Short and sweet review for a short and sweet book.
Actually, the book was 375 pages which isn’t really short, but it FELT short because I zoomed right through it. I’m not taking back my phrasing.
So this is a book about a lady who travels to Revolutionary America to search for her missing brother (a British soldier), and encounters his best friend instead, who is in a coma. When they won’t let her in to see him, she claims to be his wife, and then nurses him back to health. When he wakes up, he has no memory of the last few months, and here’s this lady who is claiming to be his wife. Whoops! (I did have to suspend quite a bit of disbelief here, but it helps that the two have been corresponding for over a year, taking on messages to each other through her brother.)
“Sweet” is really the best thing I can say about this book. It takes a couple of tropes and doesn’t really do anything new with them, just retreads them in a comforting manner, but Cecilia and Edward felt like real people, and they had some lovely moments both together and apart (it felt like such a human reaction when Edward was so grateful for the comfort Cecilia provided him while he was ill, and that her face was the first he saw when woke up).
I would have liked a little more “oomph,” though.
Super here for the next one, because shipboard romance with a dash of pirate for seasoning is a thing I have loved since I snuck my mom’s copy of Gentle Rogue out of her bedside table in middle school.
[3.5 stars rounded up]
You’re not the only one who snuck a copy of Gentle Rogue… and yeah, this one was sweet and mindless. I had the exact same opinion.
I never did finish the Mallory series. I heard the later books weren’t great. Also, the ones I’ve re-read haven’t super held up, although Gentle Rogue mostly did!