#CBR10 Book 25: "The Day of the Duchess" by Sarah Maclean

Page count: 400 pages
Rating: 2.5 stars

Three years ago, Seraphina "Sera" Bevingstoke, Duchess of Haven, miscarried her daughter (seriously this is NOT a spoiler, it happens in like the second or third chapter) and was persuaded by the Dowager Duchess of Haven that maybe it was best if she just disappeared. With financial help from her antagonistic mother-in-law, Sera flees her disaster of a marriage and goes to America, where she finds a business partner and something she enjoys doing enough to dull the pain in her heart. But to fully be the person she needs to become, she requires a divorce. So she walks into the House of Lords and demands one.

Malcolm Bevingstoke, Duke of Haven, has been searching the globe for his lost wife for the past three years. He certainly wasn't expecting her to just wander into Parliament and petition them for a divorce. He has absolutely no intention of granting Sera one, he still loves her and wants a chance to make amends for the utter disaster he turned their marriage into before she left. He claims he will let Sera have her divorce if she spends the summer with him, helping him find her successor. He was not expecting Sera to bring her four opinionated sisters with her.

The start of their marriage was an utter travesty - can Malcolm convince Sera that he truly does love her and is able to make her happy for the rest of their lives together?

I mostly really liked the books in Sarah Maclean's Love by Numbers and The Rules of Scoundrels and considered her an auto-buy author at one point. Sadly, with her newest trilogy of romances, Scandal & Scoundrel, I was initially quite entertained by the first book in the series, but the more I thought about it afterwards, the more problems I found with it. The second book was perfectly ok (but I know barely remember any details about it) and then there is this - a book I have kept putting off for more than six months after its publication, because I sure as heck wasn't going to read it while I was pregnant. I considered not reading it at all, but was also curious about it, as Sarah Maclean has been very open about how she had to rewrite most of it after the 2016 Presidential election results. In addition, I've also read everything else Ms. Maclean has written, including her really not very good at all YA romance The Season, so the completist in me really felt I had to read this eventually. Regretfully, it did not do much to entertain me.

Malcolm and Sera are pretty much love at first sight. He's a sought-after duke, whose parents had an unhappy marriage because his mother pretty much trapped his father and she's the eldest daughter of a man who won his earldom in a card game and a ruthlessly ambitious woman determined to make great matches for all of her daughters. Because of this, when Sera's mother persuades her that the only way to make sure their flirting ends in marriage is by entrapment as well, Malcolm's tentative romantic feelings towards Sera turns to hate, as he feels betrayed and hurt. They have to get married, but he has no wish to see her and they are separated for months.

The next time they see each other is when Sera's younger sister pushes Malcolm into an ornamental pond after she and Sera find him breaking his marriage vows with another woman (he claims this was a horrible moment of weakness, wanting to hurt and forget her). By now, it's obvious that Sera is pregnant. Tragically, she miscarries their daughter and is told by the doctor that she is barren. Malcolm's mother, who never wanted her son married to a vulgar social climber anyways is on hand to persuade Sera to leave for good.

Sera flees to America, where she befriends the owner of a tavern. She's always enjoyed singing and starts rebuilding her life as a singer. Now, three years later, the two of them own a series of taverns in the US and Sera has bought one in Covent Garden. But while she's still the Duchess of Haven she can't really own anything in her own right. She needs a divorce so she can become the owner of the tavern in truth.

Malcolm is full of regret for the many stupid and vicious things he said and did to hurt his wife and has had three years to really wallow in guilt. Because of the charade he has devised to make his wife love him again, he's stuck in the countryside with four eligible ladies and their families, all hoping to make a promising match, no matter how unorthodox the matchmaking is. Sera brings all four of her headstrong and scandalous sisters along as a buffer and has no intention of being seduced back, even if she's still strongly attracted to her husband.

The main problem with this book is that I didn't care at all about Sera or Malcolm. As the mother of a two month old boy, I naturally felt awful reading about Sera's miscarriage (which was why I also avoided this book while still pregnant), but I was wholly indifferent to their inevitable happy ending. Early on in their relationship, stupid decisions were made on both sides. Even with the extensive rewrite that Maclean did, Malcolm isn't exactly a prince of a man. He treats Sera dreadfully during the first few months of their marriage (not that they spend much time together - but flaunting his infidelity in public sort of does a lot of damage in a short space of time) and it's no wonder that she doesn't believe that he loves her or wants to spend the rest of his life with her. Especially since they both believe she is barren (SPOILER - of course she isn't. By the epilogue, it turns out that not only can she have children, they have a whole bunch). Barrenness isn't exactly an attractive trait in a duchess.

Malcolm takes most of the book to actually listen to Sera and start to respect her wishes. I will say that the grand gesture he makes towards the end of the book was good enough that I knocked my rating of this book up from 2 to 2.5 stars, but even then, the best thing about this book was one of the supporting characters, who is going to be the heroine in Maclean's upcoming Wicked and the Wallflower. I just hope desperately that Maclean's writing improves with that series, because this one ended on a total dud.

Judging a book by its cover: Another romance cover where the cover model is wearing nothing but a dress, mostly undone down the back. No chemise, corset or any type of undergarment, and the skirt appears to have yards and yards of fabric. I don't particularly like those covers at the best of times, but here it also appears as if one of the model's arms are on backward. I honestly don't entirely understand how the anatomy of this woman works. It gives me a headache.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR8 Book 101: "A Scot in the Dark" by Sarah Maclean

Page count: 400 pages
Rating: 3 stars

Miss Lillian "Lily" Hargrove, is the orphaned daughter of a land steward and unwilling ward to the Duke of Warnick. Due to an odd and unbelievable series of events, her guardian, and then the next seventeen heirs to the title die in the course of about a fortnight, leaving a very distant claimant to the title, Alec Stuart, a belligerent Scotsman as the new Duke. He doesn't like England, and stays in Scotland for the next five years, not even aware that Lillian exists.

As such, Lily lives a comfortable, if extremely isolated and lonely life in one of the ducal residences in London. She's not of the aristocracy, nor is she a servant. She has no friends or family to support her, and so, when unscrupulous actor and artist Derek Hawkins encounters her walking in the park, woos her and flatters her and makes her feel special, it doesn't take all that much persuasion for him to get her to pose for a nude portrait. Of course, Lily believed no one would see the portrait but them. She also foolishly believed Hawkins would propose marriage to her. Instead, he announces at the opening of the Royal Exhibition that his masterpiece will be displayed to the public on the closing day of the exhibition. Lily, distraught and shocked, makes a very public scene, and what little respectable reputation she may have had, is ruined.

Alec Stuart, reluctant twenty-first Duke of Warnick, known in the gossip pages as "the diluted duke" arrives in London two weeks after his solicitor informs him that 1) he has a young lady as a ward and 2) said lady is the object of a huge scandal. Alec has a number of reasons for disliking England and the English and he also has a massive distrust for all beautiful women. Lily announces that the painting will be unveiled to all the world in ten days' time. She wants the money promised to her by her initial guardian, so she can go far away and reinvent herself, somewhere no one knows who Lillian Hargrove is.

Alec refuses to let her run and hide, and believes the solution is to get her married off to someone respectable, as soon as humanly possible. He bestows a massive dowry on her, and sets about trying to match her up with a suitable gentleman. Of course, he is fiercely jealous of any other man so much as looking in Lillian's general direction. Yet when everyone around him, Lily included, suggests that he may be the best candidate for the job, all his fears and insecurities rise to the surface. Lily may have given herself to an unscrupulous artist and is about to have her naked body displayed for all of London to see, but Alec still believes that he is unworthy of her hand and needs to find her someone better.

In her newest series, Scandal and Scoundrel, Sarah Maclean basically takes contemporary celebrity gossip scandals and interprets them through a historical lens. The first book in the series, The Rogue Not Taken, was seemingly her take on a Kardashian-like family of sisters hugely popular in the scandal press, whilst this book is her response to various leaked nude photos in recent years. Sadly, this isn't as interesting as Ms Maclean seems to think it is. I liked the previous book a lot more than a lot of my romance reading friends on the internet, even though the hero was a complete tool for most of the book. Alec Stuart, the Scotsman hero of this one, appeared briefly towards the end of said book, and both Sophie and her new husband, the Marquess of Eversley, appear in this book, along with Sophie's many Scandalous Talbot-sisters. There are also appearances by Duncan West from Never Judge a Lady by Her Cover, as well as his wife, who becomes one of Lily's new friends. I found most of the Talbot sisters annoying in the first book and didn't really like them all that much here (nor can I tell them apart), although it is nice that Lily finally makes some friends and gets to go out in society.

While the previous book in the series had some issues, this is even more of a hot mess. There are absolutely things I liked, Maclean excels at writing witty banter and the book made me laugh more than once. I genuinely like the title, which is certainly not always the case with Maclean's books. It discusses important feminist themes such as the nature of consent, victim blaming, slut shaming and how men in society are judged by a completely different standard to women. The eventual reveal of why Alec is so damned convinced that he's an uncivilised and uncouth brute, his dislike of the English, his distrust of beautiful women and his sense of unworthiness was an interesting twist on a common trope.

It still didn't make up for the fact that it got boring really quickly that Alec was bullheadedly determined to get Lily married off, yet insanely jealous of any other man so much as breathing in her vicinity. Starting with his mother, he's been told by women his entire life that he is too large, coarse, brutish and uncivilised. His mother eventually ran away from Scotland, and it seems more than one woman has treated Alec mostly like a glorified sex toy, good for nothing but a quick affair, but never anything more lasting. His internal monologue about how precious and exquisite she was, while he was brutish and unworthy still got on my nerves. I'm not really surprised that society at large sees him as a brute, when he literally tears doors of hinges and rampages around like a jealous madman for much of the book.

Lily keeps being described as devastatingly beautiful, but it has clearly not brought her any happiness and living holed up, isolated from polite society, without any chance to experience the world or make friends makes her a far too easy victim for Derek Hawkins. While waiting for the Diluted Duke to acknowledge her existence, she has dreamed of a season, of balls, dancing, marriage and children, and she has no wish to be forced into marriage in less than two weeks just to quell the gossip. Some of the behaviour she exhibits to drive suitors off is just bizarre, though, and the various madcap schemes that she and/or Alec devise to try to stop the painting from being displayed seem strange and out of place.

There is also an aspect of insta-love here, a trope I'm less than fond of. From figuratively hissing and spitting at each other during their first encounter, fewer than ten days pass before Lily and Alec are madly besotted with one another, ready to elope for Scotland to spend the rest of their days together. Would it really have hurt to have the story take place over a slightly longer span of time, say a month? It would have made the romance more believable, certainly.

I think there is only one more book left in this series, which seems to be going for celebrity divorce proceedings, with the eldest Talbot-sister, Seraphina, petitioning the House of Lords for divorce from her husband, the Duke of Haven (I severely doubt they'll end the book divorced). I desperately hope that it is better than the first two in the series, which keep going down in my estimation the more I think about them. Sarah Maclean has been removed from my auto-buy list and is quickly moving into the "only on sale" category, which is a shame, because I really love some of her earlier books.

Judging a book by its cover: Here we have another example of that baffling new romance cover trend, with the dresses with fabric that go on for miles and mile, but still inexplicably show most of the heroine's naked legs. Just in case you didn't figure out from the title of the book that it's about a Scotsman, the cover designer has helpfully added some tartan to the floor. I like the colour of the dress, it's pretty, but it is otherwise in no way period appropriate (for any period, really, this is made up historical clothing). I highly recommend you go to Goodreads to see the splashback cover though, where this exact romance cover is shown (presumably) as the scandalous painting (Worst. Nude. Portrait. Ever) in question, while the hero and heroine sort of smooch. It's hilarious.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR7 Book 156: "The Rogue Not Taken" by Sarah MacLean

Page count: 432 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Lady Sophie Talbot is the youngest daughter of a coal miner who it's rumoured won his Earldom in a card game with the Prince Regent. Sophie was quite happy growing up in a little village in Cumbria, dreaming of marrying the baker's boy and one day running her own bookshop. Moving to London and becoming part of the ton was never her dream, and unlike her sisters, who seem to clamber to outdo each other with regards to being seen and being scandalous, she'd rather stay in the background and read. While she hates that the gossip papers have dubbed them all "the soiled S's" (all their names start with S) and the way they speculate about how her eldest sister landed a duke, she's also fiercely loyal to her family and when she finds her ducal brother-in-law in a compromising situation with a woman most certainly not her pregnant sister, she loses her temper and shoves him in a fish pond. In front of everyone in polite society. Lady Sophie, the quiet one, just caused the biggest scandal of the season.

Wanting to get away as quickly as possible, she tries to persuade the scoundrelly Marquess of Eversley, popularly known as "King" to let her ride along in his carriage back to the city. She believes she may be able to blackmail him, as she caught him climbing out a window and holds his boot hostage, but he just abandons it and her, rushing away. Desperate to be gone, Sophie instead bribes his footman into giving her his livery and stows away on his carriage, only to realise far too late that it's not going back to London, it's going north. Eversley has recieved news that his father may be at death's door and cannot resist a final chance to tell his father he is never getting married and fathering heirs.

Strangely, despite being in ill-fitting livery, barely anyone but King actually recognises that Sophie isn't a boy, despite the fact that she's still wearing silk slippers (the footman's boots didn't fit). He's convinced she's trying to snare herself a husband by being caught in a compromising position with him, but she denies this vehemently and does her best to get far away from him as quickly as possible. Using undeniable cleverness to best Eversley, she manages to get coach fare north, she's decided to go back to her home village of Mossband to realise her dreams, never to return to the capital. But the coach is stopped by highwaymen, Sophie throws herself in front of a pistol shot to rescue a young urchin, and despite telling himself repeatedly that he wants nothing to do with Sophie Talbot, King has to go searching for a doctor so he's not left with a dead earl's daughter on his hands.

Sophie and King (the reveal of his real name is excellent) pretty much loathe each other at first sight. He believes her to be a title-hunting social climber, she thinks he embodies all the things she hates most about the aristocracy. He can seduce soon to be married women and escape half-dressed out a window without anyone raising so much as an eyebrow while she was publically shunned for trying to defend her sister's honour. He's rich, handsome, arrogant and keeps saying exactly the wrong thing, sometimes directly insulting Sophie, but much of the time doing so without even meaning to. They both keep trying to remind themselves how annoying they find the other person, as they are clearly extremely attracted to one another.

In many ways, this book reminded me of A Week to Be Wicked, probably my favourite Tessa Dare novels, and one of my favourite romances ever. There's a road trip element, there is a lot of spirited banter, the couple have sizzling chemistry and they keep having mishap after mishap, while stuck on the road together. Both the heroes are uncomfortable travelling in small, dark, enclosed coaches. Both the heroines are highly intelligent, bookish, overlooked by everone and clearly super awesome. This book has daddy issues, gunshot wounds, occasional plot moppets (who were mostly sweet rather than annoying), assumed names, a pretend engagement, some pretty sexy times in both a carriage and a hedge maze, allusions to Greek mythology and hero, who while incredibly skilled at putting his foot in his mouth, eventually fully acknowledges what a first class idiot he's been and grovels very satisfyingly. He's not wrong about Sophie being far too good for him, but he shows signs of improvement towards the end and he's certainly not selfish in the bedroom department, which is an definite plus in a romance hero.

At least until I re-read One Good Earl Deserves a Lover, this is among my favourite Sarah Macleans and Sophie is certainly one of my favourite heroines. I do have niggles about the plot (King could have been slightly less insulting all the time, the conflict with his father could have been very easily solved if they actually just had a CONVERSATION), but they are not enough to ruin the happy glow of such a fun romance. After the most recent Milan was a let-down, I'm glad that I got to end the year on such a high note, making this the book that completed my triple Cannonball.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.