Flowers from the Storm
RECOMMENDED: Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale is $1.99! This is one of those romances that is frequently talked about and in a previous Whatcha Reading, several of the Smart Bitches talked about the level of feels this book gives them. Have you read it? And, if so, do you have fond memories of it?
The Duke of Jervaulx was brilliant – and dangerous. Considered dissolute, reckless, and extravagant, he was transparently referred to as the “D of J” in scandal sheets. But sometimes the most womanizing rakehell can be irresistible, and even his most causal attentions fascinated the sheltered Maddy Timms.
Then one fateful day she receives the shocking news – the duke is lost to the world. And Maddy knows it is her destiny to help him and her only chance to find the true man behind the wicked facade.
But she never dreamed her gentle, healing touch would alter his life and her own so completely – and bind them together in need, desire…and love.
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Immortal Longings by Chloe Gong is $1.99! I mentioned this one in a previous Hide Your Wallet because I’ve enjoyed Gong’s new adult fantasy retellings. This is her adult debut and is a retelling of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.
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Out of the Woods by Hannah Bonam-Young is $1.99! This is a standalone contemporary romance and came out about a year ago. I’ve seen Bonam-Young’s books recommended in the comments previously. Do you have a favorite?
A married couple joins a week-long wilderness expedition to help them reconnect in this heartfelt companion novel to the viral TikTok sensation Out on a Limb.
High school sweethearts Sarah and Caleb Linwood have always been a sure thing. For the past seventeen years, they have had each other’s backs through all of life’s ups and downs.
But Sarah has begun to wonder… who is she without her other half?
When she decides to take on a project of her own, a fundraising gala in memoriam of her late mother, Sarah wants nothing more than to prove to herself—and to everyone else—that she doesn’t need Caleb’s help to succeed. She’s still her mother’s daughter, after all, independent and capable.
That is, until the event fails and Caleb uninvitedly steps in to save the day.
The rift that follows unearths a decade of grievances and doubts. Are they truly the same people they were when they got married at nineteen? Are they supposed to be?
In a desperate attempt to fix what they fear is breaking, Sarah and Caleb make the spontaneous decision to get out of their comfort zone and join a grueling, week-long hiking trip intended to guide couples through rough patches.
What follows is a life-affirming comedy of errors as two nature-averse people fight their way out of the woods in order to find their way back to their roots.
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This book is on sale at:
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We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks!A Lady’s Guide to Skirting Scandal
RECOMMENDED: A Lady’s Guide to Skirting Scandal by Kelly Bowen is $1.99! This is a historical romance novella. Carrie gave this a B+:
I read A Lady’s Guide to Skirting Scandal at the dentist while waiting for two fillings. I’m horribly phobic about the dentist so when I say that this story was comforting, it’s high praise indeed. It’s too rushed to go down in literary history as the best story ever, but if you need a quick comfort read you can’t possibly do better than this tale of a social climber who falls madly and inconveniently in love with a ship’s doctor.
Lady Viola Hextall is bored—of the ocean, her chaperones, and the woeful lack of available dukes on the ocean voyage from London to New York. Scrambling for any diversion short of jumping overboard, Viola strikes up a conversation with the ship’s rough-hewn, blue-eyed surgeon—and discovers an immediate cure for what ails her…
To Nathaniel Shaw, Viola has the bearing of a lady and the spirit of an adventurer—an unlikely combination that he finds utterly irresistible. So he’s hoping to convince Viola to leave the stifling ballrooms of London high society behind because there is a big, wide world just waiting for them to explore—together.
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For some reason, the Whatcha Reading link for Flowers in the Storm is not loading for me (http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2015/03/whatcha-reading-march-2015-edition/). I just get a blank page.
FLOWERS IN THE STORM
I read this for the first time last October and enjoyed it a lot. The Duke’s plight is extremely sympathetic and moving. But I would say that when I read this with 2025 sensibilities, two things really struck me. First, the Duke runs pretty roughshod over Maddie’s sincere religious beliefs, which isn’t cool. And second, this books suffers from old skool dub-con. As terrible and desperate as the Duke’s situation is in the book, I think that the author would have made different plot choices today.
Old skool dubious (and non-existent) consent rightfully gets a bad rap today, but it was all over romance for a very long time. Dubious consent was the rage in part because our concepts of sexuality and desire were really quite different back then. Even having lived through that time myself, it’s sometimes hard to reconcile what I know now with what I was taught back then.
As someone from that era, the dubcon/ noncon was strictly a peculiar convention in romances and had nothing to do with any real life attitudes or expectations.
@Vivi12 – really? You think so? I was, granted, a teenager in the 90s and new to the subject. But my recollection is that consent was conceptualized as a binary. If you indicated in some manner that you wanted sex, then anything and everything was okay. There was no checking in. You could say “no” and (theoretically) be believed, but anything other than a very firm “no” early on was “yes.” And there was this underlying assumption that all teens were unbearably horny, so any girl who said she didn’t really want sex was clearly lying. In fact, a girl who played “hard to get” (ugh) was really just dying to be swept off her feet. I will grant you that this isn’t exactly the same as dubcon/ noncon, but it feels closer to that than our more modern ideas around consent. But maybe what I think of as modern consent was there all along and it just wasn’t something I was exposed to at the time.
One amazing thing about the book is how Kinsale first-person narrates the Duke’s recovery from his brain injury. That really makes it a tour de force.
I also really like the way Kinsale showed how the MFC’s Quaker faith was both an asset (making her an independent thinker w some agency), but also later a constraining and patriarchal force. By the book’s end
Darn i screwed up the spoiler tag. Sorry.
All fixed!
Thank you!!! Should we also spoiler his condition?