This RITA® Reader Challenge 2016 review was written by Kate. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Paranormal Romance category.

Here is Kate's review:

This was my first book by Angela Quarles, and I picked it purely because of the name. Must Love Chainmail is the second book in the series, but it can easily be read alone. The best way I can describe this book is to compare it to my experience with Lynn Kurland’s time travel romances: light-hearted, fun but rather forgettable, and with absolutely no explanation of how the time travel works.

Katy is a busy professional with a bad case of smartphone addiction, who is visiting Wales for her bridesmaid party. Everything in her life is part of a plan, including her boring fiancé, whom she is marrying because she wants to be married before she turns thirty and because he lets her tell him what to do. While visiting an old Welsh church, she sees a statue of a handsome warrior-saint from the twelfth century, and senses an Instant Connection. A wish soon sends her back in time, and she lands on the eve of a historic siege. Sir Robert, the handsome knight she saw in the church, gets an Insta-Boner upon seeing her and takes her under his protection by pretending she’s his squire. The two of them have to navigate a countryside full of rebels and rogue knights while Katy searches for her way home and Robert tries to restore his family honor.

It took me about a hundred pages to get into this book even a little bit. I think the book was aiming to create distinctive narrative voices for Katy and Robert, but the number of colloquial phrases used was really distracting. Katy’s portions of the story are splattered with words like “kinda,” “gonna,” “crazy-of-crazy,” and “Holllyyyyyyy crap.” (Not kidding.) Robert’s narration, on the other hand, is full of pseudo-medieval oaths like, “By all the saints’ wrinkly knuckles!” It was impossible to take the story seriously when it kept switching from “medieval-looking doodad” and “chainmail hoodie-thing” to “God’s balls, he needed not the distraction of a comely wench,” and then on to: “Holy-holy-holy crap. She’d been shot with a frickety-frick arrow.”

That said, the writing calmed down after a while and the story started to take off. The author has obviously done a lot of research on medieval siege warfare and twelfth century Wales, and the book showed it. I liked that Katy keeps her head after finding herself 900 years in the past and learns the skills she needs to survive. Although it takes Katy and Robert about half the book to figure out each other’s languages (Katy is fluent in French and Robert is a Norman), once they start talking it becomes clear that each of them balances the other out. Robert is someone Katy can’t control, but he’s a worthy partner, unlike her spineless fiancé in the present.

Unfortunately, the ending wasn’t as satisfying as I hoped it would be. The resolution to the romance was good, but the plot left a lot of things hanging. At the beginning of the book, Katy learned that the castle was destroyed and Robert was sentenced for treason, and the desire to find out how they survive was what kept me reading—but I felt like the book never really convinced me that the danger was serious, and it missed the opportunity to be memorable.

I started out thinking this book would be a C-. During the middle third, I was ready to bump it up a notch, but given the lack of a satisfying resolution to the Welsh portion of the story—and the over-exaggerated writing style—it ended up staying a C- for me.