Only a Kiss

by Mary Balogh

September 1, 2015 · Signet

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If you’re going to read Only a Kiss by Mary Balogh, plan on calling in sick to work. Trust me–just do it. Either you’ll need the day off to power through the book because putting it down is not an option, or you’ll need time to recover from the crushing weight of your own feels and the emotional hangover you’ll have.  I recommend calling your boss and starting off with “I got dinner from a food truck that looked a little sketchy, and by ten p.m. the cramping and bloating had started. By midnight–well, I guess streaming is the right word, but–” At this point no more detail is required.

I loved this book. I read it in one sitting and it made me smile a lot and cry a little.  It’s the sixth book in her Survivor’s Club series (all of which have emotionally devastated me in no small way) and the book I’ve personally been dying to read because the survivor is in question is a woman. The Survivors Club is made up of men (and one woman) who have served in the Napoleonic War and been scarred either physically, mentally, or both, and who have come together to form a support network.

Imogen, Lady Barclay, is the only female member of the group. She traveled to Portugal with her husband during the war. Imogen’s husband was a spy, and when they were both captured she was forced to witness his torture. Imogen herself was never harmed while in captivity (although rape is discussed in this book, it’s because everyone assumes that’s what happened to her), she did endure the unspeakable with regard to her husband.

If you absolutely must know what the big, dark reveal is before picking up this book:

Since coming back to England, Imogen has walled herself away in the dowager’s house at her late husband’s estate. She has friends and makes social calls, but she is very much detached emotionally from the world around her.

Enter Percival Hayes, the new Earl of Hardford. Percy has lived a charmed life–he’s handsome, he’s popular, he’s rich and he has oodles and oodles of family members who love him. He even gets his title due to the death of a distant relative so there’s no heartbreak there. He should be happy, but instead he’s getting shitfaced on his thirtieth birthday and reflecting on the fact that he feels like he’s missing something:

He was the most fortunate man on earth. There was not a cloud in his sky and never really had been. It was one vast, cloudless, blue expanse of bliss up there. A brooding, wounded, darkly compelling type he was not. He had never done anything to brood over or anything truly heroic, which was a bit sad, really. The heroic part, that was.

Yup, here’s Balogh subverting typical romance gender roles. The heroine comes back from war scarred and the hero needs to show her the restorative power of love.

So Percy decides he’s going to check out his estate in Cornwall and shows up and finds out he’s got Imogen living in the dowager house and two older, distant female cousins occupying the main house along with an assortment of stray dogs and cats that they’ve taken in.

He’s already crabby because he’s in Cornwall in February because it seemed like a good idea when he was drunk, and now he’s got relatives living with him and strays animals. In the early parts of the book he tries the Grumpy Earl routine without much success. “Rawwrr rawwrr this is not an animal refuge I will not have dog hair all over my study rawwrr–but this little fellow is looking quite weak so I shall just carry him about.”

Right in the ovaries, you guys.

He’s also not happy that Imogen is not impressed with his handsome, young earl shit. He’s used to being the toast of the ton and she’s irritated that he’s shown up and is interfering with her solitude.

One thing I love is that Balogh does slow burn. Percy doesn’t look at Imogen for the first time and think “OMG I must put my penis in you.” It’s all squinty-eyed dislike initially. Also there is so much verbal sparring, you guys. When they finally do start getting pants feelings and he kisses her, she slaps the shit out of him and then laments that she was too ladylike to use a closed fist.

Initially they quarrel about the stray animals, about the dowager house (it needs a new roof and she insists on paying for it, which pisses him off), about him suddenly showing up all full of himself and disrupting everyone’s lives. The great thing about the quarreling is that it leads to talking and so much of this book occurs in conversation. All of the character growth and the moments that push the plot along happen in dialogue which I truly love. Action is good, but words are necessary for character development.

As Percy starts to fall in love with Imogen, against his better wishes, he longs to make her happy in a real and meaningful way:

He wondered if she was smiling, if only inwardly. It would be a worthy, heroic thing to do, he thought, to make this woman laugh again as she had laughed at the Kramer house,  and to make her do it again and again. Perhaps he ought to make that his life’s mission.

He does make her laugh, and Imogen starts to love him in this precious, fragile way. She’s so traumatized that she can only think of their budding relationship in brief periods of time–a few days, a few weeks. She doesn’t believe that she deserves any lasting happiness. Percy also doesn’t treat her like she’s made of glass. At one point he flat out asks her if she was raped then feels immediately ashamed. He has so much verbal diarrhea that he should be calling in to work. But the fact that he comes right out and just says what he’s thinking works because it lays the cards on the table and keeps Imogen from having a safe place to retreat to when she just doesn’t want to deal. It also lets her know exactly what he’s thinking which I think was paramount to her feeling safe.

Mary Balogh has this magical way of writing complex, emotionally fraught characters who aren’t magically healed by the power of love. That sounds like an unlikely compliment in the romance novel review, but I appreciate so much that she takes deeply damaged characters and says, “This awful, awful thing may have happened to you and you will never totally get better from it and it’s okay. It’s okay to just be as okay as you can be. And it’s okay that True Love won’t heal all your wounds, but it will make your life better.”

There was also a subplot about smuggling that at first I wasn’t sure about–it seemed extraneous–but made a ton of sense later on.

I was hooked from the slow build right through to the “everything is as okay as it can be” happy ending. It wasn’t a bittersweet ending; it just acknowledged that some things are super shitty and we never totally get over them, but we can still be happy. I didn’t want this book to end and when it did end, I was a little weepy because I was right there with Imogen and Percy emotionally.

I’m sucking up my feels hangover and going to work tomorrow because we reviewers are a tough group who take this shit on the chin. My eyes will definitely be puffy from lack of sleep, though I’m totally blaming that on allergies.