By Madeleine Roux, Pub Date October 22, 2024
4*s. 2 🌶️. A historical romance for the bookish.
Publisher’s Synopsis:
“Margaret Arden yearns to live like the passionate and daring women in her novel. The idyllic life at Mosely Cottage with her two younger sisters and mother is fine, but Margaret wants more than the demure and dainty existence she’s known. After a particularly brutal rejection from an annoyingly attractive publisher, Margaret fears being forced into marriage to protect her family if their financial situation doesn’t improve—until her cousin’s glamorous wedding masquerade brings her onto a collision course with scandal, notoriety, and even love.
Captain Bridger Darrow is starting over after fighting for his country. Now home, he is struggling to save his family from destitution and succeed in a new venture of passion: book publishing. It’s all going rather poorly, until he stumbles upon loose pages of an astonishing novel while in attendance at his dearest friend’s wedding. Bridger knows he must publish it. But upon meeting the author, Bridger is stunned to discover that he—she—is a woman, and he has already told her off in grand fashion.
While Bridger is keen to gain her trust and rescind the initial rejection, Margaret can’t help but be skeptical of his intentions. Sparks fly between the two, just as the wedding of the season starts to descend into chaos when a masked dance leads to a case of mistaken identities.”
My Notes:
I really enjoyed Madeleine Roux’s House of Furies, so when I saw she was taking a foray into historical romance, I knew I need to check it out. I’m pleased to say that this was an excellent step into historical romance.
Margaret’s character build is fantastic as is Bridger’s. I enjoyed Margaret (Maggie)’s will to flout the expectations of her overbearing aunts who want her to marry well and pay for the sins of her mother, who married for love. However, Maggie absolutely adored her father and received her pension for storytelling from him, which is why she has written a book in his honor that she is desperate to get published.
That’s how she initially gets into it with Bridger, who is a book publisher. She brings her book to a salon after having sent it to his publishing office without response. Bridger, who honestly didn’t give the manuscript much of a chance in the first place, turns Maggie down in a most embarrassing fashion. Of course, the embarrassment was not necessarily on purpose – with his less than excellent father on his death bed and his older brother Paul off gambling and galivanting when he should be preparing to take over the family title, the former soldier-come-publisher doesn’t have much patience for social affairs. Unbeknownst to either, this will not be the last time they will see one another.
Upon his arrival at his best friend Lane’s country house wedding, he finds himself once again face to face with Maggie, who just so happens to be Lane’s cousin. Neither expected to see the other, but they find themselves in a series of events that thrust them together in the most unpleasant – or perhaps very pleasant – of ways.
The above is all well and good, but what the synopsis does NOT talk about is the scandal that happens at the wedding. The bride, Ann, a delightful woman of British/Indian descent, is seen kissing another man the very evening after her nuptials…or is she? As Maggie and Bridger pursue the real culprits, they find themselves stuck at an Inn in a storm with a one bed room and the perpetrator onto them.
It also doesn’t talk the issues that their adventure above will cause. There was plenty of mystery, heartbreak, enemies to lovers and one bed to keep anyone. Truly awful and unredeemable characters as well as survivors finding love. The Tertiary characters are also fantastic, and I look forward to seeing what else Roux can do with the genre.
Thanks so much to Netgalley, the author, and Random House for the advanced copy in exchange for the above honest review.
Always Lost in Words 