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.

A Kiss for Midwinter - Courtney Milan (Brothers Sinister #1.5)

Hallelujah, I have finished the category!  After having such a hard time finding a book that actually fit the "A Christmas romance" category for the Unapologetic Romance Readers' 2017 reading challenge (info here), I finally just went for this little novella by Courtney Milan.  I normally wouldn't use a novella to fulfill a category--full-length novels are much more my thing--but I was fed up of grabbing supposed Christmas romances and finding that they really were no such thing.  I figured I had done my due diligence in the novel department, and I really wanted to just move on.  That said, I knew I liked Courtney Milan, and I've heard from several people that her novellas are fire, so I figured it was a pretty safe bet.  And the description featured Christmas.  Heavily.

Which brings us to the story itself.  It starts with the hero, Jonas Grantham, silently watching as his elderly mentor examine a young woman who has been ruined and is now pregnant.  Jonas has doubts about the man's medical abilities, but has promised to stay silent--what he's really hoping to gain is the man's medical practice after he retires.  But he rather suspects that a concoction the man has prescribed for nausea is more likely a poison.  Between his doubts and his promise, though, he doesn't say anything, and leaves.

Fast forward ten years.  Jonas is now a doctor in his own right, and he's looking to marry someone, mainly so he can have a constant source of sex without risking disease.  To further his goals, he has compiled a list of the ten prettiest girls in town, hoping that one of them will agree to marry him.  But then there's Lydia Charingford, who would be number eleven on the list, and who also seems to--strangely--hate him.  Until he realizes that she's the girl he saw five years before, the one who was ruined, and she seems to think he's been judging her, making fun of her, and overall disliking her the entire time.  But Jonas doesn't dislike Lydia.  He likes her very much.  So he makes her a bet.  She'll go on three house calls to see patients with him, and if Lydia can't find a bright side to one of the situations, she'll have to kiss him.  If she can find the bright side--a specialty of hers--to all of them, then Jonas will have to never speak to her again.

This is a quick romance, being so closely focused around the Christmas season, but it's not an instant romance, which I liked.  Jonas' blunt honestly astonishes Lydia, but she's drawn to it, too, and appreciates that he gives her the truth.  And Jonas is in turn drawn not only to Lydia's looks, but also to her spirit, and he doesn't consider her to be "ruined" at all.  He's quite the burgeoning feminist, really, advocating (albeit on a small scale) for the sexual liberation of women.  And men.  Everyone.  Equality!  Huzzah.  It's a great little romance, and intertwined with it is Jonas' struggle with his father, who has failing health, some degree of dementia, and has also become something of a hoarder.  It's heartbreaking, but seeing Jonas' struggle and why he does it is so moving, and I think it added a nice dimension to this other than the main romance.

Overall, I was very happy with this.  I think it definitely could have been longer--seeing the romance drawn out more, and building up the subplots would have been nice--but it was a quick, enjoyable read.  One thing with short form in general is that the characters don't tend to develop much in and of themselves, though their relationships might, and I think that was a ding against it, but that was the only big thing.

4 stars out of 5.

Once Upon a Marquess - Courtney Milan (Worth Saga #1)

Judith Worth once thought she would have a fairytale romance with Christian, the Marquess of Ashford.  They were young, in love...what could go wrong?  Well, what went wrong was that Judith's father and brother were accused of treason, and Christian helped to prove them guilty.  In the following scandal, Judith's father hung himself in prison, her brother disappeared in a storm while being transported to Australia, the family lost its fortune, Judith's younger sister Camilla got separate from the rest of the family, and Judith ended up with her little sister Theresa and her little brother Benedict in much-reduced circumstances.  Now, eight years later, something is awry with her accounts and her guardianship of her siblings, and she--unfortunately--needs someone with a little more influence to help her straighten things out.  Someone like...the Marquess of Ashford, of course.

This was a cute historical romance, but I don't think it matched up with the plot of some of the other Courtney Milan books I've read.  Judith is definitely a strong character, who has cared for her family for eight years despite having to scrimp and save and learn skills that would be considered unbecoming of a lady.  She's managed to send her brother to Eton and to provide dowries for both her sisters.  She only turns to Christian for help because someone people, as is fitting to the time period, don't respect her, and because she doesn't have the same level of authority as someone holding a title and whose family reputation hasn't been tarnished by two traitors.  Christian had some great dynamics, too--the color blindness was an interesting character trait, though not one necessary to the story, but his addiction to laudanum/opium is the real interesting one.  I think Milan used it well, without using it to pander.  Christian's real battle with the drug is in the past, but it's made abundantly clear that he's just one taste away from sliding back into addiction, and that he'll never really stop being an addict, even if he never touches it again, which is very true of many addictions.  Theresa was absolutely insufferable.  Benedict was better but was too young to be a really compelling character yet.  Overall, though, the cast of this was pretty solid.

That said, I didn't find Christian and Judith's romance particularly romantic in comparison to Milan's other works.  It's a fine line between having a steamy romance and having a book where the guy is just trampling all over the heroine, and I think that Milan held off on the romance in order to make sure that Judith's strength didn't get lost or discarded in the process.  A lot of this lack of romance is also because, well...Judith and Christian don't fall in love in this book.  They fall in love eight years before the events of the book.  There are a few flashback moments, but the plot is more about them--mostly Judith--admitting that those feelings are still there than discovering and building them in the first place.  This means that the whole romance plot reads as the last 25% of most books, rather than the entirety of most.  If there had been a break and reconciliation of most sides, it might have been a bit more bodied, but with just Judith harboring these conflicted emotions--Christian's devotion never falters--it...drags somewhat.  The other events of the book, like the attempts to reconnect with Camilla, are really more intriguing than the actual romance, which doesn't end up really escalating until late in the book.

I think there's a lot of potential for the Worth family; Milan says in the afterword that she plans on the series being seven books long, the second being about Camilla, which seems like it's going to be awesome.  The dynamic that this book sets up is intriguing, with the elements of treason, missing persons, and so on, but I don't think it is a strong book on its own.  It's more of a prologue for the others.

3.5 stars out of 5, but for the elements other than romance.