What we have here, I think, is partly a novella problem, and partly a fanservice problem. Tessa Dare has written fabulous novellas — my favorites being The Scandalous, Dissolute, No-Good Mr. Wright and Beauty and the Blacksmith — but I so frequently find myself underwhelmed by novellas in general that I can’t help but believe they’re just tricky by nature. They’re so short that character development must be sacrificed, and whatever obstacle standing in the way of the characters’ HEA needs to be overcome quickly […]
Historical Romance and Visits with Favourite Characters
I have an addition to the Things That Occur to Me While Reading Historical Romance Novels: LUST IS IMPERVIOUS TO COLD. Never mind all those times people in these books get down to their skivvies in drafty old manor houses, lust’s powers are even greater than I supposed. How else could a person wearing a linen shift and corset while standing barefoot in a snow squall be aware of anything than the fact that she is bitterly cold? But I have gotten ahead of myself. […]
Historical romance with a sassy barmaid.
I really, really liked this one. I think it’s right up at the top of my favorite Tessa Dare books, with A Week to Be Wicked and Romancing the Duke. Pauline is a barmaid in Spindle Cove. Griff is the eighth Duke of Halford (among other titles). They are about to meet cute. Griff has been essentially kidnapped by his mother and taken to Spindle Cove to pick a woman–any woman–to be his wife. She wants grandchildren, and she wants them now. Of course, she […]
Everything makes so much sense now
A Week to be Wicked, the second book in the Spindle Cove series, was among the first Regency romances I picked up that wasn’t Courtney Milan (obligatory Malin’s Top 100 Romances namedrop, since I found it there!) For whatever reason, it took me some time to get through the rest of the series, until now, where I suspect I have finished with its weakest entries. A Night to Surrender (3.5 stars) sets up the entire Spindle Cove premise and introduces all of the main players. There is […]
A bit of a cliched mess.
This book didn’t really work for me as a whole, but I needed a fluffy dum-dum book very badly, so I enjoyed it anyway. A Lady By Midnight is the third book in Dare’s Spindle Cove series, a place where odd and unwanted women of England flock to recover from their traumas or get away and let their freak flags fly. The whole thing is a feminist fantasy, of course, but that’s part of its charm. Dare’s characters are ones who could never have existed […]
Meh.
This was okay. Not a bad way to spend an hour, but I think I wanted a different story than it ended up giving me. I just never connected with the characters after I realized it was going to be a different story than I thought it would be after reading the first three pages. Here’s how it starts. Violet is a wallflower at a ball on Christmas Eve, when in comes a seriously injured man fresh from being shipwrecked or something. He’s speaking some […]