This guest review comes from Lisa! A longtime romance aficionado and frequent commenter to SBTB, Lisa is a queer Latine critic with a sharp tongue and lots of opinions. She frequently reviews at All About Romance and Women Write About Comics, where she’s on staff, and you can catch her at _@‌thatbouviergirl on Twitter. There, she shares good reviews, bracing industry opinions and thoughtful commentary when she’s not on her grind looking for the next good freelance job.

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Luring His Lordship has one enormous, fatal flaw – its hero and heroine behave in an extremely juvenile manner, with the heroine reading like a half-grown hoyden for most of the production. One would think they were teenagers, not fully-grown adults looking to settle into a relationship together, and that left me groaning at their reactions, choices and the setup at large. There was no way I could recommend it, especially when I spent half my time choking back giggles as I read it.

Millicent “Millie” Wainright would rather be dead than married. She is, in a word, grossed out by her cousin’s and sister’s happy unions and doesn’t want the same thing for herself. She expresses disgust for the open sexual affection her cousin displays for her husband, for instance, noticing his ruffled hair and groaning at the notion of them having made out before he came to visit her. Part of this is explained away through her saying that she misses the close relationships she had with them before they became so closely intertwined with their marriages, but part of it just reads like half-grown disgust.

On top of that, she keeps behaving in outspoken, scandalous ways in public that keep bringing trouble to her doorstep. Her only options for future stability are Simon Landon, Lord Asquith, her guardian who feels more like a brother to her, and the stuffy but handsome Ambrose Augustus Meriweather, Lord Neville, best friend of her new brother-in-law, who hates Millicent’s inappropriate ways from the start.

Neville insists he’s too busy trying to defeat his lifelong rival, Willard, an extremely powerful (in more ways than one) lord who had Neville’s brother John framed for attempted rape, kidnapping and thievery. But Neville finds Millie so enticing that he can’t keep his head on straight. When Willard makes a play for Millie, literally hypnotising her into being alone with him in the hope of compromising her and then asking her brother-in-law for her hand, Neville intervenes. Millie and Nevile both become involved in Neville’s quest to save his brother and take down Willard once and for all. But one kiss causes Neville to realize the only way to protect Millie from Willard is marriage. But can a girl like Millie ever be claimed, wed, and bed?

Luring His Lordship is pretty awful from top to bottom, with one single bright spot – the cinnamon roll hero that is Neville. The novel otherwise is a messy affair made of pudding-headed choices and that ends up a disservice to what could have been something new and different.

Millie, I think, is supposed to evoke anti-marriage heroines like Eloise Bridgerton. Her disgust with physical and romantic affection was initially interesting; we have not had many romances featuring aromantic or asexual characters, and I thought the book might be going in that direction. But the book instead develops along typical lines. She encounters The Magic of Neville, gets really jealous when she thinks one of his informants is his mistress, and suddenly she’s very interested in all of that kissing stuff. All of this is very boring and unoriginal. She reads as a Betty Hutton-esque heroine from a 1940s post-code comedy who figures out all of a sudden that kissing boys is neat, after all. All of that behavior results in her feeling like a teenager, which has an unfortunate effect on the romance with Neville.

And it’s a shame, because Neville really is a good, decent chap who’s trapped with a horrible heroine and a goofy plotline. I wanted to airlift him into a better book. He’s moral and good and caring. He’s smart, though not a super genius, and he’s bar none the most likeable man in the whole book except for Simon. He’s coping with a family life that’s less than perfect – his father was loving toward him and his brother, but highly critical of his mother. He comes to realize that he’s repeating this pattern with Millie, being just as censorious of her behavior as his father was with his mom. These are all interesting ideas that are wasted on Millie and wasted on the book’s thin plot.

The problem of Millie’s immaturity rears its head big time over and over again. Her banter with Neville often involves her teasing him or doing outlandish things to get his attention, which puts her right in Willard’s path and nearly gets her assaulted and stuck in a bad marriage. At the 44% mark she starts calling him “Auggie” and one can’t help but facepalm (it is twice as bad when she calls him this in the middle of their first sex scene). His stiffness melting away would be amusing if it didn’t feel like he were seducing a thirteen year old. The euphemisms are equally cringeworthy: for example our hero is having an orgasm and: a frisson jumped through him, leaving him quaking somewhere below.

I think “Auggie” would know where his penis and balls are in that moment.

Lord Willard belongs in a children’s fantasy book from the 1990s. He is a hypnotist who uses his lulling voice to seduce people into doing his bidding. That would have been an interesting quirk if he had anything resembling layers. But he is flat, a wicked evil person with a charming facade but no depth behind the mask. At least the banter between Willard and Neville is goofy in a good way, like it escaped from Robin Hood: Men in Tights.

And then there’s the prose. There are so many italics in this book, so many, all of this emphasis gets awfully distracting. And then the author also uses them to denote both surprise and printed prose, which leaves the reader dizzy as they try to figure out if we’re reading instructions, a character’s thoughts, or something else.

Reading Luring His Lordship was like being trapped in a car on a road trip with a couple of feuding teenagers who keep shooting each other goo-goo eyes while you’re just trying to navigate the interstate. At least on road trips one gets a break to walk around and see the scenery – here you’re trapped with Millie and Neville and their total inability to act like adults unless they’re trying to make out with each other. This book gave me a case of the bad giggles more often than not, stuck envisioning Millie running around a hedge maze playing hide-and-seek with “Auggie.” He deserved to have an actual romance with an adult, and I deserved to spend an afternoon with characters I care about.