Slightly Dangerous - Mary Balogh (Bedwyn Saga #6)

At last, we have arrived: the final book in Mary Balogh's Bedwyn Saga.  Getting around to the eldest sibling in the family, Wulfric, the Duke of Bewcastle, Balogh puts forth a time jump--while the first five books in the series happened in quick succession, this one takes place more than two years after the fifth book, and all the other siblings are well settled into married life by the time Wulfric gets around to falling in love.

The heroine here is Christine, a widowed woman who is living with her mother and sister after a split with her husband's family over the circumstances surrounding his death.  Christine is clumsy and speaks her mind, and seems to be entirely unsuitable for "civilized" society, except that everyone likes her anyway.  She's dragged into attending a house party to even out the numbers, and of course Wulfric is attending as well.  Their paths continuously cross, and the two grow closer but don't seem to realize it because they're continually fighting.  After the party is over, they go their separate ways, only to reunite months later...

I liked the second part of this book, at Lindsey Hall, much better than the first part at the house party.  However, as much as I liked this pairing in concept, I felt like Balogh didn't really succeed with chemistry between the characters.  She was apparently going for a "kiss you or kill you" sort of vibe, but I never felt any romantic or sexual tension underlying the sniping between Christine and Wulfric.  The sniping was amusing, to be sure, but there didn't appear to be any actual "burn" involved with it.  And while I loved the concept of Wulfric falling in love with someone who was evidently completely unsuitable for him, and loved the incidents of him coming to Christine's rescue when she landed herself in embarrassing scrapes, I didn't really see the relationship evolving on Christine's side.  Additionally, the subplot involving Christine's reputation as a flirt and her friend Justin seemed overplayed to me, given how little of an impact it had on the book.  It was supposed to deal with Christine's Tragic Past, but honestly it wasn't even that tragic and seemed to have been thrown in for melodrama more than for any true tension or plot propulsion.

Overall, this was an okay book, but it certainly wasn't worth plugging through all of the other okay books of the series for.  This wasn't the best historical romance series to me, and I'm not sure if I'll pursue Balogh again in the future.

3 stars out of 5.

Slightly Sinful - Mary Balogh (Bedwyn Saga #5)

Plowing along through the Bedwyn books, I've finally come to this: Slightly Sinful, aka the amnesia book.  I call it this on the premise that, if an author writes books for long enough, sooner or later they're going to come to a place where they just have to give a character amnesia.  It seems like Balogh hit that point here, because when we find out where Alleyne Bedwyn has been since he vanished in Slightly Tempted, and that has been cavorting with four prostitutes, one young lady posing as a prostitute, and a one-eyed sergeant, because Alleyne hit his head and doesn't remember who he is.

Our heroine is the young lady pretending to be a prostitute, Rachel York, who ended up with the prostitutes because one of them was her nurse before she was fired and lured into a life of sin.  After Rachel's fiance steals both the prostitutes' money and Rachel's, Rachel is left stranded in Brussels with an approaching war and at the mercies of the prostitutes, who are indeed quite merciful.  When she encounters Alleyne during an attempt to rob the dead and brings him back, the prostitutes even take him into their house, as they do the one-eyed sergeant who helps Rachel retrieve Alleyne to begin with--a sequence that was a nice tie-in to the preceding book.  And when Alleyne can't regain his memory, he decides to help Rachel recover her money one way or another.

The amnesia actually lends a bit of an uncomfortable dynamic to this book for me, because one of the things that Alleyne can't remember is whether or not he's married.  We, as readers, know that he is not.  However, Alleyne doesn't know that.  He doesn't offer to marry Rachel because he can't be sure that he's not married.  And yet he proceeds to engage in a sexual relationship with her, which really made me question his morals.  Apparently the Bedywns are so moralistic that they marry for love and then never stray from their marriages--and while Alleyne can't remember that he's a Bedywn, he can remember everything else, so why does this behavior suddenly seem like it's okay to him?  Hmmmm...

Other than that, this book seemed a bit happy-go-lucky.  The prostitutes all have hearts of gold, the one-eyed sergeant is willing to pay for Alleyne's living until he remembers who he is, the uncle who's blatantly lied to and who the characters are, essentially, trying to rip off forgives everyone and welcomes them into his home.  While the four prostitute characters were absolutely lovely to read about, very amusing and engaging--presumably to replace the other Bedwyns who are missing for most of the book--everything just seemed so sweet and false.  It didn't really ring as a good story with various dimensions, though it was still an enjoyable read and I think still better than the first few in the series.  It probably helps that I'm partial to the amnesia trope, as well.  I didn't like it as much as the book before this, but I'm still planning on finishing out the series--after all, Wulfric is finally up next!

3.5 stars out of 5.

Slightly Tempted - Mary Balogh (Bedwyn Saga #4)

Finally, I found the book I was waiting for in this series.  After three disappointing volumes, fully half the series, I was almost ready to give up, but I wanted to read the book focusing on Morgan Bedwyn, because she had seemed like such an interesting character, different from the rest of Bedwyns.  I'm glad I stuck it out, because I really enjoyed this one.  Just like Morgan, this was different.

The beginning of the book finds Morgan in Brussels with the family of a friend, swept up in the social scene surrounding the buildup of armies in the wake of Napoleon's escape from Elba and return for the Hundred Days.  She's being courted by her friend's brother, something she inadvertently encouraged but wants to get out of.  She catches the attention of the Earl of Rosthorn, Gervase, both because of her looks and youth and because she's the Duke of Bewcastle's youngest sister--and Rosthorn and Bewcastle have beef that goes back nine years.  Wanting to start a scandal (really, this should have been titled Slightly Scandalous instead of Freyja's volume) to hurt Bewcastle, Rosthorn starts to court Morgan with the intention of dropping her like a hot potato after gossip starts circulating, but the encroaching war gets in the way and the two find themselves suddenly and truly close.

This is an age-gap romance (Rosthorn is twelve years older than Morgan) which is a bit strange, because Balogh really hammers that gap home, but I'm a bit more forgiving of that in the historical romance context, and I think the book makes up for it in so many ways.  The setting of Brussels in the shadow of the looming and then present war lent the first half of the book an atmosphere that the other books had so far lacked and gave the blooming relationship between Morgan and Rosthorn a snap and sizzle that was absent with the other couples.  And when the deception at the heart of the relationship is revealed, Morgan doesn't just crumple or throw a fit--she vows to get her own form of revenge, and despite her doubts forges ahead and ultimately manages to redeem the relationship.  The one thing that I didn't like here was how Rosthorn uses humor as a shield; while this is totally a thing, I felt like it's already been overused in this series, and therefore didn't do a good job distinguishing Rosthorn from the previous hero, Joshua.

Ultimately, this was such a great book in contrast to the preceding ones, and it's encouraged me to continue on with the series; there's only one more book before the other one I was looking forward to, Bewcastle's, and I'm interesting in seeing how they're going to deal with Alleyne coming "back from the dead," which is totally not a spoiler because clearly Alleyne is alive, he's the next book!

4 stars out of 5.

Slightly Wicked - Mary Balogh (Bedwyn Saga #2)

After the Unapologetic Romance Readers group read Slightly Married for one of our July reads, I thought I might as well continue on with the series, as some of the other side characters seemed interesting.  Unfortunately, the hero of this book, Rannulf, wasn't one of them.  He wasn't nearly as prominent in the first book as some of the other Bedwyn siblings, so I was a bit disappointed to see the second book was about him; I might have liked him more if there'd been more of an intro to him in the first book.

The plot here follows Rannulf, of course, and our heroine is Judith Law.  Judith has been exiled from her family home to go serve as a poor relation to her aunt, because Judith's brother has run up bills that are driving her father into poverty.  On the way to her aunt's, the stagecoach Judith is traveling in overturns and the passengers are stranded.  Rannulf comes along and offers to fetch help, and to take Judith with him to another town; she agrees, wanting a bit of adventure, and immediately makes up an alternate identity--as does Rannulf.  The two have a brief, steamy affair, and then part ways...only to find out that they're to be neighbors, which also leads to them discovering each others' true identities.  Oh, and Judith's aunt is trying to marry Judith's cousin off to Rannulf, a plan that his ailing grandmother supports.  Drama ensues.

Ultimately, the problem with this book is that neither Rannulf nor Judith is that interesting of a person.  Judith is a long-suffering young woman resigned to being a spinster and suffering for her family, who tell her that she's ugly and that men leering at her is because she's doing something wrong, though clearly it's only because she's gorgeous.  And Rannulf is a long-suffering young man who wants to party but has decided to settle down and make his grandmother happy.  His family, who are full of colorful characters, also isn't very present here.  The side characters, instead of running the whole gamut from amusing to annoying like they did in the first book, are instead just insufferable.  Judith's entire family deserved a good punch to the face with the exception of her grandmother, who instead just deserved a slap.  Rannulf's grandmother was equally tedious.  There's a sub-plot here involving Judith's brothers debts and a lecherous step-cousin, but it's not enough to salvage a story full of boring characters.  And because Judith and Rannulf hook up so early in the story, there's no real tension there to pull the story forward, either.

Ultimately, this was a boring second book, and it manages to suffer from second book syndrome in a series that doesn't even have a continuous plot.  It's not terrible, but there's nothing there to make it really sparkle.  The first book was good, but clearly served a launch for the rest of the family characters, and this one is boring.  Hopefully the third book will be better or this might be a series that I'll be abandoning.

2 stars out of 5.

Slightly Scandalous - Mary Balogh (Bedwyn Saga #3)

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

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

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

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

2 stars out of 5.

Slightly Married - Mary Balogh (Bedwyn Saga #1)

Ah, historical romance!  This was the monthly read for the Unapologetic Romance Readers for July 2017--historical romance is a perpetual favorite in that group since it seems to strike more positive notes for more people, at least if our discussions are any indication.  I was a bit disappointed because this wasn't my nomination and I actually didn't have high hopes for it, but I was pleasantly surprised.

The story is about Eve Morris, whose brother dies in the war against Napoleon.  The brother's commanding officer, Aidan Bedwyn, promised Percy before he died that he would care for Eve and protect her no matter what, though he didn't fully grasp what he was promising when he made said promise.  Eve doesn't want Aidan's protection, though she desperately wants to find a way out of her predicament.  The predicament in question?  Due to a quirk in her father's will, because Eve is unmarried and her brother died less than a year after their father, her estate is set to go to her nasty cousin, leaving Eve and her contingent of "lame ducks," such as former criminals, a fallen woman, and an amputee, completely homeless.  Aidan convinces Eve to marry him as a matter of convenience so she can keep the estate, and away we go.

I didn't feel like Aidan and Eve had a ton of chemistry here, but this was a good story of learning to love the one you're with.  They slowly grow closer to each other over the two months of Aidan's leave, first on a brief trip to London to marry, and then when Eve is dragged back to London by Aidan's overbearing brother.  Like many first books in historical romance series, however, this seems to serve mainly as a launch pad for introducing the other characters in the Bedwyn family, who are obviously the protagonists of their own string of books.  I liked that Balogh didn't start with the most prominent member of the family, which would be the oldest brother, Wulf, who is a duke, and that she instead started with the second brother, Aidan.  And I liked Eve as a character, as well.  The two of the didn't communicate, a constant problem in romances, but I could somewhat understand it given their backgrounds and the nature of how their relationship began.  Neither of them wanted to become emotionally entangled in a relationship that was never meant to last, and which they both believed the other didn't want to last.  Counterproductive?  Yes.  Effective for romantic drama?  Also yes.

Was this the best historical romance I've ever read?  No.  It didn't snap and pop like some others, didn't have me devouring page after page.  The chemistry wasn't super apparent to me, either, and while I don't demand love at first sight (which can be downright sickening) I do like to see some good chemistry.  But I think this was a solid base for a series and am looking forward to reading the others.

3 stars out of 5.