The Aristocrat
I suspect mileage will vary significantly for readers of The Aristocrat. It’s going to depend a lot on how much emotion you want in your reading (this one has quite a bit). I kept raising my eyebrow at the heroine’s implausible perfection and that pulled me out of the story.
Felicity lives in Narragansett with her foster mother. She’s enjoying a summer off before going to law school when two handsome Brits move into the house across the bay from her and she’s caught spying on one of them with binoculars. The Brits are Leo and his cousin Sigmund. Leo is enjoying a gap year of traveling around the US before he settles down to take over his father’s vast family business and meet his mother’s social expectations. This includes a marriage to “the right kind of woman” before he’s thirty. To add pressure to the situation, Leo’s father is dying of cancer and Leo wants his dad to see that Leo’s affairs are truly settled before he dies.
Felicity and Leo have a summer fling that turns into true love, which is a problem because Felicity is definitely not “the right kind of woman” from Leo’s mother’s perspective. She’s the orphaned daughter of a drug addict who was raised in the system. She’s also putting herself through law school in order to become a lawyer helping kids who are growing up in the foster system. She helps build an addition on the home of a foster family in town during her free time. She doesn’t have any vices, and honestly, she’s a little too perfect.
The first section of the book is Leo and Felicity falling in love. The next section jumps ahead five years after Felicity has graduated. She’s cleaning out her late foster mother’s things and finds a letter from Leo professing his love and telling her that he won’t get married to his mom’s choice if she contacts him before the wedding. So instead of calling she flies to England (like you do) where she finds out the letter was older than she thought, and Leo is already married.
There is a lot of emotional conflict in this book. There’s the pressure Leo feels to please his dying father, the pressure Felicity feels to be the perfect example of a kid growing up in foster care (this really isn’t explored very much), and of course their forbidden love. In order for them to be together forever, Leo will have to break a third person’s heart.
I think this is a book for a reader who wants to have a lot of feels. I was frustrated with Felicity’s perfection sometimes, and the fact that she got a millionaire foster mom and had zero trauma from growing up with a drug addict mom or in the system. I felt like the heroine’s tragic backstory was used to make her more like a Cinderella character, and the plausible trauma that would come from being a child growing up in the system after her mom OD’s on drugs was never actually explored. It was like “insert tragic backstory here.” I think a reader more willing to overlook that will enjoy the book more. I did like The Aristocrat, but I think it’s going to work best for someone who wants more emotion in their reading than I set out looking for.
– Elyse
From New York Times bestselling author Penelope Ward, comes a new standalone novel.
The one that got away. Every girl has one, right?
Mine was a charming, British aristocrat who turned my world upside down one summer.
From the moment I first spotted Leo in the distance through my binoculars, I’d been captivated. I certainly never expected to find a man showering outside of the property across the bay in his birthday suit.
Then I noticed his housemate staring back at me with binoculars of his own—watching me watching Leo.
That made for an interesting conversation starter when I inevitably ran into them.
Turned out, the handsome Brits were only renting that house for the summer in my seaside town.
Leo and I formed an instant connection, even though we were technically opposites by all appearances. I taught him how to dig for clams, and he taught me that not all wealthy and powerful guys are pretentious.
Despite knowing he was totally wrong for me, I couldn’t seem to stay away.
It was a wild and crazy few months. And before I knew it, we’d fallen in love.
We both had one wish: more time together.
But Leo had obligations back home. He lived a life I’d never fit into. And I was going to law school. So, we decided to end it and never look back.
A part of me always felt like I’d let my soulmate walk away.
I believed our story was over.
Until five years later when he sent me a letter that shook me to my core.
I’d thought my world was turned upside down that first summer?
Well, I knew nothing yet.
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This sounds exactly like a Keeland and/or Ward book. They always have an interesting setup, usually with intrinsically high emotional stakes and often with elements most authors shy away from; these are things I crave, so I’ve tried to read a lot of their books. But I think I’ve only finished maybe two or three? And it always comes down to the characters. The women are always implausibly perfect and also very often virgins, near-virgins, or otherwise Pure; the men usually have advanced Madonna/whore complexes and get off on the women’s relative purity to a degree that I find offensive, with lots of slut-shaming of every woman they’ve met besides the heroine.
I think there are some books where this is more muted; my first exposure to them was STEPBROTHER DEAREST, which did have elements of this in retrospect but executed in a context where the psychology of the characters made it less blatant. It sounds like maybe it wasn’t so bad in THE ARISTOCRAT, too? I bought a lot of their other titles after reading SD, but then I went to read them and DNFd over and over again after figuring out the pattern.
Without having read the book, Felicity’s flaws seem to be cluelessness and a weird arrogance. I mean, who would fly across the pond without calling to reconnect with an old flame who is married? Sounds stalkerish.
I loved, loved, loved Ward & Keeland’s STEPBROTHER DEAREST—which was, perhaps not coincidentally, the first book I read by either of them (or by them writing as a duo). I continued to seek out their books. NEIGHBOR DEAREST, a kinda-sorta sequel to STEPBROTHER DEAREST, was good, as were a few of the others I read. But, as time went on, I started noticing things that rubbed me the wrong way, especially controlling heroes who feel it’s their right to criticize a woman’s decisions, an element of “not like other girls”, quite a few breakups between one of the MCs and the person they’re dating because “they’re not the one”, and plots that devolved into melodrama (I love angst, but there’s a fine line between angst and melodrama—and Ward/Keeland seemed to step over that line frequently). I admit their premises tend to be intriguing, but the follow-through isn’t always there.
I have read her Stepbrother & Neighbor Dearest books and liked them a lot. But I have a bad habit of buying her subsequent books and not reading them. I think I get the FOMO when I get the emails that the price is going up. Anyway, it’s the second book in this book that has me resisting the heck out it. The blurb for The Surrogate sounds just downright Krazy Pants to where just reading it makes me dizzy.
Echoing Star’s comments, most Kreeland/Ward books are just Like This.
@DDD: I loved STEPBROTHER DEAREST too — I think it’s the only stepbrother romance that has ever really worked for me so far — and now I’m afraid to reread it in case my awareness of their pattern ruins it.