Do You Want to Start a Scandal - Tessa Dare (Spindle Cove #5, Castles Ever After #4)

Our tune is that great Disney anthem, "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?"  So sing it with me now: "Do you want to start a scandal?"  The answer is, of course, yes.  Yes I do, though the characters here would probably respond with a resounding "NO!"

When I read Say Yes to the Marquess back in 2016, one of my main comments was that I didn't particularly like the main couple, and wished instead that the book had been about the hero's brother, Piers, and his quest for love after losing his fiance to his younger brother (the hero of SYTTM).  Well, it looks like I got my wish, because that is exactly what this book is.  Tying together Dare's Spindle Cover series (which I haven't read) and her Castles Ever After series (which I have), this incorporates characters from both, though I think it's probably more heavily Spindle Cove than Castles Ever After, particularly as the heroine, Charlotte, is not in possession of a castle, which was a main marker of Castles Ever After.

One night at a house party, Charlotte sneaks off in pursuit of Piers to let him know that she does not plan on marrying him, despite whatever her mother might do to throw them together over the course of the party.  Unfortunately for her, she's soon stuck with Piers behind some draperies as another, unknown couple proceeds to have sex on the desk in the library just feet away.  When Charlotte and Piers finally find a chance to make their escape, they're caught--by the son of the house, an eleven-year-old who insists Piers was trying to murder Charlotte but who gives a pretty good impression of sex sounds to an audience, including Charlotte's mother.  So Piers says he'll marry her.  But Charlotte really doesn't want to marry him, because she wants to marry for love, and becomes determined to clear her good name by finding the mystery couple before their engagement can be announced.  And the game is afoot.

The one word that I find myself using again and again in speaking of Dare's books is "charming," and this book is exactly that.  It is charming.  I love stories that take place at house parties, and this was a good example of that, though even for a house party involving a lot of guests and at least two weeks of free time, the main characters seemed to find a remarkable amount of time to have sex in obvious places--like, you know, the heroine's room that half the house has access too.  But they are never caught, of course.  But the reality of their supervised status (or lack thereof) is not the point here.  The point is that the banter is lovely and Piers is a true honorable gentleman, even when he insists that he is not.  Charlotte is clever and good at figuring things out, though Dare didn't always do the best job of showing us her train of thought and so she seems to make leaps quite a bit, though they end up being accurate.  And while Piers wants to protect Charlotte, he also ultimately acknowledges her talents, which is high praise considering that Piers is (not a spoiler) a spy.

My biggest disappointment here was that the mystery didn't end up being one.  It came down to, "Oh, it was just a misunderstanding!" when it seemed like there was going to be something truly dramatic going on in the background.  While this makes it a cozy mystery, and cozy mysteries aren't bad, it just seemed to veer dramatically from the setup that was pursued for most of the book.  A little genuine intrigue could have gone a long way to spice things up, without veering too far into outright ridiculousness, such as that one historical romance that ends with an attempted assassination by terrorists--and whose title I have evidently blacked out of my mind.  Also, I was really hoping that Frances, the bitchy sister of Charlotte's best friend, would end up getting her comeuppance, which never happened.  Maybe Delia will get her own book and it will happen there?  I would love to read a book about Delia, she seems to be imminently deserving of her own love story.

So, I enjoyed this quite a bit, a good deal more than Say Yes to the Marquess.  Was it flawless?  No.  I'm definitely not raving about it.  But it was quite good, a fun read that only took up a couple of hours, and I would recommend it for people who like light romance and cozy mysteries.

3.5 stars out of 5.

When a Scot Ties the Knot - Tessa Dare (Castles Ever After #3)

So, here's the thing.  I'm not a big fan of highland romances.  Or, really, anything that involves Scottish characters.  It's the accents.  Many people find Scottish accents very, very attractive.  I'm not one of them.  In fact, watching Brave was a trial that had me doing this the entire time:


And yes, I've been picking at Dragonfly in Amber, the second Outlander book, for going on a year now, but I think the very fact that I've been working on it for that long speaks for itself.  It's all the "lairds" and "lasses" and "bairns" that has me rolling my eyes heavenward and praying for someone to make the agony just stop.  But this was the book that had been recommended and brought me to the Castles Ever After series to begin with, and the premise was interesting.  What is that premise, you ask?  Well, our heroine, Maddie, has a pretty bad case of social anxiety.  To avoid having to go to balls and socialize and find a husband, she invented a Scottish military captain whom she had met, fallen madly in love with, and promised to marry while on vacation with her aunt.  She proceeds to write letters to him for close to a decade, and then she does what needs to be done to end the charade: she kills him off and goes into mourning.  This works out quite well, because her godfather leaves her a castle in Scotland, to which she retreats and begins concentrating on her career as a naturalist illustrator.

And then a guy shows up at her doorstep: Captain Logan MacKenzie.  Yes, indeed, there is a guy behind the name, though Maddie didn't know it when she wrote the letters.  But he got them, and now he's arrived to collect on her promises.  You know.  Of marriage.  And everything that comes with it.  And he brought his fellow soldiers with him.

You see, the thing is, Logan is broke.  No money, no home, and his men came home from the war to find that many of their spouses and lovers had died or given up on them in their absences.  So Logan needs to marry Maddie to get a hold of her castle and the lands that come with it to give his men a new place to call home.  And then there's Maddie herself, of course, though there's some animosity lurking there on both sides.  Logan has his reasons, and Maddie...well, she doesn't exactly appreciate a guy she thought was fake turning up and demanding to marry her.  She doesn't hate him, but she made him up to avoid marriage, so marrying him isn't exactly the outcome she'd pictured.

I loved this one.  Despite my general dislike for highland romances, I thought this was both sweet and spicy, and that Maddie and Logan were great mains with a strong supporting cast.  I loved that Maddie had her own burgeoning career that she was ready to fight and take credit for, which is something lacking in a lot of heroines; she was ready to do it from the very beginning, and didn't need no man to tell her that she could.  She already knew that she could.  And Logan was a self-made man, rather than the rich dukes that proliferate in historical romance--though I think rich dukes have their place, too!  He's also a bookworm, another welcome surprise.  Women are frequently given bookworm status in books because it's an easy "how to make a reader like her" trick, but it was nice to see a guy who actually liked reading for a change.  Maddie and Logan don't fall instantly, madly in love, but instead have a steady push and pull that they slowly work to resolve.  Honestly, this was just a very refreshing book, and I wholeheartedly enjoyed it.  Definitely the best out of the series!

5 stars out of 5.

Romancing the Duke - Tessa Dare (Castles Ever After #1)

Romancing the Duke and its companion book, Say Yes to the Marquess had both been on my radar for a while because they've both popped up in the bargain book emails I receive daily.  That said, I never actually got either of them, because I haven't had extraordinary luck branching out into "new to me" authors of historical romance.  I mainly stay with my main girls: Julia Quinn, Eloisa James, Lisa Kleypas, and Courtney Milan.  When I've tried branching out, I've mostly found the results to be lackluster at best.  But the third book in this series, When A Scot Ties the Knot, came up in discussion in the Unapologetic Romance Readers group on Goodreads and was pretty highly praised by several of the group members.  I decided to look into it at some point--and shortly thereafter found out that my library had all three of the Castles Ever After books available through Overdrive for Kindle.  Score!  I checked out all three and set to reading.

Romancing the Duke is the first book in this set of related-but-not-related stories.  What I mean by that is, the stories are related in that they all share a premise and a common source: a young woman has been gifted a castle by her godfather and goes to take up residence in it to start her "own" life, as she has firmly set aside dreams of getting married.  In this case, the young woman in question is Isolde "Izzy" Goodnight, the daughter of a famous author who made her a character in his tales, and then died when the characters were left in a variety of perilous positions.  She's penniless, her cousin having inherited everything of her father's, though she has devoted followers across England who associate the name Izzy Goodnight more with the little girl in the stories than with the real woman behind the name.  She's very relieved to find that her godfather has apparently bequeathed her a castle, because now at least she has somewhere to live, decrepit as it may be.  She's somewhat less pleased to find that it's already inhabited, and by a surly though devastatingly handsome duke, no less.

Ransom Vane, the Duke of Rothbury, is equally displeased to find that a young woman has turned upon his doorstep to take possession of his castle--a castle he never ordered sold.  He's even less pleased when Izzy's followers start showing up and intruding on his brooding abode, because brooding is exactly what Ransom has been doing ever since he lost his fiancee and his sight in one fell swoop.  Yes, you read that right: we have a blind hero, my dears.  Ransom isn't entirely blind, his sight varying across times of the day from shapes and colors to nothing at all, but it's bad enough all the time that he's holed himself up in the great hall of the castle, a space he's memorized out of necessity, with no one other than his valet to witness his infirmity.  And of course Izzy challenges all of that.  She's determined not to leave, because where else would she go?  And then there are her followers, who are entranced not only with her...but also, it turns out, with Ransom, because he closely resembles the hero of the Goodnight Tales.

I really liked this.  I liked that we had a blind (or mostly blind) hero, because that's pretty unusual.  Izzy, as a penniless orphan, isn't quite as unusual, and even the later revelations that are supposed to set her apart are a bit tropeish, but I do love a good trope, and I loved Izzy, too.  Her sweetness and determination didn't feel fake, and while they're pretty much hallmarks of every historical romance heroine, I still don't find myself sick of them.  I think there were enough interesting side characters to add flavor, but without needing to shoe in a useless subplot like so many historical romances try to do.  The biggest subplot here is that someone has been skimming money from Ransom's accounts, and it ties back in nicely with the main premise of the book and how Izzy ended up at the castle to begin with, so it didn't feel out of place at all.  But a word to the wise: if you're hoping to see stories regarding those side characters, don't hold your breath, because it hasn't yet happened, something that I consider to be a shame because some of them are just great.  The setting here has a lot going for it, too.  It's a real Beauty-and-the-Beast style castle, with bats in the chimneys and the whole place in disrepair from years of neglect.  It's kind of a refreshing change from the fancy manors, estates, and townhouses of most historical romances, though I do, of course, love those as well.

Overall, I adored this.  It was a delicious, quick read, as historical romances are meant to be, and Tessa Dare has definitely earned herself a spot up with Quinn, Kleypas, James, and Milan as an author to look out for in this genre.

4 stars out of 5.

Say Yes to the Marquess - Tessa Dare (Castles Ever After #2)

Say Yes to the Marquess is a book that persistently kicked up on my radar over the past couple months, but as with Romancing the Duke, I didn't really look at it until another Unapologetic Romance Reader brought up the series.  After devouring Romancing the Duke, I turned my attention to this one, which I think ended up being my least favorite of the three current Castles Ever After books.

Our heroine here is Clio, who has been engaged to the new Marquess of Granville, Piers Brandon, for the past eight years--ever since she was sixteen.  She's done with waiting.  She doesn't think Piers will ever actually marry her, and any sentiment that might have once been there has withered away from neglect.  Besides, the marriage was always more for their families, anyway.  But she can't just get out of the marriage, because this the Regency era, and engagements are like contracts.  So she goes to the man who has Piers' power of attorney while he's gone: his brother, Rafe.  Who, unbeknownst to Clio, has been in love with her for, well, forever.  Clio asks Rafe to sign papers to dissolve the engagement, and when that doesn't work, tells him she'll be off at her newly-inherited castle if he changes his mind.

Rafe changes his mind, but not in the way that Clio wanted.  Instead of staying in London to train for his next boxing match, Rafe heads to Clio's new home to press a full-out assault to get her to go through with the wedding.  Yes, indeed, he wants her to say "yes" to the marquess, even though the marquess in question isn't him.  With Rafe comes his trainer, Bruiser, who immediately makes up a flamboyant aristocratic persona to hide behind, and Piers' elderly bulldog, Ellingsworth (I think) who was, of course, awesome, as all bulldogs are.  Also taking up residence with Clio are her two sisters, what's-her-face (the bitchy one) and Phoebe (the eccentric, sweet one) and what's-her-face's husband.  All of them are very intent on getting this marriage off the ground.  But of course, Clio discovers an attraction to Rafe as things go on...

Here's the thing with this.  As others have mentioned, this book could have actually used a love triangle.  Having Piers come back earlier and really try to win Clio's affections (and to be, at least to some degree, successful) would have been a nice, spicy element that could have perked this up.  Either that, or Piers should have been killed off while abroad, leaving Rafe to sweep Clio up without consequences.  While Rafe has this "bad boxer gone good" thing going on, with his lavish gifts of wedding dresses and entire halls of cake, the entire dynamic between he and Clio came off as a bit hypocritical and overall more than a little distasteful to me.  I mean, come on, Clio: just man up and break up with Piers before carrying on with someone else.  I don't really care if you don't have feelings for him, but you did say you'd marry him, and he deserved better than to come back home to find out you've been dallying with his brother while planning your wedding to him.  Ugh.  And the worst part is, I really liked Piers.  I didn't feel like Clio was being "rescued" from him or anything, which might have helped.  Instead, I kind of wish we'd been reading about him finding his own love interest after Clio had broken up with him, rather than reading the whole story that led up to that point.

Again, there were some colorful side characters here and a heroine with an interesting vocation (Clio wants to open a brewery) but I don't think those could really bulk up the "meh" story.  Was there some nice kissing and such?  Yes, of course.  But this was a book that I did find myself able to put down, and I kept hoping to move past it to When a Scot Ties the Knot.  This one was rather lackluster overall.

2.5 stars out of 5.