Firelight - Kristen Callihan (Darkest London #1)

Firelight is a book that kept catching my eye as it popped up on various to-read lists.  I like Kristen Callihan's contemporary romance books in her VIP series--both Idol and Managed were very good.  If that caliber of writing with a Victorian-era fantasy setting, I thought we'd be good to go.  And the library even had a copy!

The story here follows Miranda, a young woman who has the ability to start fires, and Benjamin Archer, a lord who has fallen under a curse and never shows his face or other parts of his body, instead going about in a mask and dark clothing.  Several years after an initial encounter in an alley, Archer gets Miranda to marry him through coercion.  Despite this, Miranda decides he's hot and that she loves him immediately, no matter why he's so weird--and despite the fact that he might be, you know, a murderer.

And herein lies the root of our problem.  Callihan's contemporary novels have great chemistry and build in the romance department, and that is entirely absent here.  There is no spark between these characters, despite Miranda being literally able to create fire.  There is no sense of fairy tale whimsy or destined or doomed romance, despite the story drawing heavily on East of the Sun and West of the Moon, my favorite of all fairy tales.  And there is no decent-strength fantasy to propel the story in lieu of these other elements.  There is no apparent reason that Miranda has these abilities.  Archer's curse is a mishmash of religions that don't really seem to click together, and seem to have been compiled merely to seem mystical without any thought as to what might actually be behind them.  And his curse doesn't really make much sense, either...  What information we are provided is dumped into our laps in a monologue by one character literally as Miranda gets ready to walk into the final conflict.

I'm not entirely turned off this series.  I do have faith in Callihan's writing skills, and Miranda's sisters have promise as main characters in other books.  Hopefully this was just a bad start to a series, in which Callihan hadn't really fully thought through what she wanted to put forth, and the other ones will be better.  I'll give it another try, but this one in particular was not a home run for me.

2 stars out of 5.

Ten Ways to Be Adored When Landing a Lord - Sarah MacLean (Love By Numbers #2)

Sarah MacLean is an author whose back catalog I am now working through.  After reading Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake, I got another of her books, The Rogue Not Taken, from the library.  However, I quickly discovered that the heroine of that book was a side character in the third book of the series that Nine Rules started, so I set to reading through those first.  Ten Ways is the second book there.

Our heroine here is Isabel, the daughter of an earl who has barely kept the estate together in the face of his wasteful behavior--and has run a house for women looking to escape terrible situations to boot.  All of that seems to be in danger when her father dies, the estate is left to a mysterious guardian until her ten-year-old brother can come of age, and there's not a penny to be found.  Oh, and the daughter of a duke shows up on her doorstep looking for help, which Isabel knows is going to cause trouble.

Trouble comes calling indeed, though Isabel doesn't know it right away.  It arrives in the form of Nicholas St. John, the brother of the hero from the first book, who has been asked by the aforementioned duke to find the missing sister, a task he gladly takes up to escape the slavering women of London, who are eager to nab him as one of London's most landable lords.  But when he and Isabel first run into each other, she sees Nick's value in his knowledge of antiquities, particularly marble statues--a bunch of which she owns and is eager to sell to fund the ongoing existence of Minerva House.  With an invitation into Isabel's abode, things are set for the two worlds to collide.

This book relies much more heavily on instalove than the first book did.  While the pacing in the first book was somewhat whacky, it still took place over at least a few weeks.  This book takes place over a number of days, and suddenly Isabel, who has always been leery of men because of the behavior of her father and the plights of women--mostly done over by men--who she shelters at Minerva house, is suddenly gaga over the first cute guy who shows up.  (Note how I said "cute"; other guys showed up at Isabel's house, claiming she had to marry them because her father gambled her away, but none of them seemed remarkably attractive.)  Honestly, Georgianna was a more interesting plot line here.  I wanted to know about her failed romance, what was going to happen to her.  She has her own book later down the line, in another of MacLean's series, but she definitely overshadowed Isabel, who didn't seem nearly as steady and levelheaded as we're supposed to think.  Her instant gaga-ing, but how she refuses to accept help she so desperately needs, just didn't seem to fit, and it didn't work well as a coherent whole.

But this book was mercifully lacking in mentions of "sweet rain," so at least there's that.

Overall, this was enjoyable, but I didn't like it as much as the first one.  I probably wouldn't read it again, and honestly couldn't remember much about it--even Isabel's name--by the time I went to read the third book only a few days later, which doesn't really speak highly of it.  I think there was a lot of cool concepts here, such as Minerva House.  Women helping women is so great to see!  However, as nothing every really happened to threaten this in any serious way, it was underdone and didn't have enough impact to carry the rest of the book.

2 stars out of 5.

Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake - Sarah MacLean (Love By Numbers #1)

For those who aren't avidly watching the romance community, there is currently a trash fire going on in which an author trademarked the word "cocky" for use in titles of books and series.  This is a bitch move, and it's not going particularly well for her, but it's brought up a lot of interesting conversations about titling and tropes in the romance genre as a whole.  We romance readers love our tropes--and why not, as long as they're done well?  And titles tie in very closely with them, because it lets you know exactly what you're going to get, in a way that other genres don't practice that same variety of branding.  For example, Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake implies that a heroine is going to behave badly while falling in love with a man who is known to be a womanizer in high society.  In contrast, here are a few other books I'm currently reading: The Sparrow, In the Garden of Beasts, The Unimaginable, Salt & Storm.  None of these titles really tell you what the book is about--and let me tell you, The Sparrow is definitely not about small birds.  But these romance titling conventions mean that, while you're never guaranteed to like a book, for a variety of reasons, you know if the book you pick up is going to trend in a direction you'll like.  And for that reason, romance can be an extremely comforting genre to browse, because you know exactly what to look for in order to get what you want.

I've been having reading difficulties recently.  While I've liked a lot of books, I haven't loved very many yet this year, and I've found a lot that ended up being just okay.  In the middle of several other books that weren't impressing me very much, I turned away to a good-old standby, the historical romance.  And luckily, I had just gotten off the waitlist for this book.  Sarah MacLean's name has crossed my field of vision many times--due to friends reading her books, due to her books being recommended for people who like other books I've read, due to her writing a romance column for the Washington Post.  Somehow, despite all of this, I had not read any of hers.  But NRTBWRAR (geeze) seemed like as good a place to start as any.

The book starts with an encounter between our heroine, Calpurnia "Callie" Hartwell, who is curvy and plainer than is fashionable and who languishes for ever finding a husband during a terrible Season when she eighteen, and our hero, Gabriel, a marquess with a bit of a womanizing reputation who never wants to marry due to how his mother acted when he was young.  Then we skip ahead ten years--Callie is on the shelf, sitting in "Spinster Seating" at balls, and watching her dazzling younger sister getting ready to marry a duke.  Gabriel, in the meantime, has found a previously-unknown half-sister dumped on his doorstep, and is determined to do right by her and bring her out in society, but he'll need the help of a respectable woman to do so.  When Callie turns up at his house in the middle of the night, looking for an adventure of her own, Gabriel decides she's perfect for the task, as her reputation has never been objectionable at all--though if Callie completes her adventure list, she'll be ruined for sure...

The banter here is good.  Callie is taking charge of her own life, even if only one or two other people know it.  She is determined to live, and to take hold of the experiences she wants even if she isn't supposed to want them--like learning to fence or attending a duel, things that ladies are not supposed to do.  Her sister is also lovely and charming and supportive, to the degree that she knows what Callie is doing, and Gabriel's sister, Juliana, is definitely set up for a good book of her own at the end of the trilogy--I presume the second book will focus on Gabriel's twin brother.  Even Gabriel's former mistress ended up being surprisingly nice, and I was pleased that MacLean didn't go for cattiness between the old lover and the new in order to drive the plot.  Women don't have to be nasty to each other, guys!  It's possible!

I liked Gabriel overall, though I didn't always find him to be the most interesting.  I also found him a bit more...absent, I guess, than I thought a proper romance hero should have been--both emotionally and physically.  He popped in and out, mostly when Callie was having one of her adventures, but I would have liked to see a bit more reaction between them.  Additionally, oh dear stars above, someone please erase the phrase "sweet rain" from the English language.  Like, what?  Ew.  Stop.  Also, Gabriel is kind of a jerk for most of the book.  This is pretty common in the genre, but even when Gabriel blundered quite badly, he was very, very slow to make apologies or amends for it, more so than he should have been.

Overall, I liked this quite a bit.  Not a raving, "must have it again and again" book, but something that definitely leavened my reading slump somewhat.  I'm looking forward to reading some of MacLean's other books and seeing what else she has to offer.

4 stars out of 5.

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.

From Duke Till Dawn - Eva Leigh (London Underground #1)

I've hit a point where there aren't a lot of historical romances I'm looking forward to reading.  This sounds ridiculous; of course there are tons of historical romances out there.  Probably even a lot of good ones!  The problem is finding them, because a lot of them are awful.  So I carefully poked through the ebooks available from my local library and finally got out a few, From Duke Till Dawn being one of them.  A few other ones got returned within reading a few chapters, but I pushed through with this one.

Overall, it was a cute book.  The heroine, Cassandra, is a con artist, which is something I haven't encountered in a historical romance before.  Straight-up thieves, yes, but con women?  Not so much.  Two years before the start of the book, Cassandra conned Alex, the Duke of Greyland, out of five hundred pounds, and then slept with him in a mutual fit of passion.  But she disappeared before he woke up, and he's spent the past two years trying to get over her while simultaneously trying to woo a young woman who would be a suitable wife.  That arrangement has just gone down the drain when Alex finds Cassandra again--running a gaming hell.  And when he quickly finds out about the con, he wants revenge...but he still likes her, and also wants to help her when her partner skips town and leaves Cassandra with all of his debts.  #drama

The problem here is that the initial connection, the sizzle, happens entirely off the page, because it happened in that initial encounter two years before we actually get to the story.  For the entirety of the book, we're told how the two characters are experiencing all these feelings again, but because we never actually get to see that, there doesn't seem to be much of a blooming of romance here.

Without a lot of romance, what is a historical romance to rely on?!  Well, in this case, a few things.  This is not a sweet romance (there are sex scenes, and some of them are considerably raunchier than a lot of historical romance missionary sex--at a sex club, against a wall, from behind, etc.) but many parts have the feel of it.  This is because, while we don't see a lot of the chemistry part of the relationship, what we do see is the growing caring and trust between the two.  This is something that's underplayed in a lot of romances, which focus too much on the sizzle.  So, while this hasn't struck a balance, it was nice to see an emphasis on other parts of the relationship...while still allowing the characters to get down and dirty when the mood called for it.

That said, Alex is possibly an unrealistically awesome person.  I can't think of many, if any, instances in which a man who found out the woman he was in love with had conned him would dive head-first into helping her.  He's a duke; he doesn't need the five hundred pounds back, which is made glaring obvious again and again and again.  If he really wanted revenge, as he swears he does upon this revelation, he could have just left Cassandra to her debtors.  Of course, he's too honorable of a person to do that, but this whole situation--which, unfortunately, anchors the entire plot--just seems a little weak, to say the least.

The writing itself is decent.  The pacing is good--not great, but good.  There are, for instance, a few occasions when the characters went shopping or for desserts instead of actually trying to accomplish anything.  While I love these scenes in most books, with such pressing circumstances surrounding these two characters, these outings seemed a little out of place.

Still, I enjoyed this book, and while I'm not rushing to read everything Eva Leigh has ever written, I'm certainly open to reading her other works in the future.

3 stars out of 5.

Hello Stranger - Lisa Kleypas (Ravenels #4)

For some reason I keep going back to Lisa Kleypas, even though none of her recent works have really intrigued me.  The Ravenels series hasn't been strong, and I've found myself let down time and time again.  That was also the case here, with the fourth book Hello Stranger.  However, I do think this was stronger than the preceding three books.

Our heroine here is Garrett Gibson, the female doctor who has been a side character in the previous Ravenel books.  The hero is Ethan Ransom, who we've also seen briefly in passing.  How is this a Ravenel book, you might ask, when neither character is a Ravenel?  Ah.  Well, there's a clear answer there, but if you haven't figured it out yet, I'll let it come out in the reading.

Garrett is wrapped up in her career doctoring those less fortunate than she when she finds herself in a spot of trouble with some sailors while returning home one night.  Armed with a trusty cane, she's pretty confident that she can handle things--but Ethan, who's been following her (creepy much?) steps in and helps out.  He offers to teach her some self defense, after which he says he'll never see her again, but he just keeps coming back, and the pair's attraction only grows.

My big issue with this book is the pacing.  What seems like it really should have been the climactic event happens about halfway through the book, and then the part where they bop around in the country really seems to drag on and on and on.  Garrett is of course a woman ahead of her time--working with sterilization of medical supplies and practitioners and early blood transfusions--but even watching her wield her abilities can't help the struggling pace.  And as the romance is kind of on hold at that point, too, due to Ethan's condition...well.  It's slow.  Very slow.  There's a slight uptake in pace when they return to London, but it's not enough to save the long and dragging part.

Garrett and Ethan's attraction is definitely of the instant, or at least close to instant, variety.  And yet their relationship takes time progress, indicating some issues with pacing consistency here, as well.  That said, I liked Garrett and Ransom, individually and together, more than I liked the main characters of previous books.  Garrett has all the ambition of Pandora but none of the flightiness.  She is smart and steadying but doesn't decry love in favor of her career, and instead embraces that she can have both--after all, she's already broken barriers professionally, so why not personally?  And then there's Ethan.  I kind of feel like I shouldn't like Ethan, and yet I did.  He has a shady background, to be sure, but there's never even the slightest indication that he would hurt Garrett, even through attempting to shield her, which is important.  Additionally, Ethan's profession means that, for once, Kleypas' subplot makes sense.  She continues to have a spy/murder plot shoved into a romance book, something that very rarely works and hasn't worked in her past books, but at least with Ethan being so involved in it, it fits and builds throughout the book without being shoehorned in at the last minute as a way to reconcile the lovers.

Oh, and it was nice to see a historical romance in which neither of the two main characters is wielding a title as part of their attraction.  (No, that does not count.)

Is this Kleypas' most dazzling work?  No.  And honestly, at this point I don't have super high hopes for the last two books in this series.  However, this was stronger than the previous books in the series, having better main characters, a decent romance, and a subplot that, while not the strongest, at least made sense.  It did suffer from pacing issues on both the relationship and subplot sides, however, and so it's not escalating up into favorite romances of the year any time soon.

3 stars out of 5.

A Hope Divided - Alyssa Cole (Loyal League #2)

Alyssa Cole is a relatively recent discovery for me, as I've only read the first Loyal League book prior to this, but she's got some good stuff coming out.  A Hope Divided intrigued me as soon as I finished reading An Extraordinary Union, and she also recently put out a modern romance, A Princess in Theory, that looks wonderful as well.  She has heroines who are in interesting fields--spying, medicine, science--and who are women of color, which are rare in mainstream romance and rarer still in historical romance.  And while I had liked An Extraordinary Union, something about A Hope Divided just seemed like it would strike me better.

And it did.

An Extraordinary Union was definitely a historical romance.  A Hope Divided I would classify as a historical fiction with a strong romantic thread.  The relationship between Marlie and Ewan is important to the story, yes--but equally so is the emphasis that Cole places on the non-combatant participants in the Civil War, those who didn't join up with the Confederate or Union armies, but fought in their own ways.  This might have been running slaves, escaped Union prisoners, or others trying to get away through the Underground Railroad, it might have been Quakers refusing to fight, it might have been spies, it might have been farmers sending food to Union prisoners.  Marlie, our heroine, is a biracial woman.  Growing up with her mother in a rural area, she's not very aware of her background, until a white woman, Sarah Lynch, shows up offering to take Marlie and give her the life that she, as a Lynch, deserves.  Marlie's mother agrees that's best, and off Marlie goes, against her will.  Though she finds herself living a mostly-respectable life--even as a Lynch, the color of her skin and her strange heterochromatic eyes keep people aware of who she is--she also holds onto her roots, brewing medicines for those in need, though she maintains that she relies on medicine and science rather than magic, folklore, or witchcraft like people said about her mother.

Enter Ewan, the brother of An Extraordinary Union's hero.  He's a Union prisoner hiding his identity, because his specialty was torturing information out of Confederate soldiers, and one of the men roaming in the area in charge of the nefarious Home Guard is one of the last men he encountered before being taken prisoner and he...somewhat lost his composure during the "interrogation."  Ewan has anger problems, stemming from his childhood with a drunk and abusive father, but he's worked hard to suppress them.  Torturing people, however, doesn't exactly lend itself to that.  In Marlie, who he encounters when she brings food and books to the prison, he finds peace, and also attraction--not just to her body, but to her mind.  But of course they can never be together...until he's holed up in a hidden room in Marlie's suite at Lynchwood, having escaped from prison.

There are some really nefarious people here, far so more than in the first book, and it's Marlie's interactions with them as well as the people in her community and those she meets when she leaves that make this a work of historical fiction with a romance bend rather than the other way around.  In traditional historical romance novels, the setting is kind of wallpaper, just designed to make the characters look good.  In A Hope Divided, the setting thrums with life.  It lives and breathes and is a character in its own right.  This sense of place contributes so much to the story and really grounds it in a strong historical fiction background instead of only romance.

Overall, I liked this more than the first book.  It's less of a spy story or a romance, but I think the other aspects added in balance well and make it a stronger story overall.

4.5 stars out of 5.

Earls Just Want to Have Fun - Shana Galen (Covent Garden Cubs #1)

I'm not entirely sure how this book ended up on my radar; I think I actually saw the third book, I Kissed a Rogue, and went in search of the first one.  Anyway, after a bit of library finangling (because they didn't have it in Kindle format) I finally managed to dig in.

When Elizabeth was five, she was kidnapped from her life as a young lady of the ton and brought into a ring of thieves known as the Covent Garden Cubs.  After fifteen years of lies and stealing and being told she's the daughter of a prostitute, Elizabeth (now known as Marlowe) believes it--but still wonders at the few hazy memories she retains from her early life.  And she's yanked back into that life, and that world, when she's kidnapped again, this time by Sir Brook Derring, a Bow Street Runner Marlowe's parents hired to find her.  But as said parents are out of town and Brook has other things to do, he dumps her with his brother Maxwell, Earl of Dane, and heads off on other business.  Dane is none too pleased to be saddled with a girl who he's convinced is nothing better than thief, but sparks begin to fly between the two as he tries to get her in some sort of shape to meet her potential long-last parents.  Meanwhile, Marlowe's biggest concern is Satin, the head of the Cubs who will undoubtedly come after her, with repercussions for everyone involved.

Most of the time when an author tries to put a thieving/roguery plot into a historical romance novel, it doesn't go particularly well.  Luckily, this book was the exception to that.  This is probably because Marlowe's thief status and her position in the Cubs is an intrinsic part of her character, rather than something Galen just tacked onto her in order to make her seem more interesting.  Her escape from this situation is also vital to her future and Dane's as well, since anyone involved with keeping her from the Cubs is going to come under Satin's line of fire.  Because this was a primary plot point, rather than one just shoved in for kicks, it worked out very well.

Now, let's talk about Dane.  Dane at the beginning of the book is completely insufferable.  Why?  Because he's extremely prejudiced and hates poor people, thinking that they deserve their situations.  Basically, he's the embodiment of the thought that if they didn't want to be poor, then they shouldn't have been born poor to begin with.  He is a prick.  It's bad enough that I almost quit the book when he showed up, because I knew I would never be able to root for a hero so small-minded and just--ugh.  Thankfully, he changes his tune pretty quickly.  It's not unbelievably so--as much as any timeline in a book that takes place over the course of a few days can be believably stretched out, at least--and it takes a lot of arguing in order to get him to that point, but he gets there eventually and it is a change for the better.  And you can see the change slowly occurring, which is good because it doesn't make his change of position at the end of the book seem like it came out of nowhere.  If only people in real life could be reasoned with like Dane...

The writing here is good.  Galen writes a good relationship, good kissing, good sex scenes.  It's a great historical romance novel.  I don't think I've read any other ones by Galen, and while I'm not fawning and drooling over this one and going back to read it immediately after finishing it, it's definitely a good intro to Galen, and I look forward to reading other books by her.

4 stars out of 5.

Not Quite a Husband - Sherry Thomas (Marsdens #2)

Having read Sherry Thomas' YA fantasy trilogy, the logical next step was to try one of her historical romances.  I picked Not Quite a Husband because I'd seen it on a few friends' reading lists, and it was also available from the library.  It was a quick read, only about two and a half hours, which made it a perfect book for a Saturday afternoon.

Heroine Bryony fell immediately and madly in love with Leo Marsden when he appeared in London one Season, reappearing from a past in which she knew him as a child.  Despite being focused on her career and having no plans to marry, she proposes to him in quick order, he accepts, they marry--and the marriage falls apart almost before it has even begun.  Time jump after the prologue to Bryony living in a remote area of India, serving as a doctor to a missionary community and hiding from the scandal that the annulment of her marriage caused.  Until Leo shows up, having been sent by Bryony's sister to find her based on a claim that her father--from whom Bryony is estranged--is dying.  And so begins a trip back across India while a rebellion brews in the background.

This struck me because I was simultaneously finishing up The Far Pavilions, which also takes place (mostly) in India, though in both books it's an India pre-partition, which means that the geography also includes modern-day Pakistan, so keep that in mind while you're trying to keep things straight in your head.

Watching the initial relationship here was, to me, more interesting than watching Bryony and Leo come back together.  Seeing those little snippets of them growing up, encountering each other again in London, and then the dissolution of that relationship...that was the fascinating part.  I do think their reunion could have been fascinating, however, I wasn't entirely convinced by it.  The sex was definitely of the "dubious consent" variety, which kind of squicked me out (and so was a lot of the sex during their marriage, which, what?  THAT IS SO CREEPY, LEO), and rapey heroes are so not my thing.  Just because someone gets physical pleasure from sex doesn't mean they want it, let's remember.  Then, the entire impetus of the relationship is basically adrenaline in the face of near-death experiences, which is fun, except that's basically the entire thing, no other supporting emotional incidents.

Overall, I was disappointed by this.  The initial premise and the setting had such promise, but the relationship really soured to me because of Leo's actions.  If he wasn't so rapey I think I would have liked him--I think I even could have forgiven him the discretion, maybe--but the combination was just too much to me.  I didn't hate Leo with a fiery passion (a la Greg from Happily Ever Ninja) but he creeped me out and I found myself wondering why it too Bryony so long to get away from him in the first place.  (Yes, yes, Victorian norms.  I know.  But that can totally be skirted in a modern book.)

Additionally, this is marked as the second book in a series, so I've denoted that, but looking at the so-called first book, I'm not sure what the connection actually is.

2 stars out of 5--for the setting and premise, and also for Bryony, because female doctors in historical fictions are awesome.

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.

The Duchess Deal - Tessa Dare (Girl Meets Duke #1)

Way back in November, The Duchess Deal was the pick for the Unapologetic Romance Readers' monthly read.  Except I was number sixty-something on the wait list at the library, so I definitely didn't get it in November.  It finally came through recently, and I absolutely devoured it.  Dare's "Castles Ever After" series is so cute and romantic and all-over wonderful, so I'm not terribly surprised that this other work of hers is just as delightful.

The two main characters here are Emma, the daughter of a vicar who has been working as a seamstress after becoming estranged from her father; and "Ash," real name George, but he's the Duke of Ashbury, so his friends call him Ash.  At least they would if he had any friends.

Emma and Ash's paths cross when she turns up at his house wearing the wedding dress that she made for his fiancee from a now-broken engagement, because said fiancee has refused to pay for it and Emma's going to be turned out of her lodgings if she can't pay her rent.  Ash, disfigured by an exploding rocket at the Battle of Waterloo, sees that his marriage prospects slim, so when Emma turns up in a wedding gown, it seems like a sign from Fate.  He offers to marry her, telling her that once she gives him an heir, she never needs to deal with him again.  Emma agrees for a few reasons, and not only for her own benefit, but she adds a few conditions of her own--like he has to have dinner with her every night, and she gets to pick something to call him, encompassing ridiculous pet names.  The chemistry is of course there and the two grow closer at a good clip, though it's not instant and the relationship is definitely hindered by the issues that both have lingering from their pasts.

There are other awesome aspects here.  Several other young women enter the picture, presumably the heroines of future "Girl Meets Duke" books, and since sincere female friendships are so rare in books in general but in romance in particular, their instant embrace of Emma and the great dynamic the women had between them was a real highlight.  I also really enjoyed Emma's Scarlett O'Hara moment--you know, the one with the curtains.  The banter is spot-on.

Of course, there are the usual miscommunications a refusals to communicate here.  They are endemic to the genre.  There is a really hackneyed subplot that had me rolling my eyes--the one where Ash goes stalking about after dark as the Monster of Mayfair and is eventually accused of murder.  I guess Dare felt like he needed something to do, but meh.  Trevor was fun, though, and overall the book is just such a lovely, fast read that the issues are pretty minor.  I really enjoyed it and would definitely read it again.

4 stars out of 5.

The Flame and the Flower - Kathleen E. Woodiwiss (Birmingham #1)

The second-to-last category of my 2017 romance reading challenge is done, and it was the last category I was dreading, since I saved one I was looking forward to for my final book.  What was the category, you ask?  The bodice ripper.  And when you look up bodice rippers, the name of Woodiwiss abounds, so one of hers seemed like the logical choice to fill this category.  Of course, bodice rippers are known for an abundance of rape and creepy men and unlikable heroines, so I pretty much knew what I was in for going into it.

The story is about Heather, living a life of drudgery with her aunt and uncle until her aunt's brother offers to bring her to London to get her a position teaching at a school--though when they arrive, he promptly attempts to rape her, ending in a struggle in which he's stabbed and Heather flees.  Her flight ends rather abruptly when two sailors get hold of her and take her onto a ship where she meets Brandon Birmingham, the captain, who thinks she's a prostitute and does proceed to rape her, several times, despite her repeatedly telling him no and declaring she's not a prostitute.  So, nice guy.  Heather manages to flee again, back to her aunt and uncle, until it's discovered she's pregnant and they all return to London to force Brandon to marry her, with the help of a family friend.  And then Heather is whisked away to America, where Brandon lives and plans to stay after retiring from his life at sea.

So, this is basically the story of an eighteen-year-old girl falling in love with her rapist, who is nearly twice her age.  Brandon declares that he hates Heather for trapping him into marriage, and that she'll be nothing but a servant to him, but he never treats her as such.  Though he does eventually threaten to rape her again if she doesn't come to him willingly.  So there's that.  Overall, he's not as rapey and creepy as most bodice ripper heroes, but I definitely still would not put in him the categories of "good guy" or "desirable romantic interest" because of the way he basically disregards Heather's feelings while simultaneously panting after her for the entire book.  And, you know, how he says that he raped her eight months ago and she should be over it by now.  Of course, to balance out Brandon's rather mild status are a bunch of other bodice ripper tropes--all other women hating Heather because she has Brandon and they don't and is prettier than them, all the other men wanting to rape Heather because she's pretty and innocent and naive, and a few murders thrown in for good measure.

The writing here is measurably better than the last bodice ripper I read, Savage Ecstasy, which was quite a relief.  I wouldn't go so far as to say I enjoyed this book, but reading it wasn't the form of torture that SE was.  It's all rather purple and melodramatic but again, that's something that I expected of a book in this genre in general.  Heather's feelings for Brandon were completely unrealistic--she's afraid of him for a bit and then gaga over him in quick succession and laughs off her extremely traumatic rape within less than a year.  But that's probably to be expected because Heather doesn't really seem to have much agency at all.  Every now and then she gets mad and stamps her foot or breaks something, but these rages never lead to actual action and she just goes back to doing whatever Brandon wants--or whatever she thinks he wants--the next time he appears on the page.  And then there's the portrayal of people of color--Brandon's housekeeper is black woman who is basically the embodiment of the Mammy stereotype (a la Gone with the Wind; it's a thing in books that take place during the era preceding the Civil War that black women are either portrayed as "the Mammy" or "the Jezebel" with little else to distinguish them) and it's questionable whether or not the "servants" were actually slaves.  They're called servants, but everyone else in the Charleston area has slaves, sooooo...

Obviously, this is a very problematic book.  The portrayal of "romantic rape," the women who are clearly sluts because they want sex but are not Heather, the "all ugly people are bad," the stereotyping of people of color, and all the other things I mentioned above all add up to it.  However, as it wasn't as terrible--in writing, in brutality, in pretty much anything, as the last one I read, sooo...

1.5 stars out of 5.

A Pirate for Christmas - Anna Campbell

A Pirate for Christmas was the holiday romance selection for the Unapologetic Romance Readers' group.  Like most Christmas-themed historical romances, it's a novella rather than a full-length novel.  Also like most Christmas-themed historical romances (and Christmas romances in general, regardless of time period) it relies on love at first sight to get everything going--probably because the short length doesn't leave as much room for relationship and character development.

The two main characters here are Bess, the daughter of the vicar of her rural village, and Rory, who has just taken over the title of Earl after his older brother's death.  There's a rumor rampant in town that Rory is a dastardly pirate, but we know from the book's description that he was actually in the Royal Navy.  When Bess visits the manor to obtain the donkey that always takes part in the Christmas play (Daisy--Daisy was probably the best part of the book) she encounters Rory, the two fall in love at first sight but are of course unable to express their feelings for each other, and go edging around each other as Bess starts reorganizing Rory's house and gets him to give her Daisy and his own participation in the Christmas play...all for the price of a kiss, of course.

As I mentioned before, there's not a lot of room for plot or character development here.  Bess and Rory spend most of the time mooning at each other from afar with all of the village folk trying to push them together, and then there's an extended scene where they conveniently get stuck in a cabin in the woods during a snowstorm together.  Rory wants Bess and Bess wants Rory and and Rory spends a lot of time pursuing Bess but not really wanting to do anything about it because he wants to marry her first (because that's what she deserves) but also not really doing anything to move in a marriage direction.  But of course that's where it all ends up, and then there's a weird time-jump to the honeymoon where the ~sexy times~ start.  Honestly things probably would have been a bit more interesting of Rory really had been a dastardly pirate instead of a misunderstood navy captain, but meh.

Christmas romances in book form are, essentially, the same as those cheesy holiday movies that you see on TV all the time at this time of year.  They  might be cute, for what they are, but they're not particularly good.  This book follows that trope exactly.

2 stars out of 5.

Savage Ecstasy - Janelle Taylor (Gray Eagle #1)

Slogging through the remainder of my romance reading challenge categories before the end of the year, I came to this: Savage Ecstasy.  This fit into the category of "A Native American romance."  This is a particularly bad category for a couple of reasons.  First, despite asking around in the romance group, I could not find any #OwnVoices Native American romances.  If you know of one, please direct me to it.  But what this ultimately meant was that all of the ones I was finding were written by white women.  Not ideal.  Second, there aren't a lot of ones I could find that were written within the past few decades, which mean that they were pretty much all coming from the era of bodice rippers.  I mean, the title should probably tell you all you need to know about this book, and the rest that I saw were very much like it.  But I already had this one, because it was a bodice ripper buddy read for the Unapologetic Romance Readers last year that I never got around to actually completing.  And so, since I couldn't find anything that looked better, off I went.

This book is just as offensive and downright terrible as the title would suggest.  The story follows Alisha, who has moved to the western territories of the American colonies with her uncle following the death of her parents.  One day some men living in her settlement capture an Oglala warrior, Gray Eagle, and plan to torture and kill him for kicks, but Alisha intervenes and eventually he's just put into isolation instead--from which he escapes and quickly extracts his revenge, returning with his buddies to kill basically everyone at the fort with the exception of Alisha and a few others--one other woman, who's turned into a whore, and a few men that are tortured and killed at the Oglala camp.  He claims Alisha for his own and so begins a brutal tale of repeated rape and abuse on literally every level that's peddled as a romance in which, by the end of the book, the two main characters have never held a conversation.  Seriously.  Gray Eagle speaks English but he doesn't let Alisha know this and so they just snipe at each other in their respective languages with nothing actually being communicated, and Gray Eagle periodically raping Alisha because apparently this will make her love him and be loyal to him.  And Alisha obviously does love him because clearly you fall in love with someone in the thirty seconds it takes you to lay eyes on them, and them killing literally everyone you know, raping you, beating you, torturing you, etc. does nothing to challenge those emotions.

Not only does this book have an awful plot, but it's full of terrible writing and terrible tropes.  Yes, there are some editing issues here, but I think in this case that's actually caused by an older book being converted to a Kindle format.  But the writing itself is still terrible.  It's stilted, jumps between past and present tense, and was so boring that I actually found myself falling asleep while reading it.  Why?  Because there is no depth. It's all surface level, all tell and no show.  And for the terrible tropes?  Well, beyond the love at first sight and the rapey-ness of this, all the men want to bang Alisha because she is beautiful and pure!  And all of the women who are not Alisha hate her because all of the men want to bang her.  Obviously.  Additionally, Alisha is repeatedly described as looking like a little girl, which adds a whole new level of creepiness and ickiness to this which was completely unnecessary.

This was a terrible book.  I will definitely not be reading the others--yes, this is a series, if you can believe it--and cannot fathom reading anything else by this author in general.  There was literally nothing good about this.  I hated it.

1 star out of 5.

The Raven Prince - Elizabeth Hoyt (Princes #1)

This was the main buddy read for the Unapologetic Romance Readers group for December 2017.  I'm still waiting on the November title from the library, but the library didn't have this one at all, so I went ahead and bought it and read it during those dark morning hours that you have to suffer through when you travel time zones and consequently wake up two to three hours before everyone else--and the sun.  Good thing for Kindle Paperwhite, eh?

The story here follows Anna, a widow living with her mother-in-law and one servant and whose household is going through some financial difficulties.  She decides to get herself a job to help, and finds a position serving as secretary for the local earl, who has just moved back to the area and who no one has seen yet.  Of course, Anna finds out quickly that she has seen the earl--he nearly ran her over with his horse a few days before, leading to a rather awkward encounter.  And of course the two are attracted to each other, but there are Problems.  Like Anna being barren (which, come on, she clearly isn't) and Edward wanting a family to continue his line, and him being engaged to another woman in order to pursue that.  You know.  Stuff like that.  There's also a very minor blackmail subplot, but most of the book involves Anna trying to seduce Edward, even going so far as to get herself into a brothel so she can have sex with him without him knowing it's here.

This has a good premise and good writing, and I felt the characters had great chemistry, but looking more closely at it, there are definitely some problems.  Edward has a violent temper, doing things like throwing objects at his steward's head, and it seems like maybe that's not a great person to get involved with.  Anna is confident enough to go to London to seduce Edward, but not if he knows it's her--and then gets miffy when he doesn't realize afterward.  Uhm...what?  And when she tells Edward she doesn't want to marry him, he won't take no for an answer.  I know, I know, it's a romance and they need to end up together, so clearly he's going to have to ask her again--but he outright harasses her way past the point that was acceptable.  And he continues to sleep with her before breaking off his engagement to his fiancee, which is pretty slimy in and of itself.  The whole "woman sneaks into a brothel to have sex with the man she desires" trope is also one I've encountered before and not one I'm fond of.

That said...I didn't dislike this.  I think Hoyt's writing is really good, as I mentioned before, and I think it carried the book through its rather questionable character and plot points.  She can write good tension and good banter and a good sex scene, and there is also a minor side romance that was quaint; it's always nice when love isn't exclusively reserved for the main characters.  Also, I liked how the blackmail plot was resolved.  Anna makes a questionable (again) choice regarding it at first, but then realizes what she's doing and works to rectify it.  Of course things still go downhill, but that was more Edward's fault than Anna's.  The main story is also framed by a fairy tale book also called The Raven Prince, which follows the structure of "East of the Sun and West of the Moon" but with a little less work needing to be done on the heroine's end to get her man back.  But while I liked this device, I'm not entirely sure what purpose it served since the two stories don't really parallel each other at all.

This was my first Elizabeth Hoyt book, though I have a bunch of hers on my to-read list.  Based on it, I would read more; some of my other favorite historical romance authors have made some questionable choices in their back catalogues as well, and I've loved other works of theirs.  (Lisa Kleypas comes immediately to mind.)  Hoyt's writing was strong enough for me to not just toss her to the wayside, and I'm interested in seeing what she might have to offer in other plots, preferably ones with less issues involved.

2.5 stars out of 5.

An Extraordinary Union - Alyssa Cole (Loyal League #1)

Rushing to finish my reading challenges by the end of the year means more weekend book reviews!  Oh boy.  After several attempts at fulfilling the category for a Civil War or Reconstruction romance for the Unapologetic Romance Readers' challenge, I stumbled upon An Extraordinary Union, which had high reviews, the right setting, and an interracial romance.  I don't end up reading a lot of interracial romances because I heavily favor historical romances, primarily Regency-era ones set in London society, which was not exactly brimming with interracial couples, but I'm not at all opposed to them as a concept, so this was a pleasant discovery.  (I do have to read an interracial romance for another category and have a different book picked out for it; I just had too much trouble finding a good Civil War romance to slot this one into another category.)

The story here follows Elle(n) Burns, a free woman of color who was born a slave before being freed with her family as a child.  Now, Elle has returned to the South to spy for the Loyalty League, a group of blacks working for the North, the Union, and Lincoln.  Her disguise necessitates her posing as a mute slavery and subjecting her to humiliations that she'd thought she'd escaped.  It also puts her in the path of Malcolm McCall, a Pinkerton detective who is also spying on the South, though he has the privilege of being a man and white and so gets to pose as a soldier instead of a slave.  Upon their first encounter, Elle and Malcolm are both attracted to each other--at least after they establish that Malcolm hasn't shown up to rape Elle.  But despite their attraction, Elle is leery of Malcolm for very good reasons.  You know, like the fact that she's black and he's white and there can never be an equal power dynamic between them, society will never accept them, and she's not really sure if he really likes her or if he just wants a taste of something taboo.  So there are a few obstacles in the way of their romance.

Cole does such a great job bringing Elle and Malcolm together.  There's a keen awareness of unequal power dynamics in the very nature of their relationship and Cole (and Malcolm, by extension) does everything possible to even the playing field, making sure that Elle's consent is highly visible at every step of the way and that Malcolm backs off every time she seems like she's about to say no.  After he saves her twice, she makes a request that she save him the next time--and then she does, in spectacular fashion.  And of course, Elle is the one who puts together the pieces to figure out what is going on with a ship that could threaten the the outcome of the blockade and the war itself.  Elle is a strong, remarkable woman even when she's being humiliated and put down, in direct contrast to her "mistress" who is a downright bitch and petty and vindictive even when she already has everything she could ever want.

The writing here is excellent, the pacing is on-spot, and the chemistry between Elle and Malcolm absolutely sizzles.  However, I do have two issues.  My first complaint is that not a lot is done to show Elle and Malcolm's backgrounds; a few things are stated, like the reason for Malcolm's family's immigration to the United States and how Elle came to be free and lost her best friend and former lover, but there's not a lot of insight into how that made them the people that they are.  And second, while I think the individual plots of the spy mission and romance are done well, they're not necessarily woven together well.  I liked how Elle and Malcolm teamed up to pool information and find out about the ship, but the spying aspects and romance aspects seemed to seesaw from one extreme to the other without much in-between.  Still, this was highly enjoyable and I'm definitely interested in reading more books in this series and by this author.

4 stars out of 5.

In Bed with a Highlander - Maya Banks (McCabe Trilogy #1)

I'm not a huge "highlander" romance fan, but I've read a few of them this year in hopes of fulfilling this category for the Unapologetic Romance Readers 2017 Reading Challenge.  Unfortunately for me, every time I read one, it seemed to fit another category better, and so I had to keep searching.  I'm finally calling it off with this one!

The story is about Mairin Stuart, who is apparently a bastard princess whose heir will inherit huge, wealthy holdings in Scotland.  Consequently, everyone wants to marry her.  She's been hiding out in a convent for ten years, but the book starts with her being discovered by the men of one Duncan Cameron, who intends to force her to marry him.  When she refuses, she's badly beaten, but manages to escape his clutches with the help of a maid and a boy she saves from being killed by Cameron's men. The boy, of course, ends up being the heir of another clan, who gets his father to promise to protect Mairin--and then promptly marries her.  The two scream and fight and Mairin tries to run away before they get married, but as soon as the vows are said, they're pretty much gaga over each other and spend most of the book having sex while Mairin makes charming mistakes in being the lady of a highland clan.  There's a flimsy subplot going on here with Duncan Cameron trying to get Mairin back, and someone trying to kill one of the couple, but it's mostly shoe-horned into the end of the book.  There's also a lot of Scottish history (I think) that's required to understand it, so if you're not familiar with Scottish royal genealogy in the early twelfth century, it's all a bit murky.

I honestly wasn't a fan of the writing, either; there's a lot of "aye"-ing being done, and I didn't feel that Mairin and Ewan had any chemistry at all.  Honestly, his brothers were more interesting characters, but I didn't like this book enough to pursue the other two with them as heroes, because the writing is just...flat.  The sex scenes aren't sexy, the bickering doesn't have any tension in it, and then there's the lackluster plot that's supposedly propping the whole book up.  Overall, it's just "meh," and I don't see myself reaching for this author again in the future.

2 stars out of 5.

Untouched - Anna Campbell

Okay, the romance reading challenge strikes again!  This time, we're examining the "virgin hero" category.  I read a couple of books trying to fulfill this, finding that I had been misled, the issue of the hero's virginity doesn't come up, etc.  So I went to a list!  Unfortunately, most of the books that I was interested in, I had already read, and I really try to read new titles for my reading challenges.  But Untouched was on the list, and the library had it, so it became my choice.

This is an interesting historical romance because it doesn't take place among ton society, or a country manor, or any of the usual settings.  Instead, it takes place in a walled compound with some grounds, a garden, and a small cottage, and remains there for most of the book--there are only a few segments that take place beyond it.  Why is this?  Because the book starts with the heroine, Grace, being kidnapped and delivered to the "mad" Matthew, Lord Sheene, to "entertain" him on orders from his uncle.  But Matthew doesn't want to be "entertained" even though he's been locked up since the age of fourteen, when he was the victim of a bad illness that gave his uncle, Matthew's guardian since the death of his parents, the room needed to make a grab at the family fortune and influence.

It's established pretty quickly that Matthew isn't actually mad, though he's understandably pretty ornery and doesn't want to let his uncle "win" by sleeping with a woman said uncle's goons provided.  Why this would be letting him win, I don't know; you can have sex with someone you're locked up with (as long as they want to have sex with you!) and still want to escape, the two conditions are not mutually exclusive unless, apparently, you're Matthew.  As far as heroes go, Matthew wasn't exactly my favorite.  He's an outright bastard to Grace, flip-flopping between believing her about her origins (or what she shares of them) and accusing her of being the worst sort of whore (which is problematic for other reasons, but now is not the time).  He's nasty and has none of the charm of most historical romance heroes, until they sleep together, at which point he quickly becomes an amazing lover and a very charming individual.  Because Sex Magic, I guess?  And he swears that he loved Grace at the first instant he saw her...despite being downright awful to her for so long, which, really, does not seem to indicate instant love.  He does demonstrate instant lust, but definitely not love.  However, the two seem to be hopelessly confused in this book, which even Grace admits at one point.

As for Grace...she was kind of vanilla.  She had a bit of an interesting background leading up to her kidnapping, but her own actions mostly include being victimized by people, wearing scanty clothing, and pining over a guy she's convinced she can't have even though he only wants to be with her.  She doesn't even want to escape from her confinement unless Matthew comes with her.  I didn't actively dislike Grace, but there was nothing that made me want to really root for her except a general distaste for Matthew's slimy uncle and his goons.

Matthew and Grace undeniably had physical chemistry, but beyond that, there wasn't a lot of development of their relationship; as I mentioned before, Campbell tries to later justify this with a "love at first sight" explanation, but that is not how it reads.  I would have liked to see a little bit more of the "getting to know you" phase of the relationship, some banter, something between them other than lust disguised as love.

Overall, this was an okay book.  It didn't have the same feel to it as most historical romance books, which was interesting--different is always interesting--and I commend Campbell for that, but it also lacked some of the spark that I look for in historical romances.  Would I read Campbell again?  Eh, maybe.  Still undecided on that front!

2 stars out of 5.

The Fires of Winter - Johanna Lindsey (Haadrad Viking Family #1)

I recently looked at my 2017 reading challenge in the Unapologetic Romance Readers group on Goodreads and realized that if I didn't get moving, I was going to be in very, very big trouble.  Here's the thing: I was tearing through that challenge at the beginning of the year.  But in doing so, I kind of...read all of the categories I was looking forward to.   Which left me with the "dregs" of categories I don't have much interest in or have downright been dreading reading for the end of the year.  Sigh.  Nevertheless, I had to get to it, so I decided to go for the "Viking romance" category I still had pending.

Much like sheikh romance books, Viking romance books seem to have a theme of being very rapey.  This is somewhat because this is what Vikings did.  They pillaged and plundered and raped and ravaged.  Not amongst their own people, where rape was a very, very serious crime, but Viking romances typically involve a young woman from the British Isles being swept away by a marauder and then falling desperately in love with him after her "traitorous body" responds to his ravishments.

Ich.

But there didn't appear to be any escaping it, and so I took on Fires of Winter.  The heroine here is a Celtic woman named Brenna, who was basically allowed to act like a boy for much of her young life and goes around in boys' clothes and carrying a sword.  You would think Brenna would be all about the #gurlpower, but the book starts with her discovering a man raping a woman and deciding it's okay as long as the rapist marries his victim.  This pretty astutely sums up Brenna's outlook for the book.  She's supposed to be married to a Viking in order to cement some sort of peace treaty, but the Viking's father, Anselem--with whom the deal was struck--reneges and raids her home as a form of vengeance; the prospective groom, unaware that he even was a prospective groom, doesn't show up until later, when Brenna is already ensconced in his house as a slave gift from the aforementioned raiding father.  Brenna, unlike all of the other women in her town, manages to escaped being raped in the journey to Norway, because of course her virginity must be preserved so "hero" Garrick can divest her of it.

Garrick is awful.  He's known as the "Hardhearted" because he doesn't like women after a former lover scorned him, but we're supposed to see through his tough exterior to a warm and cushy center.  Not so much.  Repeatedly raping the heroine doesn't really get very far, and Lindsey doesn't even attempt to mitigate the act with any "traitorous body" nonsense (which is the traditional out in this type of book, the 1980s bodice-ripper--"she liked it and so it's okay in the end") until pretty far into the book.  And even then, Brenna returns to her philosophy of that it's not wrong that Garrick is raping her, it's wrong that he's raping her and refusing to marry her after.  Why does he refuse to marry her?  Because she's a slave, but he can't free her, because then he wouldn't be able to rape her!  Obviously.

BUT!  Here is the thing.  Horrible people doing horrible things does not necessarily a bad book make, as my recent reading experience of The Bronze Horseman goes to show.  What actually made this a bad book was the writing.  Brenna was not a heroine I could root for; her actions in the beginning of the book, excusing a rapist even though she protests to hate rape, set me against her from the start, and it wasn't an upward path from there.  Despite saying she will never be dominated by a Viking, she finds herself basting the hindquarters of animals pretty quickly and cleaning up a room she trashes because Garrick says he won't feed her until she does.  She is of the foot-stamping, hair-tossing variety of woman who everyone happens to love, or at least want, at first sight and who, despite being "the best" warrior, manages to get her ass handed to her at every turning point.  She screeches and flails and is just generally so annoying that I wouldn't have minded if she fell into a fjord and drowned.  Garrick, though a terrible person, actually fit the book better, because his actions were essentially what I expected of this variety of character in this time and place.  I actually kind of appreciated that Lindsey didn't make him the raider who had stolen Brenna away, because that was actually something a little different.  But despite having an intellectual acknowledgement of Garrick and his motivations, I still couldn't feel strongly for him in any direction because Lindsey's writing is just flat.  No emotion, no spark, no fury, no passion.  Nada.

Looking at other reviews of the book now, I see I probably could have spared myself the time if I had realized Nenia from Readasaurus Reviews (and also admin of the Unapologetic Romance Readers group) had already read and reviewed this.  But still, the library didn't have anything available on Kindle and this was relatively inexpensive, and I don't think most other Viking romances would have any better, so I'm just going to move on.

1.5 stars out of 5.

The Bronze Horseman - Paullina Simons (The Bronze Simons #1)

The Bronze Horseman was a group read for the Unapologetic Romance Readers group in September, but I just got around to it this month.  I'm also slotting it in for the "military romance" category in the group's 2017 reading challenge.  Let me tell you, this book is a whopper of a romance--over 800 pages, and it looks like the two sequels are even longer!

What I have to give Simons credit for in this is her sense of time and place.  Set during the time leading up to and during the siege of Leningrad in World War II, the main characters are swept up in all of the hardship that the siege entails.  Starvation, freezing, bombings, deaths en masse--they suffer through it all.

But then, they're also infuriating people.  So not so much credit there.

The main characters are Tatiana Metanova and Alexander Belov.  They spy each other across the street one day during the white nights in a Leningrad summer, just as the war really moves into Russia, and fall in love immediately.  Problem: Alexander is dating Tatiana's older sister, Dasha.  This is the conflict that will fuel the first half of the book, as Tatiana is so scared to lose her sister's love and affection that she insists that Alexander keep dating her despite all of the trouble it causes everyone involved.  Tatiana's love for Dasha also apparently doesn't seem to go both ways, as Dasha uses Tatiana mercilessly and is fine with writing her off at the first available opportunity.  Of course, there's only one way a conflict like this can end, and the book then moves onto what's an incredibly slow start to a second half, where Tatiana and Alexander are reunited and proceed to have sex for about a hundred straight pages before diving back into the war and the siege.

The story is definitely much weaker in the time that Simons moved it away from Leningrad.  The siege provided such structure to the story, a time and place that people might not act as they otherwise would.  In Leningrad, Alexander's controlling behavior comes across as protective, especially because Tatiana is not only naive but possesses feathers for brains for much of the book--yes, she's seventeen, but in a time when "adolescence" wasn't really a thing (I mean, this is Soviet Russia, for crying out loud) she doesn't really have an excuse to continue being as dumb as she is for as long as she is, and miraculously still alive.  In other circumstances, though, Alexander's behavior strikes me as downright abusive, and doesn't bode well for the future.  He's also ruthless with using Tatiana for his own gains, especially because he knows what's likely to happen to her down the road because of his own background.  And then there's Alexander's "best friend" Dimitri, who is vile in his own special way.  Tatiana doesn't mean to be vile--in fact, I firmly believe she has a good heart, and that's the only thing that saves her character from being absolutely death-worthy--but ultimately, this is a book about terrible people doing terrible things to each other, and basically getting away with it because of the war pressing in on them from literally all sides.

There are two more books to this series, and geeze, I have no idea how much more wringing Simons can put these people through, especially given how the book ended.  It's like a train wreck--absolutely terrible, not in writing but in happenings, and yet it's so impossible to look away.  I do intend to continue reading this series, but oh man, I just don't know where it's gonna go.

3.5 stars out of 5.