A Final July 30 Release Review: How to Lose a Bride in One Night

How to Lose a Bride in One Night

By Sophie Jordan

Publisher: Avon

Release Date: July 30, 2013

Annalise Hadley can hardly believe how her life has changed. First her father found her and, despite her illegitimacy, transformed her from a nearly penniless seamstress into an heiress. Now, despite her limp and her dubious past, she is the bride of the handsome, charming Duke of Bloodsworth. But her wedding night is not the culmination of a fairy tale; instead, it is a nightmare that proves all too real. Her new husband, thinking he has been successful in his attempt to murder her, throws her into the river like the piece of trash he clearly thinks she is.

Owen Crawford’s year as a sharpshooter with the British Army in India changed him irrevocably. He harbors no resentment over his brother Jamie’s marriage to Paget Ellsworth, the vicar’s daughter Owen expected to marry. Indeed, Owen is pleased that they have found happiness together, but he feels removed from them. They don’t know the man he has become. He is a reluctant savior, but he can’t ignore the woman he finds on the riverbank, broken and burning with fever. Saving her seems in some way compensatory action for the lives he has taken.

Owen takes the woman to a gypsy camp where the tribe’s wise woman uses her skills to set Annelise’s broken leg and care for her other injuries. When Annalise regain consciousness, she feigns amnesia, claiming to remember only that her first name is Anna. Owen is skeptical of the amnesia, but he realizes there is truth in the gypsy healer’s claim that having saved Anna’s life, he is responsible for her. He decides to give her refuge in his London house until her recovery is complete and then give her money to make her own way. But the attraction he feels for Anna complicates matters. Owen is not ready for the complications or for the tenderness Anna evokes in him, but he will learn that opening his heart to the possibilities will not only allow him to protect Anna but also to conquer his own demons.

Anna, knowing that her husband is still a threat and terrified that Owen will return her to him if she reveals her identity and convinced that her father will do the same, maintains the fiction of her identity. Despite Owen’s gruffness and his avoidance of her, she feels safe with him. She also is determined to hold him to his promise to teach her the defensive skills in which he is expert, but there are no defensive skills that will protect her heart against the threat Owen Crawford, Earl of McDowell, poses to it. This time Anna’s salvation depends upon her trusting Owen enough to be honest with him and with herself.

The denouement seemed rather melodramatic to me, but Annalise and Owen are engaging characters, and watching these two damaged people experience the healing that love can bring to wounded hearts provided an emotional, rewarding read. This is the third book in Sophie Jordan’s Forgotten Princesses series. I had not read the earlier stories, but I had no difficult following Annalise and Owen’s story. I will admit to being so obsessive about series that I plan to read the first two novels Wicked in Your Arms and Lessons from a Scandalous Bride and the novella, The Earl in My Bed.

Are you obsessive about reading all the books in a series, or can you read one and forget the others? 

Another Review for a July 30 Release: The Lady and the Laird

The Lady and the Laird

By Nicola Cornick

Publisher: Harlequin HQN

Release Date: July 30, 2013

Lady Lucy MacMorlan is a perfect lady, a perfect daughter to her father, and a perfect sibling to her surviving brothers and sisters, but perfect Lucy harbors some secrets that would seriously jeopardize her reputation for perfection. Few people know that she was the author of a series of erotic letters she had been paid to write for her brother Lachlan and his friends, resulting in their scandalous success at their  amorous escapades. Nobody knows the reason Lucy is so devoted to the memory of her older, scholarly fiancé that she has refused to consider another suitor since his death. Nobody knows what Lucy does with the money she makes from her letter writing. It’s her need for funds that persuades Lucy against her instinct to write more letters for Lachlan. This time the letters are not for an opera dancer but for the young woman betrothed to Robert, Marquis of Methven.

Robert, Marquis of Methven, is furious that his promised bride has left him waiting at the altar and eloped with Lachlan MacMorlan. It’s not that Methven loves the girl, but he does love his land and feel responsible for those who dwell on it. Thanks to his estrangement from his grandfather, his absence from Scotland at his grandfather’s death, and the terms of a fifteenth-century treaty, he stands to lose half his ancestral lands to a man who will exploit and abuse his clansmen. Marriage to Lord Brodie’s daughter and a legitimate heir from their marriage would have fulfilled the treaty terms, but the list of other women who would satisfy those terms is nonexistent. Then his lawyer informs him that Lady Lucy MacMorlan, as a descendant of the original Earl of Cardross, will fulfill the terms as well. And Methven knows that he will make Lucy his bride, but he has no idea of the trials that await him on his journey to that goal.

Readers who like intelligent heroines will find much to like in Lucy who even as a sixteen-year-old preferred reading books to dreaming about her future husband. Who would ever imagine all that the proper daughter of a duke was learning from those books she read--erotic poetry and swordplay and all sorts of things that would later prove useful. Some may think that some of her choices suggest that she could have used more pragmatism mixed with her book learning, but people, even smart ones, do make foolish decisions when driven by their fears. And Lucy is convinced that marriage and passion and pregnancy lead to certain death, an irrational idea but an understandable one given her experience. When her love for Methven grows stronger than her fear, it’s a real test of that love’s power as well as evidence that Lucy has healed enough to leave behind the broken, terrified adolescent that she has been behind her carefully cultivated image of perfection.

Methven has the leader’s sense of responsibility for his people and the protectiveness of his woman that are conventionally primary alpha characteristics, but he delights in Lucy’s strengths and is incredibly tender when that quality is what she needs. He is also willing to admit that he is wrong. In other words, he is a complex, compelling, satisfying hero.

Cornick also provides some interesting secondary characters. Lucy’s sister Mairi and Methven’s cousin Jack are excellent foils for the protagonists and promising future leads. Lucy’s godmother is amusing, and I adored Methven’s fierce grandmother. But my favorite part of the book was the Highland Ladies Bluestocking Society. I wanted to join them. I did find the villain flat, but I find that a common weakness in historical romance fiction.

The Lady and the Laird is the first of Cornick’s Scottish Brides series. I look forward to Mairi and Jack’s story, One Night with the Laird, which will be released on October 29. The story of Christina, the eldest MacMorlan sister who is already a spinster, may prove to be the most fascinating of the three.

I’m not a reader who reaches for a romance just because it’s set in Scotland, but I have read several Scottish romances recently, with mixed results. I wonder if more are being written than usual. Are you a fan of Scottish romances? Why do you think they are so much more popular than romances set in Ireland?

Super Tuesday and Tuesday Review

  

July 30 will be another Super Tuesday for Romance Readers with a stack of incredibly good books being released that day. I sang the praises of one of those releases at Heroes and Heartbreakers today: Why Dukes Say I Do by Manda Collins. Beginning today and continuing through Friday, I will review a July 30 release at Just Janga. Last week, I reviewed three—Love and Other Scandals by Caroline Linden, Three Little Words by Susan Mallery, and Home to Whiskey Creek by Brenda Novak. Sometimes soon, The Romance Dish will publish my reviews of Some Like it Hot by Susan Andersen and The Devil and Clan Sinclair by Karen Ranney. To celebrate this super week of releases, the Randomizer will pick one commenter from this week’s post (North America only) to receive a free copy—Kindle or print—of Why Dukes Say I Do and one other of these July 30 releases (reader’s choice).

Now for the regularly scheduled Tuesday Review!

Sanctuary Island

By Lily Everett

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

Release Date: July 30, 2013

Ella Preston is reluctantly accompanying her younger sister Merry to Sanctuary Island, a thinly populated island off the Virginia coast that serves as a refuge for wild horses. The free-spirited Merry is eager to reconcile with their estranged mother, Jo Ellen Hollister, a recovering alcoholic. Ella has no desire for reconciliation with the mother she hasn’t seen since their father divorced her and took the girls away when Ella was thirteen. Three years younger than Ella, Merry may remember less clearly than Ella what life with an alcoholic parent was like, but Ella hasn’t forgotten. Therapy may have helped her forgive her mother, but it didn’t make her want Jo Ellen in her life. But since impulsive Merry is going to Sanctuary Island, so is Ella, who has spent most of her life looking after Merry.

It’s not only wild horses who find sanctuary on Sanctuary Island. It proved a refuge for Grady Wilkes when he returned after one of his search and rescue missions literally blew up leaving him with grievous injuries that have left him still scarred physically and psychically five years later. Grady owes a lot to Jo Ellen whose contribution to his recovery was crucial and who has continued to be a mother figure in his life. He’s not about to stand by idly while the two daughters who have refused to have anything to do with their mother for fifteen years turn up to take advantage of her just as she come into an inheritance.

The open-hearted Merry and Jo Ellen reconnect immediately. Merry feels at home on the island and as her mother’s daughter. Ella is far more complicated, and even as she slowly comes to recognize that Jo Ellen is not the woman she has imagined, she clings to the past and to the anger she denies but cannot eradicate. She also discovers that Grady is more complex and vulnerable that her early conclusions about him suggested. As these two wounded people grow closer, their power to heal one another grows clearer. But they can embrace the future only if they can trust one another enough to let go of the emotional baggage they carry from their pasts.

I enjoyed Louisa Edwards’s Recipe for Love books, and even after reading the billionaire Harrington brothers novellas that served to introduce Sanctuary Island to readers, I wasn’t sure why Louisa Edwards was now writing as Lily Everett. Sure, there was a major change in setting, but she was still writing contemporary romance. Her stories were still a mix of humor, hurt, and heat. I understood better after reading Sanctuary Island, which has the definite feel of a romance/ women’s fiction hybrid. Ella’s journey to self-knowledge and self-acceptance are key to the story, but this fact does not lessen the power of the romance. In fact, there’s a love scene that I’d rank very high on the tenderness, heart-melting scale.

Ella and Grady’s story is richly emotional and rewardingly intricate. Despite Ella’s time in therapy, she is still very much the adult child of an alcoholic. Her need to be in control, her heightened sense of responsibility, her difficulty in letting go and just having fun, and, most of all, her difficulty separating the past from the present are all classic symptoms. She felt so real to me that I found it easy to understand and forgive her stubbornness and her carefully maintained distance from her mother. I fell in love with Grady from the start. His loyalty, his courage, and his ongoing struggles with the consequences—physical and emotional--of his injuries gave him depth and credibility. Without taking any respect away from military heroes, I was also pleased that his injuries were sustained in a different manner. As the recent deaths in Colorado surely reminded us, heroes wear a lot of different uniforms, and some even dress as civilians.

Although the romance is central to the story, Ella’s relationship with Jo Ellen is equally important. Truly forgiving her mother, not merely giving lip service to the idea, is an essential step in Ella’s ability to become healthy enough to give and receive love. Everett does an excellent job of giving both relationships their due.  Jo Ellen too is a great character. Her love for her daughters is evident as are the regrets she lives with and her need to accept herself as worthy of a second chance, not just with her daughters but with a full life.

The Billionaire Brothers novellas are fun reads, and I think contemporary romance fans will enjoy them. But Sanctuary Island is something more than a good read. It has substance and heart, and it leaves the reader thinking about connections and disconnections and forgiveness and healing as well as happy endings. I highly recommend it. 

I adored Merry and her curmudgeon match. Their story, Shoreline Drive (January 28, 2014) is already available for preorder.

I confess that I’m a great fan of romance/women’s fiction hybrid novels. Many of my favorites fall in this group. Are you a fan, or do you prefer your genres unmixed.