A
Genre: Historical: European, Romance
This is my first Bad Decisions Book Club of 2025. Sleep became a distant memory with this book. For context, I have a newborn. I had the opportunity to sleep, but chose not to because this book was much more important. It is also the start of a series and it’s a series I’m now very excited about!
Euphemia Flite was raised in a school for girls on the outskirts of Victorian London. Her origins are unknown to her and the headmistress of the school is quite a cold woman. She is, however, a cold woman with a mission: upend the patriarchy (WOOHOO!).
After a period working as a companion to a lady in Paris, Effie is summoned back to the school for an important mission. If she can achieve her goal, the headmistress will settle a good sum on Effie and she’ll be independent and free. This is a strong incentive for a woman who is quite desperate for a place to call her own.
The mission puts her at cross purposes with Gabriel Royce. He started in the slums of St Giles and rose up through some kindness and a lot of hard work to become a community pillar, albeit one that runs a betting shop. He spends money on himself but his mission is to improve the lives of those in St Giles before it is completely cleared away by the British government.
The central figure in this battle is a viscount who is respectable, wealthy and a total asshole. Gabriel needs him to maintain power so that Gabriel’s betting shop is protected from the authorities. Effie needs to bring the viscount down in order to set herself free. For Effie to succeed, Gabriel must fail and vice versa.
A pet hate is when the barrier to a couple being together can be solved with something as simple as a conversation. This conflict is not easily solved. In fact, there was a TINY hint about a possible solution but it was well hidden and I only realised it was a hint once the resolution happened at the end of the book. Gabriel and Effie’s attraction (and love) for each other grows inexorably just as a solution for this this barrier becomes more and more pressing. The tension was phenomenal! I was gripped!
As with most romances that end up in the A category for me, these two had to learn to be vulnerable with each other. Neither is particularly keen on ‘letting people in’ but from the start there is a spark between these two that demands more of them than superficial interactions. Slowly they reveal their soft undersides to each other. It’s hesitant and tentative and delightful to read. It’s not all tenderness though. There are sparks and disagreements and sizzling chemistry. Neither backs down no matter how formidable their ‘opponent’ is. (While there is chemistry, kissing is as explicit as it gets.)
As an aside, the nickname for Effie’s school is the Crinoline Academy. These wire-hoop underskirts are multipurpose, my favourite of which is that they enforce women’s personal space and, in fact, encourage them to take up the space around them. The book is littered with little feminist tidbits like that, my favourite of which is in the ending, which I won’t spoil.
For a romance, there are a lot of secondary characters. Some of them are pretty flat and serve only as insights into our main characters’ personalities. But some of them are more nuanced and the next couple in the series are a serious newspaperman and a teacher with a limp who is determined to be a teacher at the Crinoline Academy forever. They both show plenty of personality in this book (including, but not limited to, courage, determination and a love for justice) so I will definitely be reading book two in this series.
If you too would like to join the Bad Decisions Book Club and immerse yourself in a tale of vulnerability and courage, with excellent dialogue, emotional depth, and very clever characters, then this is the book for you.
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Ok! I need to read this. I thought I’d like it when I came across it months ago and this review made me go yessss!
Can’t wait for this one! I’ve had it preordered forever.
Interesting! This has been getting some mixed reviews, people seem to either love it or hate it.
Afraid that as soon as I read “betting shop” I thought “noooooooooooooo”. Probably being a Ms Picky, but betting shops weren’t a thing until the 1960s. There was of course legal gambling in clubs (think Boodles or Whites) but it was only available to the upper classes and the rich and powerful. The working classes had to make do with street betting, which was illegal. No-one would have wanted to draw attention to themselves by running an actual betting shop, unless they were pretending it was something else. I should probably give the author the benefit of the doubt but it is such an anachronism that I just can’t give it a chance! 🙂
RachelK, I’m not so sure this is an anachronism though: the Betting Houses Act was passed in 1853 to suppress betting houses, so surely something must have existed if it needed to be made illegal? Thank you so much for this morning’s very entertaining procrastination exercise 🙂
It’s an interesting premise, so I’m adding this to the TBR!
That cover <3
Jenny: This novel takes place about a decade later than the year that act was passed, though, and I’m not completely sure if any betting houses would still be around after they had been illegal for a decade.
That being said, I’m fine with that kind of anachronism (if it is one). I can absolutely accept that a character manages to keep an illegal betting house going with the help of a Viscount he knows, even though that’s usually not possible. It fits into the category of plot elements that I once heard described as “unlikely, but not impossible.”
Mikey and Jenny, I agree with both of you! This period is quite murkey in terms of the law. The Metropolitan Police was in its infancy. But my feeling is that these laws were directed at pub landlords and particularly the working class – servants, journeymen and apprentices are specifically mentioned in the Acts. There is the rise of the affluent middle-classes too which added additional pressures on the law makers. But the effect of all of the 18th and 20th century was to force games of chance and gambling underground or onto the streets. They even had to introduce and Vexatious Indictments Act to stop people from accusing people they didn’t like of illegal gambling!
So you are absolutely right, it makes for an interesting plot scenario 🙂
I was already sold, Matthews is an autobuy for me, but glad to see a great review of the book.