BOOK REVIEW: Unmasking the Thief by Mary Lancaster

 I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

Book Five in Mary Lancaster’s Pleasure Garden Series is now available: Unmasking the Thief. I’ve enjoyed this series all along and recommend starting with Book One: Unmasking the Hero.

The current hero is Francisco de Salgado y Goya de Valdecara, otherwise known as Mr. Francis. He’s a world-weary Spaniard who considers England his adopted country. For this country he has been a spy and other unsavory things. However, he is honorable at heart and so is tired of the man he has become. He wants to retire, but England needs him to do just one more thing.

The heroine is Mathilda (Matty) Mather, a country gentlewoman turned governess to the Dove family. (We’ve met the Doves in previous books.) Matty loves her work and adores her charges, even if they do get into scrapes. Her main problem is that her sister has inherited a fortune and is now being courted by Sir Anthony Thorne, a rising political star, an obvious fortune hunter, and Matty’s one-time fiancé. She can see through him, but unfortunately, her sister cannot.

Francis and Matty meet, both incognito, at the Maida Pleasure Garden. Francis was there to intercept a message about an intended violent political uprising. But he made a rare mistake, stealing not the ring that was supposed to contain the hidden message, but a ring belonging to one of Matty’s charges. Matty is there to retrieve the ring. Sparks fly.

The ton is a rather small world and their paths keep crossing. Suspicious of one another at first, they quickly dispense with that and join forces, falling in love along the way.

The characters are admirable. The relationship is credible. The plotting is fast paced. It’s nice to see so many of the characters from the previous books returning. This series is highly recommended.

BOOK REVIEW: Desperately Seeking a Duchess by Christi Caldwell

 I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

I’m continuing with historical romance. I just finished Christi Caldwell’s Desperately Seeking a Duchess, book two in the series All the Duke’s Sins. (The first book, Along Came a Lady, was a lot of fun. You should read it first, but don’t have to.)

This novel continues to follow the fortunes of the Duke of Bentley’s illegitimate children, raised in a mining town by his mistress. He was unaware of them until very recently and is now trying to make amends.

For Cailin Audley, the youngest child and only daughter, this means a chance to experience London, the museums and bookshops in particular. Or so she thinks. Instead, it is an endless series of lessons on how to behave in Polite Society. She is miserable all the time, except for her encounters with Courtland Balfour, the seventh Duke of St. James.

Courtland is a reforming/reformed rake, who has inherited not only the title from his father but a ruinous mountain of debt and the care of three younger sisters. He also is responsible for his twin brother, Lord Keir, who is on the autism spectrum. Keir is employed by Bentley as a man of business, and it is that employment that is barely keeping the family afloat.

Cailin and Courtland have met once before, very briefly, when Courtland posed as his brother, sent by Bentley, to convince the family to come to London. That encounter went poorly or wonderfully, depending on the perspective.

At any rate, when the two meet again, they put that behind them and begin again. Courtland admires and understands Cailin, but he hides from her his family’s devastated fortunes. Cailin finds him charming and yet down-to-earth, unlike much of what she is seeing of Society. When she goes to his house, unchaperoned, to give him some news, her reputation is nearly ruined. Her family whisks her away to a country home for a house party, still bent on finding her a husband. She is even more miserable. Until she sees that Courtland and his siblings were also invited. There, they have more opportunity to grow their friendship and to recognize that they have fallen in love.

The characters are lovely people. Cailin is refreshingly anti-polite society. Courtland is an honorable man, devoted to his siblings, despite his reputation. Although I found the chemistry between them a bit unconvincing at first, they grow into a couple to root for.

There are siblings aplenty in Cailin’s family and in Courtland’s, so I eagerly await the next book in the series!

BOOK REVIEW: The Runaway Duchess by Joanna Lowell

I was long overdue for another historical romance. Fortunately, I picked up The Runaway Duchess by Joanna Lowell. What a delightful romp! Set in 1883, rather than the Regency Period, there are elements of a slightly more modern society, but women, on the whole, remain hemmed in by convention.

Lavinia Yardley is the unwilling duchess. After having been ruined by the love of her life, she tries to salvage what she can by marrying the Duke of Cranbrook, a textbook disgusting old villain. Before the marriage is consummated, she seizes a chance to run off, at a train station, with a man who mistakes her for someone else.

The man is Neal Traymayne, a botanist, an intrepid collector and categorizer of exotic and local plant-life, and the head of Varnham Nurseries (a very successful commercial endeavor.) Neal has come to the station looking for Mrs. Muriel Pendrake, a fellow botanist with whom he has been corresponding. She’s a widow, and he hopes they will hit it off in person as much as they have in writing. Because he is looking for a wife.

They do hit it off. Or rather, Neal and Lavinia-as-stand-in-for-Muriel hit it off, even though she is not at all what he was expecting and he is not the type of man she ever thought she would look at twice. Unfortunately, Lavinia has to keep pretending to be Muriel Pendrake.

The novel is chockful of clever humor. Some of it goes along with the mistaken-identity situation, but most is the result of witty banter and sly observation of human foibles. The book is steamy, more so than my usual preference, but the emotional relationship is well on its way before they start acting on their mutual desires, so the sex scenes don’t read as gratuitous.

There is really only one way for the HEA to be obtained, so there are no surprises. But it’s such a fun read, with unique plotting along the way, that it’s highly recommended!

BOOK REVIEW: End of the World House by Adrienne Celt

 I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

End of the World House by Adrienne Celt is a quirky novel set in the near future, partly in Paris and partly on the U.S. West Coast. It is billed as reminiscent of Groundhog Day, using the structure of repeating or reliving a day with slight variations. Presumably, the character would eventually get something right that had been wrong in their life, and thus break from the loop. But it’s not clear that happens here.

Bertie is the protagonist. A late twenties or early thirties woman, her career as a graphic novelist has stalled. She works for a large tech firm as a sort of graphic designer. She doesn’t know what the company actually does, but she is very well paid and her job comes with perks (free food, after-work cocktail parties, health insurance). In the current economy, she is very fortunate and recognizes it, even if she feels her actual job is meaningless.

Bertie’s best friend is Kate. They’ve been friends since high school and have a complicated past. They bonded during the recent crazy years (representing the end of the world as they knew it.) However, Bertie is more attached to Kate than Kate is to Bertie. Rather obsessively so. Kate has decided to move to L.A. for a new job, and Bertie is both furious and devastated.

As a way to salve the pain, Kate agrees to a Paris vacation with Bertie.

The novel opens with the two on their way to the Louvre on a day that it is closed. They had met a man in a bar the previous night who, after flirting with Kate, promised to sneak them into the museum for a private experience. Here things go haywire. 

The museum is odd. They wander aimlessly through it. They are separated. Bertie panics. Then she wakes up in the hotel room with Kate and they start the day all over, with similar results.

The two are separated again. But instead of finding Kate, Bertie finds her old boyfriend. He is a stalker it seems, but he understands what’s going on and she doesn’t, so she falls in with him. They end up back in the U.S., living a semi-idyllic life as boyfriend and girlfriend. She has odd compulsions about an old friend she never sees anymore (Kate), and eventually pulls the boyfriend back to Paris.

The novel moves along pretty well. The plotting is clunky, but that is how it’s structured. The characters live superficial lives and are not, in themselves, very interesting or likeable. Even the friendship between Bertie and Kate doesn’t ring true, since they spend their short times together getting on one another’s nerves and apologizing passive-aggressively.

The true star in this novel, the thing that kept me reading, was the setting. The disturbing atmosphere captured the disconnected weirdness of a slow crawl to the end times. People know the world is falling apart yet strain for some semblance of normalcy. Looking at it from the outside is horrifying. Particularly because it is holding a mirror up to our current day.

Rather than a pandemic, there was a worldwide series of unexplained bombings. People hunkered down. They chose buddies for sheltering in place (like Covid pods.) Political upheavals, border closings, supply chain issues, gas rationing, the rich getting richer while the poor get left behind, living lives through social media, and the omnipresent evidence of climate change is all here. And people’s response (or lack of response) to it all is realistically, depressingly, portrayed.

Human interaction becomes very superficial. Best friends can be discarded, or maybe they were never all that close. It was easy for Bertie to become fragmented, for her reality to dissolve, because there was so little real there to begin with. The ending is not hopeful. Nor is it satisfyingly sad. It’s just unsettling.

BOOK REVIEW: Archangel by Andrea Barrett

Historical fiction and short stories don’t generally go together in my mind. When I think of historical fiction, I think of detailed world-building, big-event settings, and large casts of characters. However, Andrea Barrett’s Archangel surprised me. In her collection of interconnected short stories set in the early 1900s, Barrett is able to create intense, poignant vignettes featuring several characters whose lives are caught up with the new discoveries being made in science and natural history. They deal with difficult life situations while grappling with new understandings that displace the comfort of the familiar. Scientific theories permeate their lives and they draw connections between scientific endeavors (engineering, astronomy, biology, genetics, and medicine) and their own life experiences.

The reader is firmly drawn into the time and place of each short story. The details bring the world to life. The writing is beautiful. And the characters are sympathetic and realistic.

I loved the book and will have to look for more of Barrett’s work.

BOOK REVIEW: Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

 I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez is a gripping, important book, but brutally difficult to read.

Civil Townsend narrates the tale in two timelines. In 2016, she is a middle-aged Black OB-GYN, looking back and trying to make sense of her life. In 1973, she is a newly-graduated nurse, determined to help people. Her first job, at the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, initially seemed perfect. Knowing firsthand the importance of reproductive health, of reproductive choice, she believes in the mission: giving Black women living in poverty some control over their bodies and their futures.

Unfortunately, the clinic was not what it seemed. Early on, Civil was assigned to give birth control shots to two sisters – hormone treatments that had not been FDA-approved. Worse, the sisters were 11 and 13 years old and were not sexually active. The opinion of the head of the clinic, a white woman who saw herself as a do-gooder, was that if they weren’t yet, they soon would be, based on their race.

Civil is appalled by their living conditions. She inserts herself into their lives, finds them government housing, supplements their food stamps, buys them clothes, even teaches their father to read. Her intentions are good. But...

The sisters are essentially abducted from their home by the clinic supervisor and sterilized without informed consent. 

When Civil finds out, she seeks justice for the girls. With the help of a family friend, the other clinic nurses, and an idealistic young white lawyer, a lawsuit is filed against the clinic. However, as they uncover information about the scope of the government’s forced sterilization project, the lawyer takes on the Federal government instead. Tens of thousands of women of color were forcibly sterilized.

The novel dramatizes these events in a horrifying fashion. Yet there is nuance to the story. Civil, too, realizes that she steps across boundaries she shouldn’t in her eagerness to help.

There is a lot to absorb in this novel. It’s based on true historical events. Because the history is so recent, it’s raw and difficult to take in. Difficult too are comparisons with ongoing efforts to restrict women’s access to reproductive health and to deny women bodily autonomy.

In some ways, the book reminds me of The Illness Lesson, another novel where young women were exploited and used as guinea pigs. So much trauma.

Even though it’s difficult to read, Take My Hand is not to be missed.

BOOK REVIEW: A Perilous Perspective by Anna Lee Huber

 I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

The tenth book in Anna Lee Huber’s Lady Darby mystery series, A Perilous Perspective, is newly released. 

Kiera (Lady Darby, Mrs. Gage) is at the country home of her great uncle for a wedding party. Kiera is eager to finally see her uncle’s painting collection, which is supposed to be superb. (She is a well-known portraitist. Earlier books explain how her talent dragged her into her first husband’s illicit cadaver dissection business. He was psychologically and physically abusive. After his death, Kiera had to deal with the fallout with the help of now-husband Sebastian Gage, a government investigator. They have solved many murders together. That’s a quick recap.)

Kiera is enjoying the visit and the time with her three-month-old baby girl. Unfortunately, things fall apart when she explores the painting gallery and discovers that a prized Titian is a forgery. This leads to the spilling of old family secrets, painful ones, which would be difficult enough to deal with. Then, one of the maids is discovered murdered in the gallery beneath the forged painting.

Once again, Kiera and Sebastian are called upon to solve the murder (murders), while dealing with complex family situations.

This remains a well-plotted mystery series with engaging protagonists. A secondary relationship between Kiera’s lady’s maid and Sebastian’s valet keeps things interesting on the romance side now that the love story between Kiera and Sebastian is so well settled.

Fans of this series will be thrilled with this new addition. For those who have not yet met Kiera and Sebastian, start with book 1!