Exclusive interview with author Julia Quinn and a review of her latest novel A Night Like This featuring the Smythe-Smith family
Reviewed By Gabrielle Pantera
Rating: Four Stars
“I just like that she’s so strong inside,” says A Night Like This author Julia Quinn. “Until the time she was 16 she lived a fairly privileged life. I like her strength and her ability to maintain a sense of humor. Daniel barely appeared in Just Like Heaven [the first book in the Smythe-Smith Quartet], but he was still such a large presence for the hero and heroine. As soon as I wrote that he had been forced to flee the country because of a duel gone bad, I knew he’d have to have his own book.”
A Night Like This is for readers who like historical romance in the style of Downton Abbey. Quinn’s novels are funny, the dialog is witty and there is always romance. For something light to read, Julia Quinn always delivers. Readers of Julia Quinn’s novels will recognize the Smythe-Smith family from her other books. This novel is about Daniel Smythe-Smith, Earl of Winstead who’s a bit of a black sheep.
We soon meet Anne Shawcross, a governess to the Smythe-Smith family and Daniel. When a family member falls ill, Anne is pressed into performing at the family’s annual musical concert for the town. Mortified after the performance Anne goes to hide but encounters a young man, Daniel just returned from the continent. Even though he was told it was safe to come back to England someone is trying to kill him, but who? As Daniel starts falling in love with Anne he wonders if he can keep her safe from this new danger in his life.
“Because families and family relationships are so important to my writing, I have to have a really clear sense of my hero and heroine’s families,” says Quinn. “This meant I had to figure out how many brothers and sisters each character had and where they were in the birth order. Because the Smythe-Smiths are such a large family, I had to come up with eight separate nuclear families. To do this I had to recreate nineteen years of Smythe-Smith quartets. Yes, that’s right. Nineteen years of them!”
“I had to research my own novels,” says Quinn. “I had included Smythe-Smith characters in so many books that it took me several days just to compile all of my previous mentions. Once I did that, I had to decide which set of Smythe-Smith cousins I was going to write about. I settled on the girls from 1824 to 1825, in part because I wanted to be able to spread the quartet of books over two seasons.”
When I develop my characters I spend a lot of time on their backstory, and I think a lot of their characteristics emerge through this process,” says Quinn. “If for some reason I ever need to know who played the viola in 1815, I’ve got the info at my fingertips.”
Quinn recently completed writing The Lady Most Willing, her second collaboration with Eloisa James and Connie Brockway. “We had so much fun with The Lady Most Likely we decided to do it again,” says Quinn. “But this time, we’re heading to Scotland. Well, our characters are. I tried to convince Connie and Eloisa that we should take a trip to the Highlands for research, but somehow we ended up in New York instead.”
Julia Quinn is a New York Times bestselling author. She started writing her first book one month after finishing college and has 22 published novels. Quinn lives with her family in the Pacific Northwest.
A Night Like This by Julia Quinn. Mass Market Paperback: 384 pages, Publisher: Avon (May 29, 2012). Language: English, ISBN: 9780062072900, $7.99.
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