When I first started getting into romance about 10 years ago (it was during a deployment when I also transitioned to being primarily an ebook reader), Lisa Kleypas, Tessa Dare, Courtney Milan and Sarah MacLean were my entry authors (have to start high – also, thanks, Malin).
Sarah MacLean at some point stopped being an auto-buy for me because her characters always felt so angsty, Tessa Dare has unfortunately not published anything in a while and somehow I fell behind on Lisa Kleypas with her Ravenels series. Of course, this means when the novels show up in sales or I am in a slump, I have an easy fall back!
I caught up with two of the Ravenel novels I hadn’t gotten to yet earlier this year, Hello Stranger, which follows Dr. Garrett Gibson, the only certified woman physician in England, who often works with the Ravenels and the department store owner Winterborne, and Chasing Cassandra, which is focused on Cassandra, the final Ravenel twin, and Tom Severin.
While I was very much interested in reading more about Dr. Garrett Gibson, the overall plot for this one wasn’t as fun as some the other novels since it involves government plots and conspiracies thanks to her love interest, Ethan Ransom. It wasn’t a bad time but Garrett deserved better. Ransom was a bit bland for my tastes.
I had more fun with Chasing Cassandra – while Tom Severin isn’t as good as some of Kleypas’s best love interests, he does follow in the tradition of taking someone that was established as a bit of a bastard in earlier novels, and showing a more empathetic and human side – the rich and powerful man that completely melts for that one woman, in this case Cassandra. There is a decent amount of resistance from both because they want such different things but eventually they realize where they can make it work and how they may have been wrong about their desires and needs.
It looks like there is one more novel in this series left that I haven’t read so these two novels don’t make me want to rush to read the remaining one right away but I’m sure I’ll get around to it eventually.