pursuing One Another! Way back in the yonder years before I had a Kindle, I shelled out money for a PB copy of this, and now I need to find somewhere to bury it.
The writing is just fine- not my fave, but decent. The story… meh. Okay. In the right hands, it could have been better- again, not my fave, but decent. Would have been in the solid three star category. Except for the worldbuilding and culture. I spent 80% of the book wanting to burn the entire planet to the ground because the planetary purity culture was so intensely stupid. I was so annoyed with the main characters, the secondary characters, and the entire farce of a plot(???) that I wanted to scream. And the way the book treated women as egg-production and “gasp, I must cry news of a scandal!” was annoying to Me-of-10-years-ago, and I can only imagine it would be infuriating to me now.
I don’t rant about many books. Usually if the story doesn’t move me, I assume it’s just not my cuppa and move on. This one is so excruciatingly awful that I not only remember it, I’m bitter about having wasted book money on it.
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I try not to rant either, because tomato, tomahto, people like what they like, and I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum. Everything about this book just enraged me, though. I suppose it could be argued it was written to fulfill the male fantasy of a society where gay men can live and love openly. In that case it works great, but it’s the author’s world to build from the ground up. Don’t make women egg producers. Come up with a scientific basis for propagating the species. And don’t equate sex with damaged goods.
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