Review by New York Times Review
EVERYROMANCE novel isakind of fantasy, whether it features an impossibly wealthy duke or a cute guy who knows how to talk about his feelings. It can be escapist or aspirational, extravagantly hyperbolic or easily plausible, but it's still idealized. Every romance has a happy ending, after all. That's a narrative constraint and a defining characteristic of the genre; it's also a puzzle for an author to solve. Make your main characters too good or too perfect, and obstacles to their happy ending seem far-fetched. Make them too flawed, and maybe they don't deserve a happy ending. Here are five new romances that grapple with their protagonists' shortcomings and virtues - their worthiness of a happy ending - or at least leave their readers doing so after the final page. Tessa Dare's THE GOVERNESS GAME (Avon; paper, $7.99; ebook, $6.99) hinges on a classic obstacle to a happy ending: the hero who thinks himself unworthy of love. Like many romance heroes, Chase Reynaud, the future Duke of Belvoir, has cultivated the trauma of a youthful mistake into a grand unified theory of self-loathing. He has sworn off marriage and he's desperate to protect his two young wards - orphaned sisters - from his spiritual corruption. If only the girls would stop driving off their governesses! Enter Miss Alex Mountbatten, clock setter and amateur astronomer, who through a series of miscommunications is offered and accepts the job. Dare deftly navigates the entanglement between employer and employee. Besides, the real power in the household belongs not to Chase but to his obstinate wards, and he and Alex quickly become partners in their care. While the logic of Chase's reluctance to love falls apart on close inspection, it gives Alex cause to take the lead. She is sharp and smart and funny - the whole book is, actually: "When he spoke, his voice was so perilously deep it needed a fence and a warning signpost." And the younger of Chase's wards has an exquisitely droll fixation on convening funerals for her doll, a gambit with surprising emotional payoff. But the child care - and comethunting - never detract from the love story, instead giving it a vivid world in which to flourish. Alex and Chase are playful, intense and stubborn - their flaws make them a magical match, not perfect but perfect for each other. The prologue of Christina Lauren's josh and hazels GUIDE TO NOT DATING (Gallery Books; paper, $16; ebook, $8.99) begins with Hazel Bradford listing her flaws: She's broke, lazy, drinks too much at parties to avoid social awkwardness, always says the wrong thing at the wrong time. "In summary, I am superb at making an ass out of myself." Hazel doesn't see these traits as flaws, though, but as eccentricities, with habitual blackouts on the same level as painting her toenails different colors. When she sees Josh Im for the first time in seven years - in college she puked on his shoes at a party - she's sure this calm, thoughtful guy would never love a weirdo like her, so she decides they'll be best friends. Sure enough, they click, but even when Josh's caricaturishly evil girlfriend cheats on him, even though each thinks the other is the hottest person they've ever seen, they decide to be just friends. To get Josh over his breakup, and to enforce the just-friends facade, they start setting each other up on blind double dates. It's almost a kind of masochism to watch these outlandishly bad dates stack up, especially as Josh and Hazel keep making inadvertent eyes at each other. You're not meant to feel bad for the rotating third and fourth wheels. They're obviously bad matches for the real stars, who are also obviously falling in love. But the dates are too often dismissible because they're easy stereotypes. (A hemp-wearing, vegan yoga teacher fares particularly poorly.) We never go very deep, but the story skips along the surface, propelled by rom-com momentum and charm. Taking your book's inspiration from "Magic Mike XXL" provides a great opportunity (hot male strippers) but presents a challenge as well: The real heroine of "Magic Mike XXL" is not... whatever her name is, the photographer woman; it's everyone in the movie audience, in that each viewer is the object of the film's seductive attention. And a good deal of the movie's exuberant fun is watching the men strip, a decidedly visual art form. Luckily, Zoey Castile doesn't lean on narrating big dance numbers in STRIPPED (Kensington; paper, $15.95; ebook, $9.99), focusing instead on the white-hot connection between the stripper Zac Fallon and his upstairs neighbor, Robyn Flores. And Robyn, thank goodness, is a vast improvement on the milquetoast heroines of the "Magic Mike" franchise. She and Fallon are brought together by a laundry mix-up meet-cute with a star-spangled thong, and while there is the requisite squeamishness about dating a male stripper to be gotten over - perhaps less plausible since "Magic Mike" does exist in Robyn's universe - their chemistry is intense. The real obstacles to the romance are personal and psychological: Fallon's defensiveness against people's judgment of his profession, and Robyn's sense of drift in her own life. She's always late to work, sleeps poorly, flounders as her best friend's maid of honor. Is she depressed? Unfulfilled at work? Maybe all or none of the above. Most tantalizing is the half-explored theme of the pressure Robyn and many women feel to set and meet long-term goals in their careers and personal lives. Once the specter of that pressure is raised, you almost share Robyn's best friend's concern that things are moving too fast with Fallon, that their romance is a Band-Aid for her problems. But on the other hand, he's extremely attractive and extremely kind, so you mostly just want to hoot and holler and cheer them on. The marriage of convenience is a well-worn, well-loved trope in historical romance. But most historical romance takes place 200 years ago. Move the setting to 1965 Texas, as in the extremely charming FREE FALL (Penny Bright Publishing; paper, $12.99; ebook, $3.99), by Emma Barry and Genevieve Türner, and a shotgun wedding less than a decade before Roe v. Wade takes on a new valence - what other options might 19-year-old Vivy have had? Luckily, her one option, that of a rushed marriage to Dean Garland, the astronaut with whom she had a one-night stand, turns out to be pretty wonderful. (The space race setting is a treat, too.) The biggest challenge, at first, is enforced celibacy : After an accident while testing a spacesuit, the astronauts have been ordered to stay abstinent until their mission is over. Apparently being sexually frustrated is... less distracting than having sex? There's also the fact that Vivy's father is the defense contractor responsible for the defective suit - the suit Dean is about to debut in orbit. But for all the external obstacles, the real heart of this book is Vivy and Dean falling in love and learning how to be partners. Sure, they're drawn together by physical attraction, but what keeps them together isn't some enigmatic gravitational pull, it's their efforts to make the relationship work. Their flaws - she can be overbearing; he's reticent and emotionally repressed - and their desire to understand each other make for an emotionally rich portrait of love. It's the beautiful way two people can fit together, challenging and complementing each other at the same time. Scarlett Peckham's astonishingly good debut, the duke i TEMPTED (NYLA Publishing; paper, $14.99; ebook, $3.99), also features two people discovering how well they fit together, in a historical romance setting that's both more traditional and not at all. The Duke of Westmead seeks a wife for a marriage of convenience. He can give her anything other than love, as long as she gives him an heir and the privacy to seek his pleasure where he finds it - which is on his knees in an S&M dungeon. Poppy Cavendish isn't looking for love, or even a husband. She's a botanist hired by Westmead to decorate the ballroom where he plans to find his future wife. But he finds Poppy instead, and a contrived scandal soon forces their hands into marriage. Poppy finds in Westmead's library a book full of erotic illustrations, and what she sees in those pages sends her mind spinning with what it reveals of Westmead's desires - and her own. "She'd never thought to contemplate that the roles might be reversed. That a lady might be the one to make demands. That a man might want it so. Might delight in it. How intriguing." Intriguing, indeed, but also hardly a subject she can broach with her new husband. Their relationship isn't cold - it's downright blazing at the start, but Westmead's stranglehold on his desire leaves Poppy hurt and baffled, and their marriage settles into loneliness and longing. It also leads to anger on Poppy's part, which is refreshing to read. The whole book is a breath of fresh air, both a complex, layered story and a soaring romance with two very real people at its heart. Peckham evokes a wide arc of desire, fear, love, humor and sadness in Westmead and Poppy's marriage. And bravery, too - the bravery that comes from the person you love asking what you want, and meeting you there. JAIME GREEN, the Book Review's romance columnist, is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed, Popular Science, The Cut and Unbound Worlds.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Chase Reynaud can't believe his two young wards have set a brand-new record for getting rid of a governess: 17½ hours! Fortunately, it seems a new candidate for the position has just walked in the door, and from what Chase can discern, she seems like a real pip. When Alexandra Alex Mountbatten lets herself into the next London townhouse on her list in order to go about her duties setting the clocks, she can't believe the gentleman waiting for her is none other than her Bookshop Rake. Months ago, Alex bumped into a tall, dark, and handsome stranger at Hatchards, and ever since, she had been dreaming of meeting him again. Unfortunately, Chase seems to have absolutely no memory whatsoever of Alex, and what is even worse, he thinks Alex is just going to drop everything and become his new governess! From the very first page of this whimsical and wryly inventive masterpiece, the latest in her fetching Girl Meets Duke series, following The Duchess Deal (2017), RITA Award-winning Dare reels readers in and then keeps them firmly hooked with her distinctive blend of exuberant characters, lively dialogue, buoyant wit, and bone-melting sensuality.--John Charles Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Dare's sizzling second Girl Meets Duke Regency (after The Duchess Deal), a young woman discovers that her romantic fantasies about a handsome rake are vastly different from the reality of him. After bumping into the effortlessly charming man of her dreams in a bookstore, Alexandra Mountbatten meets him again when calling at his London home, offering to set his clocks. Chase Reynaud mistakenly believes that Alex has come to apply for the position of governess to his two precocious wards, Daisy and Rosamund-and she needs a job, so she plays along. The witty banter of the misunderstanding is the perfect prelude for their future encounters. Chase professes himself a confirmed rake who refuses to marry as self-punishment for his past actions, but Alex sees through Chase's callous façade to the kind and generous man inside. Even as she tries to convince him that he deserves happiness, she knows that he must marry someone of suitable rank, which excludes her. Alex is an intelligent, independent heroine who is the perfect match for Chase, whose hardened heart softens as Alex reveals how much she cares for him. Sensuality and witty repartee fill the pages of this fast-paced story, which is made complete by the expertly developed characters and hints at future installments. Agent: Steve Axelrod, Axelrod Agency. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Startled when her visit to Chase Reynaud's home to set his clocks results in being mistaken for the new governess for his two young wards, pragmatic Alexandra Mountbatten sets him straight and leaves. Then an accident sends her into the Thames, with her chronometer and, therefore, her livelihood lost in the process. She returns to the Reynaud home, dripping wet, and accepts the position. A pair of charmingly difficult girls (and one constantly ailing doll) are a challenge, but Alex is not one to give up. She knows the key is patience and love-and a bit of piracy helps. Now if she can just get their wickedly sexy, love-wary guardian to realize he needs to be part of this, too. -VERDICT A ducal heir who dreads failure and a comet-obsessed sea captain's daughter with her own ghosts to slay finally give in to romance in an affecting gem enhanced by laugh-out-loud humor (the doll's various "demises" are priceless), scorching passion, and sparkling repartee. Pure reading joy! Dare (The Duchess Deal) lives in Southern California. © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
When an independent spinster loses her livelihood, she reluctantly takes a governess position in the home of an infamous rake and finds herself believing in dreams."Alexandra Mountbatten had common sense. That's what her friends believed. The truth was, Alex had no sense at allat least, not when it came to charming gentlemen with roguish green eyes." Or one gentleman, anyway. She'd met the stranger at Hatchard's bookshop and made a complete fool of herself, but that didn't keep her from dreaming about him for months. Then, on the fateful day when she met him again and learned his nameChase Reynaudand that he was the heir to a dukedom, she also lost her livelihood as a clock setter due to a panic attack that left her chronometer at the bottom of the Thames. Accepting Chase's offer of work as governess to his wards, two young sisters named Rosamund and Daisy, she's swept into the household. Daisy likes to start the day by announcing her doll's latest macabre death, and Rosamund is determined to challenge Alex. Relying on her own experience of being an orphan, Alex uses authenticity and ingenuity to engage with the girls, and before long the house becomes more of a home. Chase loves his wards and soon realizes he's in love with Alexandra, but after a lifetime of self-loathing, he doesn't trust himself to take care of them. Just when Chase moves forward, a misstep sends Alexandra away, forcing him to take a stand and fight for her. A sprawling cast of delightfully eccentric characters adds texture and depth to a captivating love story.Dare continues her splendid, quirky Girl Meets Duke series with wit, heart, and humor. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
