NB: Welcome to Flashback Friday! If you didn’t catch it, Carrie had a disappointing experience reading Mary Balogh’s latest release, Someone to Love, due to racist stereotypes. But, if you’re hoping to read Balogh without DNF-ing, Elyse wrote a glowing review of Only a Promise. This review was originally published June 10, 2015. 

Only a Promise was the first book I read by Mary Balogh, and I rectified that situation pretty damn quick. It was so so amazingly good that I went to the used bookstore and basically just dumped the entire shelf with her name on it into my cart.  The guy at the counter asked me how I was doing , and I think I just made Good Book Noise® back at him.

Only a Promise is basically made of Elyse’s catnip tropes, plus frosting. Marriage of convenience. Tragic, wounded hero. The heroine is a companion to an older lady, and I love companion books or books where the heroine is an outsider. There is some serious slow burn going on here–and it all comes together beautifully and culminates in a wonderfully satisfying ending. This book is 6th in the Survivor Club series, but can easily be read as a stand alone.

This book is about two people struggling to hold their shit together and failing. Chloe Muirhead is a woman of good breeding and should be in London for the Season, finding a husband. Instead she’s living as a “guest” and acting as  a companion to an elderly duchess. Chloe will do anything to avoid London. During her first Season her sister eloped with a playwright, causing her family to be the subject of scandal.

Then during her second Season, rumors of Chloe’s legitimacy surfaced (she looks identical to another woman who is the daughter of a man her mother spent a lot of time with. And Chloe was two months premature. Ahem). Her entire experience in dealing with the ton is as the subject of mockery and shame, and so Chloe has basically run away.

When the duchess’s grandson comes home, Chloe sees the opportunity for bettering her circumstances. Ralph Stockwood was wounded in the Napoleonic Wars, but most of the damage was done to his psyche. Three of Ralph’s friends followed him to war, and all of them died. Ralph blames himself for their deaths and suffers from PTSD. When the novel opens he has only just recovered to the point that he’s not suicidal anymore. Ralph has zero interest in entering society again. For one thing, he might run into the families of his dead friends, and that’s untenable. He also just wants to hide and lick his wounds. But Ralph is the grandson of an aging duke, and his father is dead, so he does have to get married and continue the family line.

When Chloe suggests an alliance, it seems perfect. She gets to have children, like she always wanted, and run a household and be married. Ralph gets a wife and kids without having to go to London, and his bride is completely down with hiding out in the country and never going anywhere near the ton again. Ralph makes it very clear to Chloe that while he’ll always respect her, he can never offer her any type of emotional attachment.

One of the things that fascinated me about this book is that Chloe and Ralph don’t immediately have amazing sex when they’re married. In fact it’s a “lift the nightgown and insert p in v” sort of thing, and both are fine with that. Balogh doesn’t use sex to bridge the emotional gap between these two people. She makes them do all the emotional heavy lifting without the help of their groins.

When Ralph’s grandfather dies, everything changes for them. Ralph is now a duke, sooner than expected, and has to take his place in society — which means Chloe does, too. By forcing them into the crucible, so to speak, Balogh forces them to confront their anxieties head on. They also slowly come to understand the trauma the other person suffered, and that’s what made this book truly exceptional. It would be easy for Ralph to overlook Chloe’s social anxiety or the pain she suffered at being ridiculed. He could easily minimize her trauma compared to his–violence and loss suffered during war. At no point though does Ralph say, “Oh, people were mean to you, get over it.” And that’s the beauty of  the romance genre–everyone is deserving of love, no matter what, and everyone is entitled to their pain, and their personal experience with it.

Chloe is also stronger than Ralph. She had self-exiled herself, but when they are put back into Society and forced to deal with what ails them, Chloe is the one better able to handle the challenge of facing her past. She could easily hide behind her title and be like “I’m a Duchess and you were mean to me so I’mma ruin you,” but she doesn’t. Chloe isn’t out for revenge against the people who hurt her; she just wants acceptance.

Balogh manages to write two characters who really need each other, and who wouldn’t succeed in healing without the other. For all of that, it’s really a quiet romance where the love blooms naturally rather than in one lightning strike moment. There are no punishing kisses or sex as a placeholder for feelings. As their emotional intimacy deepens, so does their sexual intimacy, but sex is a reflection of where they are as a couple, not a method of pushing them forward in their relationship. In fact, while they both enjoy sex, there isn’t a “OMG I’ve never had a hoo-hoo as magic as yours moment,” and I liked that. Often times in romance sex is used as shorthand for this couple being destined for each other, and I didn’t get that in Only a Promise. The reason that Ralph and Chloe work so well together is that they accept each other’s trauma, recognize when the other is having a crisis, and help each other through. It’s amazingly affirming:

“It’s not unmanly to weep,” she told him.

“The devil it is not.” He nudged her away from his chest and gazed into her face. His own was a bit blotchy. His scar was more pronounced than usual.

“I hope you do not mind too much that I stayed,” she said. “Sometimes we need company while we weep, especially when we are mourning a loss.”

“They have been dead for more than seven years,” he said.

“No,” she said. “For you they have just died.”

 

There’s no easy resolution for Chloe and Ralph, either. For each step they take forward, they sometimes take two back. Occasionally, lost in their own emotional shitstorm, they say unkind things. By not making the solution to either of their problems simple, I felt like Balogh did credit to the characters and the depth of their anxieties.

I really can’t say enough good things about this book. It’s the best kind of romance, the kind with real people for characters, the kind that affirms we all deserve a partner to help us through the sticky patches in our life. And it’s all so subtly done that the story unfolds naturally and beautifully, and only when I stepped back at the end did I truly appreciate how complex and perfectly wrought Balogh’s narrative was.

That’s a lot of words to say that this book was awesomesauce. Pure awesomesauce.