Slightly Scandalous - Mary Balogh (Bedwyn Saga #3)

I'm starting to think that Mary Balogh isn't for me, or at least this series isn't.  Someone sang its praises to me, particularly about Wulfric's book--and so I've been soldiering ahead in hopes that the series would get better than the first two books, which were just bland.  Well, this one wasn't bland.  It was annoying.

The plot here revolves around Freyja "Free" Bedwyn, the older of the two Bedwyn sisters, who goes to Bath with a friend and her mother in order to avoid the birth of the child of Freyja's former love who married someone else, Kit.  (Wow, what a sentence.)  While there, she runs into a man who burst into her room on the road, Joshua, who is trying to avoid becoming betrothed to his cousin (who is also eager to avoid a betrothal) at the whim of his aunt, who is eager to avoid being ousted from Joshua's house, even though Joshua has no intentions to throw her out, or even return.  So Freyja agrees to pretend to be betrothed to him instead.

The problem here is that there wasn't an un-irritating character among the main cast here.  Freyja is petty and refuses to acknowledge her feelings.  Not acknowledging feelings is par for the course with romance novels, but Free does it out of some sense of emotional self-flagellation or something which irked me more than denial of emotions normally does.  Meanwhile, Joshua acts like he's incapable of taking anything seriously, even when he clearly does, which was annoying in its own way.  At one point, Free accuses Joshua of wearing a mask with nothing underneath it--and honestly, that seemed to be the truth for both of the main characters here.  Meanwhile, Joshua's aunt couldn't seem to manage being outright devious, and so she was just annoying as well.  While the other Bedwyns lent a variety of color here, as usual, they weren't enough to salvage a bunch of annoying main characters and a subplot that even Balogh admits ends in an anticlimax.

Here's the thing: ultimately, there are only two books in this series I really want to read, and those are Morgan and Wulfric's.  I already have Morgan's book out from the library, but there's another volume--Alleyne's--between hers and Wulfric's, so I guess we'll see how Morgan's goes before I decide if I should just skip the fifth book or not.

2 stars out of 5.