Miltantly Romantic

This one has been sitting on my TBR for quite a while, since Aoki is digital-only and I'm not particularly good at digital-only. But having inherited an e-Reader from my father, I've embarked again on the attempt to clear out some of the stuff I can only get in this fashion.

I'd been quite interested in this one for its setting, in China during the Boxer Rebellion. Historicals set outside the UK or nascent US are not easy to find, and depending on when they were written, can be something of a gamble. This is even more true for queer historicals.

Our two leads here are Alfred, a British Marine, and Zhang, an officer in the Chinese military. The POV is entirely Alfred's, though. As a general rule, I'm not bothered by single-POV, and there's a solid reason Aoki chooses it--for the Big Misunderstanding to work, the reader has to not understand what's going on in Zhang's mind. (Which also presumes the reader doesn't understand that certain cultural concepts are at work.)

I found it uncomfortable in this case, though, since Alfred is part an army that China does not particularly want at its shores, and I was never entirely able to shake that discomfort.

The first half of the book moves fairly quickly, with Alfred and Zhang meeting in a garden in Shanghai, where Alfred's ship is docked. There's a decent amount of chemistry between the two leads, and there's very good sense of place.

The problem is that the Big Misunderstanding happens at basically 50% in, and Alfred and Zhang spend almost the entirety of the rest of the book apart. At that point, the book becomes more historical fiction with a side of pining than anything else. And, due to it being wholly from Alfred's POV, Zhang's story is entirely lost.

Further, the book ends with them reuniting/the necessary HEA, but...it's deeply unclear how each of them has worked through the problems that drove them apart. And they are not petty. Zhang conceives of Alfred as his wife or subordinate, and Alfred is incensed and hurt by that. And yet, at the end, Alfred claims to want to be Zhang's wife, and Zhang responds that Alfred is his equal. Only, again, forget telling not showing, we haven't even been TOLD the steps either of them took to get there. It basically seems to depend on a combination of "absence makes the heart grow fonder" and "but you could have DIED" and...sure. But that doesn't change that the two of you have fundamentally different conceptions of partnership.

I think there's a little bit too much going on in this book, and that the romance element of it gets short shrift. This is fine, if the book isn't, you know, a romance. Unfortunately, in this case, it's a bit of a problem. 

This is the first in a family series by Ashley that's fairly popular amongst avid histrom readers.  We're not talking Kleypas or Quinn, but she definitely has a following.  I was interested because it was recced to me in a conversation wherein I was asking about main characters in histroms who have what we would now recognize as Autism spectrum disorders. 

I enjoyed a lot of things about this book.  Our female protag, Beth, is a widow who was a poor lady's companion until said lady passed and left her fortune to Beth, which puts Beth in a very different position that she's previously been in throughout her life.  Beth's a highly relatable heroine.  She's practical but also ready to have adventures.  She loved her first husband, enjoyed having sex with him, knows how lucky she was in both, and misses having male companionship.  At the same time, she's old enough to be fond of the independence she's gained.  When we meet Beth, she's engaged to a man with whom she feels she'll rub along well enough with.  

Ian has knowledge otherwise and lets her know.  I'm going to set aside my issues about what Ian knows about her fiancé to talk about later, since it's one of my issues with this book.  Overall, I also like Ian.  Is it not really acceptable that he has his not-exactly-valet dude look into Beth before he decides to tell her what he knows?  No, not really, but also, Ian's ASD is pretty darn well constructed, and even if his actions are still not particularly acceptable, within his history and the way his mind works, they're definitely understandable.  

(His valet sits in that weird position that happened a lot in late 2000's romances where the main male character had a lower class valet with whom he was strangely close and allowed unusual behavior in to show that...it was okay that he was rich??  And honestly, for the most part I didn't blink much at that, because okay, sure, but it's evidently a theme with the brothers that gets pointed out repeatedly in this book, presumably for emphasis of their lack of airs, and at one point one of the brothers makes a comment about his valet being a Rom and therefore "hard to tame" that was hella uncomfortable for me.)

Anyhoodle.  Ashley writes well, and Beth and Ian have great chemistry, and if you're into the sexy parts, there's a lot of that, and people assure me that it's hot.  There's a mystery element to the book that as far as I can tell readers are split on, and I could care less about because I could always care less about mysteries.

The interactions between the Mackenzie family, particularly around Ian's early-life institutionalization and the reason for that, were what really drove this book for me, outside of the push-pull of Beth and Ian.

However.  There's a lot of underlying WTF in this book for me.  Returning back to what Ian knows about Beth's fiance, it's that he's a male sub.  That is, he likes to be spanked by women.  Oh, the horror.  The worst part is, this isn't necessary?  The guy is a spendthrift who wants to marry Beth purely for her money and that's more than enough of a reason for her not to marry him.  But no, evidently he has to be a "pervert."  This problem is made a bigger problem by the fact that it turns out that Ian's eldest brother, who, you know, will get his own book later, is a Sadistic Top.  E.g., it's fine to be kinky, as long as you're the right KIND of kinky.  How's that for some toxic masculinity for you?  

Throw in there that this book has a surprise!lesbian villainess for no obvious reason--and this woman literally has no role other than to be a faceless sex worker and a murderer--and an obsessedmistress!villainess--again, having no role other than to be the older brother's masochistic sub and a murderer, and I'm like "there's, uh.  A lot happening here."

It puts me at a quandary.  Because if you take out the mystery element and Beth's fiance, neither of which are actually necessary for the book, weirdly enough, it's a well-written romance between two enjoyable characters with unusual representation of ASD in histrom.  Except that you can't take all those out?  I suppose it's kind of a "now you know, you can make your own decision."

This was one of those books where I took a chance, knowing that the concept felt somewhat icky to me, to see how the author carried it off.  The answer was basically "fine."  I wasn't running for the hills by the end, but I didn't particularly care to read further in the series. 

The premise of this feels extremely Old School.  The female lead, Mia, was captured by corsairs on a sea trip at seventeen and taken to be part of a harem in the Middle-East.  Some seventeen years later she escapes during what is essentially a coup, and returns to England.  She goes back to her father, who feels pretty accurately sociopathic in his need to marry her off before someone catches on to the massive lie that she's been in a convent all this time.  Unfortunately, she's neglected to mention that she's left a seventeen year-old son behind, and has every intention of going back to get him.

(It's honestly never entirely clear to me why she can't just get him to come in the first place aside from "because plot" which I don't love.  I'm not saying the author doesn't give a reason.  It's just...not a very good one.)

Anyhoodle.  Enter Adam, our main duderino.  Adam has had two wives die under, uh, questionable circumstances.  This has made him persona non grata with the rest of society.  But Daddy Sociopath needs his daughter to legally shack up and he really does not care with whom she does it.  Adam has not so much planned on doing the marriage thing again, but, welp, Mia's pretty fascinating, so he changes his mind.  In fairness, this is the part Spencer makes work.  I believe Adam is lonely, and sees Mia as a fellow outcast and wants what being with her offers him.

And for readers who are into the sexy times, Spencer is also quite good at those.  They don't particularly do anything for me, but I can tell, objectively, that they're well-drawn.

When Mia finally begins working toward her goal of getting back to her son, Adam's reactions are probably accurate--angry she hasn't told him, certain he's not going to allow her to set foot anywhere near danger--but I don't care?  She speaks Arabic, he doesn't.  She knows her way around the palace, he doesn't.  Also, it's her son.  Whom she's going to recognize.  And I'm just over domineering male behavior.  I know a lot of readers find the "I'll protect you instinct" endearing.  I find it annoying.  Tell her you wish she wouldn't go, then respect her choices, FFS.

There's also this storyline regarding Adam's first wife having been mentally ill and him being terrified that it's been passed on to his daughters that's hard to talk about because while I respect that mental illness in women remains stigmatized today and was a weapon against women at that time, the whole storyline feels a) unnecessary and b) ableist in a manner that left a bad taste in my mouth.

Similarly, Mia spent seventeen years of her life in the harem, she raised a son there.  Yet she seems to have no friends whatsoever--it's clear that there was a lot of rivalry, but it seems unlikely that zero alliances would have been formed--and aside from her ability to speak Arabic and her sexual knowledge/her relative lack of caring about what British society thinks, she doesn't seem to have picked up ANYTHING from being in an entirely different culture, where everyone would have practiced a different religion.  It's as if the harem was a vacuum of a sort.  I get that the premise of being a harem captive is treading some pretty fine lines in terms of Orientalism/exoticization of the Other.  But the way it's used in this book makes it feel like because it's outside of England, it doesn't exist as a place of its own, a place that MATTERS, and that isn't a great solution for the overall problem.

In the end, this isn't a badly done book.  It's just not a well-done book, either.

I had an intense debate with myself over whether I was going to review this book.  I have followed the author on social media, she's extremely sweet, she's a WOC, publishes independently, works a day job, and small authors depend so much on positive word of mouth.  She's someone I want to support as a person.  However, as discussed in-depth in this highly recommended episode of the Smart Bitches podcast, if readers in a genre aren't willing to honestly review the genre, it makes it extremely hard for other people to come into the genre.  This is made worse for under-reviewed genres like romance, where, for example, the NYT reviews MAYBE twenty a year, usually four to five at a time, and the reviewer is Olivia Waite, a romance writer herself, who is thereby under pressure to constantly represent the best of the genre.

That is to say: if readers of romance aren't willing to admit that there are not-great or even bad romances out there (and there are plenty), there's nowhere for newbies to turn to and get trustworthy information, which in turn, makes it a pretty big gamble to even bother with a genre nobody is rooting for in the first place.

Given all this, here I am, reviewing this book.

Let me say that I did find some positives about this book.  The heroine is plus-sized, and I didn't feel that was fetishized by the male lead, just appreciated.  There's a woman character who has an interesting background and could have made for a very intriguing lead later on.  There are family dynamics that I find enjoyable in the abstract.

There are basically three main problems with this book, and those problems are...significant.

1.  The writing is highly simplistic.  And while that can be a style choice, if it is, it does not work, here.  The dialogue often either falls flat or just plain is not something one human would say to another.  The descriptions can feel either trite or uncomfortable.  The literal language that guides the narrative doesn't flow the way it needs to.

2.  The exterior obstacles often do not make sense.  It's not that you can't understand what's happening.  It's that it wouldn't happen.  I am NOT (as anyone who reads this blog or has, you know, ever had a convo with me about this knows) a stickler for "historical accuracy".  I could indeed, give less than negative two fucks.  That said, if the premise upon which certain actions rest are so inconceivable in terms of the way British society at that time worked, that's a problem for me.  I need to have a mere patina of believability re: what people might have done/thought/etc, but I do need that patina.  And it's not here.

3.  The characters and their actions are never properly fleshed out.  For instance, the heroine is an eighteen year-old (possibly nineteen, I think they waited a year), making her debut.  Hero is known as the Bachelor Duke because at the ripe age of thirty he hasn't settled down.  Let's put aside that that wouldn't have been terribly remarkable and pretend it would have been.  It takes about fifteen seconds for BD to fall in strong lust/have serious interest in the heroine.  But like...has this guy never met an attractive woman before?  I truly read the whole book and I had no idea what it was about this 18/19 year-old chick that was healing this guy's trauma-based marriage-aversity.  My best guess is she had really great breasts.  No, I am not kidding.

All of those are enough that the book wouldn't work for me, and until about the last thirty pages I was mostly just feeling like the whole thing was a bit unfortunate.  Then we get to those thirty pages.  There are two "villains" throughout this book.  I put that in quotes because they're not really around much, they show up when needed for plot and both of them are driven by greed and just being bad people.  While I do not deny that there are bad people in the world, the one-note level of these two is somewhat egregious.

In any case, said villains decide, for Reasons, to burn down the house--in London--that the heroine and the female character I felt had the most promise in terms of backstory, along with said female character's young child, are all in.  Miraculously, the heroine and the child make it out, and no other houses are burnt, which, if you know literally anything about how fire worked in Regency London is, ah, not possible, I shall say lightly.  The other woman dies--seemingly silently, not even going to talk about how that's not a thing when one is caught in a burning house--and the heroine and BD are married two days later.

That's not an exaggeration.  Nevermind that the woman was the half-sister of BD's bestie, who's having a bit of a rough time.  Nobody seems to consider maybe, you know, pushing back the wedding.  It's like "aw, sad.  Welp, let's get married and bang!" 

To say that I was wigged by the wrap up would be something of an understatement.  

She has the second in the series out now.  I honestly wish her the absolute best of luck, but that's going to be a hard no for me.

Okay, got thrown for a loop by a Life Emergency, but pulling myself back on track.

I'd been putting off reading this.  For a whole slew of reasons.  Partly because I had fond memories of Chase from the early 2000s, which can be dangerous, partly because it's so well regarded in the way that say, you know, Bridgerton is, and I'm quite clearly a duck very out of water there.

I finally forced the issue because I had a zoom session through Carey library featuring her approaching and I wanted at least one of her works to be in the forefront of my mind.  Good news: my concern was largely for naught.  (I mean, I've purchased her latest because word on the street says as good as she was then, she's that much better now, but given how little bandwidth I have for terribleness in this arena at the moment, it was quite the relief to not be punched in the face with mid-90's misogyny.)

It's not that Sebastian Ballister/Dain isn't a child who needs to grow up in order to be worthy of Jessica Trent.  Because, frankly, he is and he does.  It's that Chase puts in the work to make the reader understand why he's stuck in a child's emotional state and then makes Dain do the necessary work to push himself past that, which is a) not something we get to see a lot of in this era of histrom (or, you know, in the overwhelming majority of histrom) and b) really satisfying on a bone deep level.

The set up is you have Dain's bumhole of a father, who loses his wife and all his heirs later in life and has to start over again.  He chooses to do so with a young, Italian wife, who gives him a son.  Enter, Dain.  Dain's father is prejudiced AF against his Italian mother, who, when Dain is roughly eight, runs off with her lover and dies from a fever a few years later.  One of the elements that Chase gives a lot of nuance to is Dain's mistrust of (and surface hatred of) women as relating back to his mother.  The thing that really works for me here is that while Dain might judge women's actions in the text, the text never does, and actively works to make it clear where those women are coming from.

Anyhoodle.  Dain picks up enough of his mother's darker coloring and his father's larger size to be bullied relentlessly at school until he proves himself able to bite back effectively.  When we next meet him, Dain is an adult living firmly in the demimonde, answerable to nobody but himself, and doing whatever the fuck he pleases in France.

Jessica Trent is twenty-seven, making her an older heroine for a histrom, but unlike many older heroines, she's not been ruined, she's highly desired, there's nothing wrong with her, she just does not wish to marry.  Rather, she's extremely good at finding antiques at bargain cost and reselling at actual worth and wishes to found a shop and support herself.

Before that, however, she needs to extricate her idiot older brother, who's running in Dain's circles and is going to ruin himself doing so.  This brings her and Dain into each others' orbits.

I rarely feel sexual tension between characters in books.  I don't know if it's an aspect of me being so heavily grey and disinterested in vanilla sex as a whole, or what, but even the writers that everyone swears are steam-level-off-the-charts, I'm usually entirely unaware of sexual tension that isn't spelled out to me.  And even then, I don't really feel it.  Yeah, no, these two have sexual tension the second they look at each other.  And it never lets up for a minute.  

The famous scene from this book, of course, is where Jessica shoots him, with premeditation--which, I'll be honest, score for sheer moxy, but I don't actually love physical harm between will-be partners, and I think this scene would play a LOT differently if the two were reversed.  (In fairness, she shoots him because it's the only power she has in the situation, really, so there would be a number of things that would play out differently.)

For me, where this book absolutely shines is in the ways that Jessica is not just intelligent intellectually, she's emotionally intelligent.  There's not a bunch of "oh, he has man parts, however shall I understand him?"  In fact, she's all, "I raised roughly a billion male cousins, I know what your damage is, and I'm gonna need you to fix it."  But instead of using her emotional energy to constantly be at odds with him, she does three things: 1. she stops fighting with him.  She gives him EXACTLY what he wants, in order to show him that, uh, he doesn't really want it, 2. she makes sure he has the knowledge and the awareness that she, as an outside party, can have regarding his damage, and 3.  she trusts him, when push comes to shove, to be the caring human she knows he can be.

There are a lot of ways in which this book feels almost outside the scope of romance in moments, not in bad ways, but in the sense that it pays more attention to the outside factors that weigh on the characters than many others do.  (This actually feels somewhat reminiscent of McNaught, but I don't think Chase had read her at this time.)  The way Chase weaves it first into character and then into the relationship between the characters is what makes it....well.  A classic. 

Quick housekeeping note: I might be skipping next week due to Passover, driving half way across the country in order to be with family for Passover, and a Serious Work Issue that extends through midnight on Wednesday.

I'm so torn over this book.  I want to love it without caviling because it has a Jewish hero whose Judaism is central to the plot and engaged with, which is beyond rare in historicals.  And it has quite a bit to recommend it.  However, there was element that made me uneasy in a way I couldn't shake.  And that makes it a little hard to unconditionally recommend the book.

Our hero, Simon Cohen, is a banker who is returning to his native England after years of living abroad with his parents, who have recently died in a tragic accident.  Simon's mother was a Jew-by-choice, and Simon's paternal family handled that unevenly.  Simon's maternal family declared her dead.  Quite literally, she was recorded as dead in several places.  Given this, they moved away from England.

Simon comes back in part because he's at ends having lost his parents, in part because his cousin has been elected to Parliament, but cannot be sworn in because the wording of the swearing in requires swearing on the true Christian faith, and Simon needs to do some politicking (of the money and influence kind), and in part for revenge.  The revenge part is honestly complicated, but suffice to say, it involves him getting a wing of the National Gallery named after his mother.  This, in turn, involves a donation of art.

Lydia, our leading lady, is the daughter of a Marquis with a gambling problem who has just been left by her fiance, due to her younger sister being with child out of wedlock.  On top of everything else, Lydia's father has lost their last property to Simon in a card game.

Lydia and Simon have good chemistry from their first meeting, and they challenge each other's preconceived notions of what is right, what is proper, what will keep themselves safe.  This is a book where the two mains go toe to toe a lot, and rather than one side winning, they mostly level each other up.

Simon's relationship with his paternal family is complex and well-drawn, and Lydia's family history, which is revealed in layers, is tragic, but also explains so much of who she is.  All of the characters here, even the truly unlikeable ones, are the kind of people we all know.  

I should state that while none of these are in any way glorified, this book does discuss child sexual grooming (not of either of the main characters), self-injury (also not of the main-characters), and has a decent amount of period specific anti-Semitism.

Here comes my issue: the place Simon's parents remove themselves to is Cape Town.  Just to begin with, this is a pretty icky choice that necessitates them being part of an immediate and significant system of oppression.  It's made somewhat worse by a number of things: 1. Simon never really talks about Cape Town.  He talks about growing up on the veldt, which speaks more to the concept of Africa being this wild, untamable place.  Only, Cape Town was pretty established by this point BY colonizers.  Like, forget that Simon never mentions the Jewish community there, which was also established at that time and it seems weird AF that his observant parents seem to have had no part of, he never mentions anything to do with people.  Which I think was a way of trying to pretend that being a European in Cape Town at that time wasn't that big a problem, but.  It was.  It really really was.  And the LACK of any discussion of the politics of Cape Town while so much of the politics of Jews in England get talked about feels...like putting a problem in a corner and hoping nobody will notice.  2.  On several occasions, Lydia thinks of Simon in exoticized terminology, e.g., analogizing him to a tiger.  Setting aside issues of the Othering of Africa, Simon isn't African.  He was born in England.  Both of his parents are English.  It's a whole bundle of no happening in noville there. 3.  At one point, Simon DOES bring up that Jewish money helped to finance things so that England could work itself free of slave ownership.  I'll be honest, my knowledge of the end of slavery in England is crap, I have no idea what went into it.  This may or may not be a historically accurate statement.  But it feels like a what-aboutism.  Like, it's FINE that Simon's family was hanging out, taking advantage of South African Blacks because some other Jewish dude from England made sure that Blacks in England could be free.  And, uh.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's not how this works.

Basically, I'm left with the more-than-sneaking suspicion that Simon might be a raging racist throughout the whole book, and that even if he's not, he's sure as hell done a whole lot to hold up White Supremacy without even having the grace to acknowledge that, and honestly, it took a lot of the joy out of it for me.  Which sucked because, yeah, like I said, Jewish hero = fucking unicorn, and the book is extremely well written.  Sigh.

This romance stretches a number of the conventions of historical romance in a healthy way, and I enjoyed the results, but I think this is definitely a case where, for a lot of reasons, this probably isn't for a significant number of histrom readers.  The book is escapist in the way that all romance is, you know you'll get the HEA, but getting there is hella rocky and a lot of what the characters undergo in this is the kind of stuff where, there's genuinely no way these characters aren't going to have PTSD the rest of their lives.

Content warnings for this puppy: graphic violence, "onscreen" death of both good people and bad people, rape, nonconsensual drugging and body modification, and forced prostitution.

First off, this is a Restoration romance, which, not the most common time period of choice.  Things were pretty dicey, England was sort of just getting back on its feet, and there was a lot of inner turmoil that wasn't well resolved.  It's, by nature, a more dramatic time period to place the book in.  Cale does a really good job of threading some of that in quietly, in the history of Nick's family.

As is totally normal for romance novels, this book begins at a hanging, where one of the heroine's only friends, a highwayman, is hung to death.  Cale carries it off.  It's, in some ways, the beginning of the end of our heroine, Sally's, obedience to her pimp, Wrath.  She just doesn't know that yet.

Sally was born Celestine Rami.  She fled from France as a young woman, believing she had killed her stepfather in self-defense.  She had chosen England as her landing spot because she knew her biological father was English, so it seemed as good a place as any.  Through a series of unfortunate events, she ends up essentially being trafficked, which is where we meet her, some years later.

Nick is the younger (possibly-half) brother of a highwayman who is trying to be legit and tutor young nobles.  His employer is not paying him, making it hard to stay honest.  

For the first hundred pages of this book, Nick and Sally barely see each other, and when they do, only once is Nick not holding up his own employer's coach out of sheer hunger and desperation.  That is--Sally only sees his face once in those first hundred pages.

Sally attempts to run from Wrath after he kills her best friend, and he stabs her and leaves her to bleed out in the street.  Nick finds her and takes her back to his brother's workshop, and from there, things are almost weirdly sweet.  Sally, who grew up at an inn, learning to bake, bakes for the shop of highwaymen.  She helps with getting one out of Newgate.  Her and Nick dance around each other, each too shy and full of their own insecurities to admit they're head over heels for each other.  It's some very nice pining.

There's a distracting and unnecessary jealousy plot involving the older daughter of Nick's employer.  She is developed in an interesting, if disconcerting way late in the book: this makes sense, she is the lead in the second book, but most of the time she felt like a tired plot device.  Aside from that, the way Nick's family mystery, the question of Sally's father, and the ongoing thread of who, exactly, Wrath is, tie up nicely.  It's almost a little jolting how nicely they tie up, given everything that's come before, but at the same time, I'm reading as a romance reader, so I WANT that neat bow.

Overall, I found this a little bit different than a lot of what's available, the characters endearing, and the darkness worked for me.  Do with that what you will.

I went back and forth over whether to even talk about this book.  I want to support this author.  She comes out of fandom, she has poly titles, POCs, other stuff I want to see in romance, and particularly in histrom.  And in general, my experience with her on panels is that she's a smart, fun human. 

This is an f/f histrom, which is pretty rare.  It's basically her, Olivia Waite, and Jenn LeBlanc in that camp.  I REALLY want to like this book.

That said, it just doesn't work on a number of levels.

The first problem is that the characterizations are pretty flat, as are the motivations for the characters.  Mary James, our protag #1, is the daughter of widowed Sarah James, whose foremost characteristic is that she's a money-grubbing bitch.  I like a problematic parent as much as the next person who lives and breathes for h/c, so in theory, this isn't a problem.  However, that's really all Sarah is.  She's written as nothing more than a caricature of a gold digger. 

Mary, who is our POV character, is grieving her father, a merchant who was lost at sea.  She is also pregnant, apparently because Sarah forced her to have entrapment sex with a wealthy male character from a former book.  There are...a lot of pieces to this part of the book missing for me. The guy clearly doesn't know, as far as I can tell, because nobody knows, since they're trying to get Mary married off before anyone finds out.  There's no suggestion that the father is a bad person, which leads me to question whether he might want to KNOW that he has a child on the way, but setting that aside, okay, pregnant, needs a marriage before child comes.

Mary then meets Alex, our protag #2, who, within the space of a conversation a) figures out that Mary is romantically interested in her, b) that she's in trouble and needs a spouse, c) offers to be that spouse for reasons that seem to amount to "paying it forward" but what she's paying forward is unclear, d) explains that marriage of all kinds are perfectly legal in this particular town, and e) comes up with a plan to trick Mary's mother to allow this.   

So.  I have a lot of problems here.  First, as a lesbian, who knows other lesbians, and has on many occasions spoken with even more WLW, it is actually intensely hard to tell when a woman is hitting on another woman.  We're not socialized to see it.  When I say to another woman, "you look great in that dress," she can rightly assume that I mean, "you look great in that dress," and I might absolutely mean that.  But I might also mean, "You look great in that dress and I would like to peel it off you with my teeth."  There are VERY few WLW I know who haven't had this dilemma.  Which makes it incredibly hard for me to believe that at a time when the word "lesbian" wasn't yet a term, that it would take a few minutes for these women to figure out they are romantically interested in one another.

Honestly, I need more than "someone did something nice for me once and now I'm helping you."  Uh.  You're offering to MARRY her.  Presumably to intertwine all your holdings, which we, as readers, are led to believe are at least decent, with this woman you've just met.  At least tell me what that person did for you.  Something.  Anything.  (Nor is this followed up on.  We're never given the reason Alex does what she does.  At best, I am left to presume that she finds Mary TEH HAWT and so is like "aw yaaaaas" and figures she gets a kid in the bargain, too??  I have no idea.)

Perhaps the legal marriage thing is explained earlier in this series, as to how that came about in this town.  But it's nutballs?  Like, even in frontier-times, there was SOME level of state control?  Or federal, if it was a territory.  And I get that romance novels are about escapism, except that I personally want something to anchor that escapism.  I don't care if you want to come up with a whole alternative timeline of the States.  I mean, PLEASE, tell me stories where European settlers never come, or other things.  But give me the necessary narrative underpinnings for it.  Here, I feel like the answer to everything is "why not" which, yes, is an author's prerogative, it's just not one that works for me as a reader.

Finally, I'm not sure WHY there needs to be a whole "tricking Mary's mother" plot.  On the face of things, Mary is legally an adult.  Her mother has no ability to stop her from getting married.  Furthermore, the way things roll out, Mary and Alex end up getting married spur of the moment anyway, which makes it doubly unclear why close to a third of the book is spent without Mary and Alex having any interactions, and instead it just being about this plot to trick Sarah into letting Mary marry Alex.

The last third of the book is stronger than the first two.  Mary and Alex are married and they go back to Alex's farmstead.  There's some cute flirting and then we end on some sex, which seemed perfectly passable to me, I'm not really into sex scenes and this one didn't blow me away, but I think if you are someone who enjoys sex scenes, it probably registers as a sweet one.  I think, possibly, if the middle third of this book were taken out, the open shored up a bit, and the ending expanded to really establish these two, this might work better for me?  I still didn't really have a great sense of who either of these women were--although, admittedly, I knew Mary much better than Alex--by the end of this book, nor was it clear to me why they loved each other.

There were some interesting ideas here, and fun tropes to be explored, but in the end this felt like a first draft to me, and one that needed a bunch more in order to flesh out the main characters, what they see in each other, and the ins and outs of the marriage-of-convenience aspect of the book. 

This book takes advantage of the somewhat banana-pants marriage laws that Scotland had throughout large swaths of history to set up what is an accidental marriage.  It's not convenient--actually, it's rather inconvenient--but after the two of them tell what they think is a white lie to protect the female protag's honor, the two of them are decidedly legally bound, and made moreso by the fact that the male protag's creditors have gotten wind of this accident.

Anthony, our male protag, is basically useless ton.  He's kind and has a good heart, but the only thing he's ever learned to do is gamble, and he's also learned by osmosis that his worth is in when he's winning at the tables.  So it's a bit unfortunate that he's 2k pounds in debt, and the debt has been called.  He has two weeks to pay up, or be sent to debtor's prison,

Charlotte, our leading lady, is the out-of-wedlock child of a courtesan and has been treated quite shabbily by the ton, as such. 

Charlotte wants respectability.  Anthony wants to be useful and pleasing to people.  And, as the kind of society who has grown up vacillating between everything-is-fine-just-now to not having a enough to eat to keep up appearances, he has a number of useful, surprising skills and a willingness to work.  

The moment he realizes he's married to Charlotte and that his ruin would be hers, he starts coming up with a plan to find an apprenticeship and a way to pay down the debt.

There are a number of truly charming things about this book.  The first one is that Anthony is a gambling addict, and the book doesn't pretend that's any less of a problem than it is.  Nor does it treat it as something that one just gets over.  Anthony repeatedly has to force himself to walk away from offers to gamble by remembering what is at stake.  And that's charming in and of itself: from the first, he values her enough to realize that he has to stop being reckless with money.

The second is that Charlotte struggles with her mother's profession, but the book does not.  The book very clearly sees her mother as someone doing her best by a child she loves, and who engages in sex work as an honest, if not always desirable, profession.

The third is that a lot of Anthony's assumptions about how his family values him turn out to be wrong, which was delightful.  Don't get me wrong, I love a terrible birth family as much as the next hurt/comfort loving swamp witch, but it's also nice when a character realizes they are more loved for being themselves than they have understood themselves to be.

Ridley's greatest strength, I would argue, is her dialogue.  She's sharply witty and extremely fun in her banter.  Combine that with characters who are struggling with flaws that feel intensely real, who are also people you can imagine wanting to know, and you have this book.  This was my first of Ridley's, I will definitely be returning.

This is a cinnamon roll of a book.  

Basic premise: Solomon, our hero, goes to a brothel with some acquaintances one night while at University.  Upon getting in the room with his assigned Lady of the Night, he realizes that sleeping with someone who's only sleeping with him as a professional courtesy isn't really doing it for him.  In a move that is a mixture of sheer awkwardness and a dose of sympathy, Solomon drops his entire month's salary in her hand and walks out the door.

Fast forward some years, Solomon is happily working as a chemist for his uncle's cloth/tailor business, and Serena, our heroine and former Lady of the Evening, has invested Solomon's money into running an Inn, and is doing so successfully.  When Solomon seeks her out, it has nothing to do with their former encounter, nor does he know who she is at first.  Rather, she has a reputation for finding things, and Solomon's family has had a pair of earrings stolen and wants it back.

(Serena recognizes him immediately.)

Solomon recognizes her some days later, when they end up in the dark together.  He never mentions it until she tells him who she is, at which point he's like, "Oh, I know, I figured it out when I saw you with the lights out."  And Serena is very "blink blink," because clearly it has not occurred to him that this makes her lesser in any way.  Indeed, the only protagonist in the book who is somewhat bothered by Serena's past is Serena, and that is more in the sense of the choices she had to make and the ways they hurt her than in a shamed sense.

As it turns out, Solomon's missing earrings are part of something much larger involving French spies and English intelligence and a bunch of plot stuff that is pretty spoilery.  Suffice to say, there's a lot that's not what it seems in the book, and several of the secondary characters have really complicated, fleshed-out arcs.

One of these arcs leads to Solomon, who is such a solidly sweet dude, but also, a product of being a cishet white male with a number of choices he could have made, coming to one of the most succinctly beautiful summations of conceptualizing privilege I have ever seen:
In any case, despite all the politics and hijinks, there's something extremely grounded about this book, and I have a soft spot for male protagonists who can wait out extremely wary, fiercely independent female protagonists and win the long game with kindness.