Young Rose Sweetly is a computer in Victorian England. This means she works for a male astronomer, doing amazing feats of arithmetic and calculation to help him in his work. She lives with her pregnant sister, taking care of her while waiting for her brother-in-law, a naval doctor, to return from abroad. Preferably before the baby is born. She’s also very much in love with her neighbour, the infamous author and columnist Stephen Shaughnessey. Yet she heeds her sister’s advice. He is a legendary scandal […]
A Book I Couldn’t Wait to Review (So I Didn’t)
I’m writing this review without actually finishing the book. I know, it’s unorthodox, but stick with me here. Thanks to the lovely reviews of Courtney Milan’s Brothers Sinister series I have decided to make these books my summer/fall romance reads. Based solely on the reviews I purchased all of the available books and novellas for my Nook and have been sliding these books in amongst my other reading. The Duchess War is the first full novel, second story, in the series and I am in […]
HUZZAH!
This book has EVERYTHING. There is simply no other author doing what Courtney Milan is doing. She wears her heart and her mind on her sleeve, and in doing so, my heart and mind are engaged to their fullest capacity when devouring her stories. The amount of romantic passion, intellectual rigor, and political zeal that she includes in her characterization is astounding, and even more so because as overbearing as any one of these can be in less skilled hands, in her texts the complement […]
A romance that felt made for me
This book was stunning. Courtney Milan’s characterization and gender politics have always been several cuts above much of what is present in the genre, but here she addresses head-on the inequality of opportunity for 19 century women and details the psychological effects of internalizing the message, both overt and more subtle, that you can’t. Violet Waterfield, the Countess of Cambury, is a brilliant scientist. She’s also a woman. Her gender has done her no favors: her groundbreaking discoveries on reproduction and inheritance of traits are known […]