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Dalliances & Devotion
Dalliances & Devotion by Felicia Grossman is $1.99! This is the second book in The Truitts series, and the first is also on sale. Claudia gave this one a B:
Readers who enjoy seeing characters embark on literal and figurative road trips will like this book. As long as they are patient with a few detours, the journey and the destination are worth it.
A change in course can be refreshing…when it’s done together.
1871
After two disastrous marriages, beauty columnist Amalia Truitt’s life is finally her own—well, it will be if she can get herself back to Delaware and demand access to her share of the Truitt family fortune. After all, the charity she’s organized for women who can’t afford their own divorces won’t fund itself.
However, not everyone wants her to reach her destination. When her family learns she’s been receiving anonymous death threats, a solo journey is out of the question.
Enter David Zisskind, the ragtag-peddler-turned-soldier whose heart Amalia broke years ago. He’s a Pinkerton now, and the promotion he craves depends on protecting his long-lost love on the unexpectedly treacherous journey across Pennsylvania.
That their physical connection has endured the test of time (and then some) is problematic, to say the least.
In very close quarters, with danger lurking around every curve, with each kiss and illicit touch, the wrongs of the past are righted. But David can’t weather another rejection, especially with his career in jeopardy. And Amalia can’t possibly take a lover, never mind another husband…not with so much depending on her repaired reputation. Not when she’s hurt David—her David—so badly before.
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The Highlander
The Highlander by Kerrigan Byrne is $1.99! This is the third book in the Victorian Rebels series and Carrie gave it a B:
For the most part, though, this book was a fun diversion for me during a difficult time. If you enjoy the kind of romances that include lines like “Dark waves of hair hung long and heavy with moisture down his back, and menace rolled off the mountains of his shoulders in palpable waves” then you’ll like this book.
Can the fiercest master of battle conquer a woman’s heart?
They call him the Demon Highlander. The fearsome Lieutenant Colonel Liam MacKenzie is known for his superhuman strength, towering presence, and fiery passion in the heat of battle. As Laird to the MacKenzie clan, the undefeated Marquess has vanquished his foes with all rage and wrath of his barbaric Highland ancestors. But when an English governess arrives to care for his children, the master of war finds himself up against his greatest opponent… in the game of love.
Defying all expectations, Miss Philomena is no plain-faced spinster but a ravishing beauty with voluptuous curves and haughty full lips that rattle the Laird to his core. Unintimidated by her master’s raw masculinity and savage ways, the headstrong lass manages to tame not only his wild children but the beast in his soul. With each passing day, Liam grows fonder of Miss Mena—and more suspicious. What secret is she hiding behind those emerald eyes? What darkness brought her to his keep? And how can he conquer this magnificent woman’s heart… without surrendering his own?
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Tooth and Claw
Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton is $2.99! This book as been mentioned in the comments several times and described as Pride & Prejudice but with dragons. We’ve also favorably reviewed Walton’s latest release. Are you a fan? Did you like this one?
Here is a tale of a family dealing with the death of their father, a son who goes to court for his inheritance, a son who agonizes over his father’s deathbed confession, a daughter who falls in love, a daughter who becomes involved in the abolition movement, and a daughter sacrificing herself for her husband.
Here is what sounds for all the world like an enjoyable Victorian novel, perhaps by Anthony Trollope…except that everyone in the story is a dragon, red in tooth and claw.
Here are politics and train stations, churchmen and family retainers, courtship, and country houses…in which, on the death of an elder, family members gather to eat the body of the deceased. In which society’s high and mighty members avail themselves of the privilege of killing and eating the weaker children, which they do with ceremony and relish, growing stronger thereby.
You have never read a novel like Tooth and Claw.
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My Darling Duke
My Darling Duke by Stacy Reid is 99c! This is the first book in the Sinful Wallflowers series. Shana wrote a Lightning Review for this one and gave it C-. If you’ve read this one, how did you like it (or not)?
Miss Katherine Danvers has always been a wallflower. But now, with her family on the brink of financial ruin, she finds herself a desperate wallflower. To save her family, she’ll do anything. Luckily, she has the perfect plan…
She’ll impress the ton by simply announcing she is engaged to the reclusive and mysterious Duke of Thornton, Alexander Masters, and secure strong matches for her sisters. No one has heard from the duke in years. Surely he’ll never find out before her sisters’ weddings, and she can go back to her own quiet life.
Soon, though, everything is out of control. At first, it’s just a few new ball gowns on the duke’s accounts. Then, it’s interviews with reporters eager for gossip. Before she knows it, Katherine has transformed herself into Kitty Danvers, charming and clever belle of the ton—with everyone eager to meet her thankfully absent fiancé.
But when the enigmatic Alexander Masters suddenly arrives in the city, dashing and oh so angry, he demands retribution. Except not in the way Katherine expected…
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Tooth and Claw is a fascinating book about dragons and their complex social systems. However, I feel it fails as a comparison to Pride and Prejudice because the female characters are almost all meek and forgettable, when they are actually there. A sad comparison to actual Pride and Prejudice, which has so many wonderful female characters it does not pass the reverse Bechdel test. A missed opportunity, for sure.
I know I tend to get hung up on little things, but the publisher is marketing Dalliances and Devotion as part of a “daring Regency miniseries” but it’s set in the US. In 1871. What the…?
That sort of thing just doesn’t inspire confidence in me.
I LOVED Tooth & Claw, but there are caveats. People love to toss around comparisons between it and Jane Austen, but Austen novels are about the inner lives of women. This is MUCH more like a Trollope novel (as it says in the book blurb) – it’s a society novel, about who will get an inheritance and how minor differences in social standing become magnified under pressure. Also, who will eat the lion’s share of the corpse of the deceased patriarch??? (To my knowledge, that never featured in a Trollope novel but he literally wrote 47 of them so maybe I missed something.)
Tooth and Claw was the first Jo Walton I ever read, and I hated it but immediately read a bunch more of her books so the writing is good! I just got really hung up on how does a dragon wear a mantilla? What does the comb go into?
Dalliances and Devotion is FABULOUS, one of my favorite 2019 reads. I recall the Byrne just being all right.
My grade for the Reid was concurrent with Shana’s – sadly it’s a very contrived book.
@Jessi: You don’t remember the “eating the patriarch’s remains” scene in HE KNEW HE WAS RIGHT? For shame!
I remember reading the Stacey Reid a while ago and laughing at the moments that are supposed to be serious. The whole impotence angle was handled so weirdly and I know we overlook outrageous plots in HR a lot but I also found the writing style stilted.
Dalliances and Devotion was fantastic, as was its predecessor Appetites and Vices. I think the hero in Dalliances and Devotion must have been the first ever Eastern European immigrant Jewish hero I have come across in romance?
@LisaF, I also didn’t like the Reid book. It had potential, but didn’t live up to it, and I remember rolling my eyes a lot when reading it.
@Sydneysider – for me it was because the plot was so terribly unrealistic. Not a single realistic thought went through those character’s heads for the first half of the book.
@LisaF, I think I laughed out loud during some of the first part.
I enjoyed Tooth and Claw, though I admit I went for the obvious joke when writing about it for my friends:
“it isn’t a long jump from the Victorians to Dragons (I mean, on the one hand you have treasure-plundering, world-despoiling, voracious monsters, and on the other hand you have dragons).”
@Nicole
Does it help to know that Walton said she wrote the female characters in Tooth and Claw as if Victorian ideas of women were biological truths?