After the Wedding - Courtney Milan (Worth Saga #2)

Sometimes a book is a long time in coming.  This book, for example.  Courtney Milan self-publishes this series, and she has admitted to having zero loyalty to deadlines.  This means that I've been stalking this book's steadily-receding release date for about two years.  It's one thing when a book doesn't have a release date; it's another when it has one, and it keeps changing, getting your hopes up and then crushing them time and time again as the months march by with no sign of an actual book appearing.  And as those months march by and hope for a release diminishes, well, hope for that book's quality has to go up in proportion.  After all, it must mean an extraordinary story is being written if it's taken so long to appear, right?  Well...

Unfortunately, this book was not everything I had hoped it would be.  The premise is amazing: Camilla Worth, the missing sister of the heroine in the first book, is forced to marry a man at gunpoint.  We last saw Camilla turning up at her sister's house asking for her help; this book takes a step back, relating the events that led up to that reunion and what came after.  Camilla has been shuttled from place to place, always hoping to find love and belonging but never actually finding it, though hope springs as eternal for her as it did for Milan fans hoping this book would ever be published.  While she didn't want to be married at gunpoint, she's hopeful as ever--maybe this will be the time it will stick, that someone will stand by her and choose her.  Her groom is Adrian Hunter, the black nephew of a bishop.  Adrian has a loving family, even if he doesn't see them terribly often and even if some of his brothers died during the American Civil War.  He wants his uncle to finally acknowledge him and the rest of his family after a lifetime of pretending that Adrian is someone else to him--a page, an amanuensis, whatever--and he's willing to do almost anything to earn that acknowledgement...even if it involves spying on his uncle's main political rival.  But Adrian also wants a romance like his parents had, and being married at gunpoint does not factor into that.

This book has so much going for it.  Beyond the strong premise, it has an interracial relationship, set in a place and time--Victorian England--where such romances are extremely rare.  It's nice to see this!  Adrian is a hero who isn't nobility, though he's still wealthy.  There are hints that Camilla is bisexual, or at least open to experimenting, and several other characters blatantly are bisexual, and Adrian's uncles--one by blood and one by relation--are gay (and also the stars of their own story in the compilation Hamilton's Battalion).  Camilla is a heroine who isn't a virgin.  There's so much going on here that could be amazing, which actually isn't surprising, because Milan has always been very vocal about a greater need for diversity in romance.

And yet the book falls flat.  Much of this is due to Camilla.  She is, quite frankly, annoying.  She manages to be Eeyore-level depressed and yet ridiculously peppy at the same time.  She believes she's cursed, in a way, not to be loved because she abandoned her family for comfort and security when she was twelve.  And yet she keeps looking for it.  This is fine!  This is a great character background.  But she harps on it, repeats it so much, that I wanted to slap her and tell her to think of something else at some point.  She has literally no other thoughts or hobbies other than sighing over wanting love and belonging while moaning that she doesn't believe it.  And then, of course, she has a moment of "Yes, I do deserve it," and no internal conflict from then on.

Adrian is also perhaps a bit too nice.  Not that heroes need to be assholes--quite the contrary.  But his niceness was syrupy to the point that he lacked backbone until, like Camilla, he suddenly didn't.  Really, what was lacking in these characters was growth.  They changed, but they did not necessarily grow, and that was disappointing, because Milan has always been so good at showing how her characters grow and evolve and improve.

This book's strongest elements, other than a diverse cast, might have actually boiled down to the set up for future books.  Theresa's character set up and the hints for Anthony, Priya, everyone else, were so great.  I have high hopes for future books in this series, but I wonder if maybe Milan got a little too tied up in this one and it just didn't work out in the long run.

3 stars out of 5.