Brigitte Knightley’s debut novel, “The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy,” has everything fans of enemies-to-lovers romance are looking for: disagreement that becomes flirtatious banter, ethical quandaries, forced proximity, and characters who can overcome their prejudices to see a human beneath a label. Featuring a brutal assassin and a magical healer forced to work together while trying — desperately — not to fall in love, the heat of this romantasy novel is perfect for warm summer nights.
Osric Mordaunt, considered a dark magic user, is part of an order of assassins hated and dismissed by Aurienne Fairhrim’s light magic order of healers. When Osric seeks medical treatment for a degenerative condition, he gets roped into helping Aurienne’s order cure an outbreak of pox that is killing children in droves. The pair traipses around seeking healing under romantic full moons and become involved in spycraft that reveals evidence that the outbreak is not what it seems. They begin to see each other beyond their individual allegiances, but it happens slowly, prejudices unraveling at a crawling pace. The author’s bio declares that she puts the unresolved back in “unresolved sexual tension,” and it’s true: Knightley is a master of the slow burn.
There is plenty of fun along the way: Getting to know both magical orders, their fortes and foibles, is a squelching, bodily fluid-filled delight: The only thing sharper than their wit is the divide that separates their lives. The magic system has an almost science-fiction element to it, with lots of medical talk about magical maladies and a well-rendered in-line breakdown of how “Outlander”-esque menhir travel works. Aurienne is as much a scientist as a witch, which is a treat in a genre overrun by wand-waving laziness. The novel is set in the 19th century, but in a version of England where the Norman Conquest of 1066 failed. Instead of a unified empire, the smaller kingdoms of the Heptarchy still dominate, their various dangerous machinations providing the raison d’être for the differing orders.
“Irresistible” might be set in the period we know as the Victorian era, and there are royals and attendant paraphernalia, but lovers of polite courtly romances might want to steer clear. With more dick jokes than a Deadpool movie, Knightley’s novel is dirty. Sexual attraction is not hidden behind genteel metaphors; Aurienne and Osric want. They’re not blushing virgins on their way to an altar, but adults who have loved and lost, who each bring a trolley’s worth of emotional baggage and sexual preferences to their relationship. Their self-awareness is part of the charm; they might wield magic like us mortals wield butter knives, but they’re relatable.
Readers plugged into the world of fan fiction may recognize the author’s name, which is a pseudonym. Writing under a previous nom de plume, isthisselfcare, Knightley gained an enormous fan base dedicated to “Draco Malfoy and The Mortifying Ordeal of Being in Love,” her 199,000-word Dramione — short for Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy — on a popular fan-fiction site. With a Jane Austen-influenced voice, it was ironic, sarcastic and delightful. Knightley’s new novel is like a grown-up version of “Mortifying” — more mature, more grounded and more voicey than ever. Fans will be pleased to see how she’s grown.
People love to denigrate fan-fiction writers, though some of today’s most popular authors started as fan-fiction writers: Cassandra Clare, Naomi Novik and Andy Weir, to name just three. Novels like “Irresistible” are proof positive that writing fan fiction is an excellent training ground for building a novel. To write truly great fan fiction, a writer must identify what makes the source material sparkle and then replicate it. It’s not enough to graft existing characters into new situations. The most effective fan fiction shows readers how characters can continue to grow beyond the bounds of the original work while remaining consistent with the source material. That exercise in maintaining consistency and internal logic is excellent practice for creating original worlds.
In some cases, that also means identifying elements about characters that original authors themselves might not see. This was especially true of the explosion of Draco/Hermione fic after the Harry Potter series ended. Where author J.K. Rowling saw an irredeemable villain in Draco Malfoy, thousands of people saw an abused child who had grown up in a dangerous household and was trying to survive. Fan fiction allowed writers to transform Draco into a good person who falls in love with his childhood enemy; this gave readers the redemption arc Rowling set up but didn’t follow through on. There are tens of thousands of fics that explore this arc.
Literary-minded sociologists could probably study how millennial women never fully recovered from Draco’s lost redemption. The preponderance of platinum blond bad boys with chances at redemption has only grown as the girls who grew up reading Harry Potter became authors themselves: Coriolanus Snow in Hunger Games trilogy prequel “Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” Sebastian Morgenstern in “City of Glass,” Cardan in “The Cruel Prince.” (“Buffy’s” Spike is a clear predecessor.)
With Knightley’s debut, we can add Osric Mordaunt to the list. He is a tragic figure, doomed to a life filled with violence after an abusive childhood. He’s shaken out of this destiny by meeting the STEMinist figure Aurienne, who accepts no excuses for his bad behavior.
Though Osric seems to have Malfoy DNA at his heart, the rest of the cast is original and well-developed. That said, Aurienne does toe the line between aloof and arrogantly unlikable. We get the hint that she has a dark backstory, that her snark is a shield, but we’ll have to wait for Book 2 to find out. Until then, “Irresistible” will probably inspire fan fiction of its own, training a new generation of authors.
Castellanos Clark, a writer and historian in Los Angeles, is the author of “Unruly Figures: Twenty Tales of Rebels, Rulebreakers, and Revolutionaries You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of.”
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