Fans of the Pennyroyal Green series have been waiting a long time for The Legend of Lyon Redmond. For those unfamiliar with the series, the Redmonds and the Everseas are the two most powerful, prestigious families of Pennyroyal Green. They are also at odds with each other, like Regency Capulet and Montagues. So OF COURSE an Eversea falls in loves with a Redmond. It’s destiny.
This is book eleven in the series and up until now, all we’ve known is that Olivia Eversea and Lyon Redmond fell in love, fell apart, and then he left under mysterious circumstances. It was long believed that Olivia would wait forever, pining for Lyon, but when the book opens Olivia (nearly on the shelf) has accepted a marriage proposal from John Lansdowne, a perfectly acceptable gentleman that she likes but does not love.
In the previous books, Olivia and Lyon’s love affair was mostly given to the reader through gossip and innuendo. In this book, we actually get the real story from Olivia and Lyon’s eyes. They fall head over heels for each other, an infatuation bordering on madness. Being young, they both believe that they somehow are managing to hide their relationship from their disapproving parents (they aren’t).
How disapproving you ask? I give you the best explanation of family antipathy ever:
Olivia had never been quite this close to Lyon Redmond, and it was so exotic she felt as though she’d been given an actual lion to dance with. Everseas and Redmonds did not dance with each other. If humanly possible, they did not speak to each other, or about each other, or do business with each other. For as long as she could remember, it was understood that the word “Redmond” would be treated in their house rather as thought someone had silently broken wind in company. Its occupancy was distasteful but occasionally unavoidable, and while it could be politely ignored, it was certainly not encouraged or enjoyed.
That’s right. Lyon Redmond is the equivalent of a Silent But Deadly Fart.
So Olivia and Lyon have their youthful dalliance which ends HORRIBLY and Lyon, in a fit of butthurt and rage, runs off and becomes a pirate. That’s romance novels for you. Love of your life reject you? BECOME A MOTHER FUCKING PIRATE.
When the book opens, Lyon finds out that Olivia is finally getting married and of course he has to haul piratical ass to stop her because she’s his one true lurve.
Basically, that’s why this book is some much awesomesauce. Doomed youthful love affair + piracy + wedding crashing = win.
Also, there’s waterfall sex.
I think the cover of this book sums up everything within it nicely. These are two people who seem overjoyed to see each other again. He’s so happy, he’s hugging her like he might crack a rib or two. There’s not weird eyes-half-closed-head-back sexy times going on. I mean, the cover could clearly use a horse in the sky or the hero farting some flowers, but it’s pretty damn great. You get the impression that these are two people who really, really want to be together from that cover art, and that’s exactly what you get in the book.
It’s fine to read The Legend of Lyon Redmond as a stand alone, but it won’t have as much impact without reading the earlier books in the series. Of course, that means I’m giving you a great excuse to buy a lot of books. For Pennyroyal fans who have been holding out for this one? You won’t be disappointed.
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I’ve never read the series but now I WANT TO READ THIS BOOK. It is such a joyous cover and I love the young lovers torn apart and reunited trope…plus also pirates!
One of the great disadvantages of living in a landlocked area is how much more work it is for me to go pirate when the butthurt gets me down. Maybe I should consider relocating to Sussex….
Considering many pirate crews were all male and alone together on the sea for months at a time, I would think becoming a pirate would lead *to* buttsex instead away from it. Sorry if I just ruined thousands of romance novels there…
I loved this whole series and this final book was excellent, but I admit to being a little disappointed in the epilogue. Anyone else?
Love the series too! I really could have done without the epilogue. Felt superfluous all the way. Overall, I found the book to be a satisfying end to the series…my only caveat is that the heroine was a lot less interesting than the hero.
I have never read her books! So I went online at the library, and there’s multiple holds on every book. So excited to read the series!
So, I actually kind of hated this book. I will admit to having skipped many of the middle books in this series, but I loved the first few (I read Colin, Miles, Violet, and Genevieve) and I had really high hopes for Lyon and Olivia.
But I kind of came away from this book thinking that they were both assholes. I thought they were immature, terrible at communicating, and I thought they treated other people (uh, Landsdowne?) really poorly, and that they often treated each other really poorly. Part of this was probably just a bad fit for me personally as a reader- it hit a lot of my “HATE THIS” buttons. I hate it when the hero’s devotion is conveyed to the reader in ways that are opaque to the heroine (like, ok, I know that he’s been thinking of her and motivated by her all this time, but there’s no way for HER to know that, so why should the heroine be impressed when as far as she can tell from their actual interaction he’s just kind of being a dick?) And I also really hate it when a hero and heroine are separated for a long period of time and he gets to have so many more adventures during their separation than she does. I think we were certainly supposed to come away with the impression that Lyon spent their separation being a badass, and while it’s not like Olivia was pulling a Miss Havisham up in the attic all those years, I definitely wouldn’t say she was kicking ass and taking names. Or whatever the saying is. I also felt like the slavery storyline wasn’t very thoughtfully integrated into this series, and that felt like too big of an issue to handle in such a superficial way.
1) “Epilogue = superfluous” is exactly right. My guess (without reading any author or Avon websites) is that JAL is about to pull a Kleypas and move into contempo-romance. I don’t feel happy about that. But then again, Victoria Dahl started out publishing historical romances and has become my release-date auto-buy for her sexy-funny-poignant-adult CRs. So who knows…
2) And I’ve been waiting/wondering for 3+ months what the SB review would be. I’m in almost-identical agreement, but would have to tack on a big red minus to the “A” BECAUSE (SPOILER ALERT):
Yeah, I know – it’s the Regency, Lyon is awesomely gorgeous, he’s rich and a pirate and he has NEEDS. But the reference to his having sex with other women while on the road (high seas) broke my heart. TLOLR is the consummate(d) fairy tale and one thing the Prince NEVER does in them is bring the possibility of syph, etc. to the pure maiden. There have been other historicals wherein the Hero has been abstinent for love of his Heroine. It’s never easy, there are always temptations, but one well-placed (and detailed 😉 scene of Lyon self-pleasuring would have kept the angst-and-poignancy-level at a staggering 100%.
JAL did a magnificent job in the face of the possibility of ruining the magic that she had built up over 8 or so years. I fugly-cried. A lot. But that one “problem” kept TLOLR from perfection and still bothers me 3 months later.
I really loved this series and this book. The build up to Lyon and Olivia was pretty intense, and I found the book to be mostly satisfying. I felt so badly for Olivia through the whole series, and think she tends to get a lot of flack while Lyon gets a pass for being a giant man-baby. I definitely liked the latter half of the book a lot better than the flashbacks. Great review!
Also not a fan of the epilogue!
Never read this series but I love the sound of this book. The size of this series scares me a little but as I have been working my way through the JD Robb series ( a much larger series) I can add this to my list. Used book stores here I come!
I LOVED THIS BOOK!!!
Although I enjoyed a couple of the other books in the series, several were “meh” for me, and several I didn’t read at all. You DON’T need to read any of the series to enjoy this book…it stands on its own.
It may be the best reunion romance I’ve ever read. It had a joyous feeling that was perfectly captured by the cover. I think what I found so powerful about it was the way you could sense the chemistry and attraction between the leads, not merely the author telling us that these two are fated for each other.
Their break-up made sense to me, and their reunion was way more than resorting to love-hate bickering. It was simply a lovely, beautiful novel.
Count me among those who HATED the epilogue! Talk about a pointless waste of page space that was a real let-down. The main novel finished on a high-note….then we jump forward 150 years to spend time with their descendants we don’t know and don’t care about? It spoiled the ending for me.
Still….I give it a hearty two-thumbs up and a permanent place on my keeper shelf.
I really enjoyed this book, even though I had problems with the epilogue. I thought this was one of the best historical series out there in how it worked as a puzzle. We learn a little bit about Lyon & Olivia in each book, but the last book is the final piece of the puzzle.
A few questions in the series were never answered, however. Who were Phoebe Vale’s parents and who paid her tuition? In the sixth book, How the Marquess Was Won, much was made of Phoebe’s mysterious abandonment at the school and how her tuition was paid until she reached her majority. I thought this would link back to the matriarch and patriarch of the two families. Since the mystery was never solved, I thought it would come back up in future books. It never did.
Also, the secret benefactor of Miss Endicott’s Academy for Young Women was never identified. I initially thought it was Olivia, but this book makes it clear that she didn’t have the resources to donate that much money. I thought the secret benefactor would again tie back into someone in the Eversea-Redmond families, but I guess this plot thread had nothing to do with them.
I LOVED the epilogue. This is one of my favorite series and I was sad at the end. And JAL is going to contemp for her next series, but it’s not tied to Pennyroyal Green. More’s the pity! But, I’d read anything she wrote.
There were bits I normally hate, especially poor Landsdowne. Love triangles are my number one hate, but I still thought this worked if only because it was so in keeping with Olivia’s character. Who was never super likable. I loved her, but I never liked her. 🙂
I hated this book so very very much and had been looking forward to it. The heroine is incredibly passive. She sits and waits like Penelope. Don’t tell me “history”, she’s way more passive than she needed to be. She sits around and reads political pamphlets that other women write – blah. Then she does something cruel at the end of the book that I found incomprehensible.
The hero is a big fat jerk. He has no reason to be mad at her – a young woman sensibly refuses to run away with a penniless young man at the drop of a hat in the 19th century. Then when he has made his fortune he does not seek her out for years and years until his hand is forced. If she hadn’t gotten engaged to someone else, would Lyon ever have come? No reason to believe he would have.
Also, nearly 200pages are filled with young love back story which is utterly dull unless you really like historical YA, first kisses and stuff. So it takes forever to get to the current part of the story, where plot holes abound.
I adore SBTB but this book was just so depressingly bad.
I mostly enjoyed this series and was sort of looking forward to this book – Lyon and Olivia’s romance/his abandonment had been lurking in the background for so long. I did not really like it. Lyon is a stalking jerk and Olivia is sad and passive, and horrible to her fiance. The epilogue was bizarre. So sad. I think Julie Anne Long’s next book is a contemporary so she must be ready for something new too.
I loved Lyon in “I Kissed An Earl.” In this book, not so much. Why oh why did Olivia even go with the wedding????? And the epilogue just killed me. Agh. Giant holes in the plot. Way too long. And contemporaries…except old Jennifer Crusie’s…aren’t my thing.
Also, regarding a previous comment, wasn’t Jonathan Redmond a big donor of the school’s.
I have the series stacked up & I am obsessed with reading in order. I have heard such good things about this series and particularly this book. So glad you loved it! Great review! I will definitely read the series in the next month or so.
I was looking forward to the book, and deep in my secret heart wished that Olivia would realize that Lyon was a shmoo and marry Landsdowne.
Loved the series. Hated this book. Hated the flashbacks. I wanted the story to be about them now. I think they were stupid obnoxious teenagers and hey, that’s true for a lot of us, so no harm, no foul except the flashbacks kept going on and on. Was I supposed to relate to the pretty, perfect, and privileged teenagers who could have had everything if they just hadn’t been so stupid about things? If it had been about, yeah, we were stupid, but we were young, and here is where we go from now, that’s the book I wanted and might have liked.
I was disappointed. I love the series and had been looking forward to Lyon/Olivia’s story for so long, but I ended up skim-reading most of it and finished with a giant feeling of Meh. I feel like the various anecdotes and mentions of them in previous books were more fleshed out and interesting than the actuality of them and I didn’t find either of them very enjoyable or even likeable most of the time.
I’m with you, @Carney @Lozza and others, I loved the series and hated this book. But then I’ve never thought Romeo and Juliet was a love story but rather a tale of two teenagers with poor decision making skills . The Grand Romance is all based on love at first sight which is really Lust at first sight and all predicated on endless descriptions of how pretty they are. i was really rooting for her to have finally grown up and realized she’s changed in the 5 or 10 or whatever years and stay with Lansdowne (who got totally shafted and I really want him to have his own book with his own HEA). I yelled at the book for most of while I was reading it and had to re(re-re)read How the Marquess Was Won as a palate cleanser. I wish JLL would stick with historicals as generally I love her but I hated this book!
I am sad she left the Landsdowne story line “on the cutting room floor”, so to speak.
Loved most of the books in this series but not this one. I didn’t want them to end up together and they spent so much time apart that I’m not sure why they did. From earlier books I thought that Olivia was a jerk and pretentious. She talked about all this stuff she did for her causes but I never really saw any actions that backed it up…There were also a lot of interesting items from earlier books that were too conveniently wrapped up (I.e. The investment in the slave trade by the investment group, etc). This was a bummer for me.
The Pennyroyal Green series held my interest less and less with each installment, and this review reminds me that I didn’t even get around to finishing TLoLR. As others have said above, I didn’t much care about Olivia, and all those flashbacks slowed me down so much that it got harder and harder to pick the book up again. But perhaps now I shall skim ahead to the Epilogue everyone dislikes so much.
I kept hoping the book would take a sharp turn and turn into Olivia/Landsowne. What a bummer of an ending to a series that I’ve really enjoyed (for the most part).
I loved some of the early installments, and What I Did for a Duke is one of my favorite romances, but I hated this book with a passion. For all the reasons mentioned above, but I was also vaguely offended by the way JAL treated the slavery issue so casually. Really, Lyon? You’re an abolitionist with a sugar cane plantation in Louisiana? How does that work? Plus, he robs her of all agency until the very end, and she’s totally ok with it. Just, No. This was awful. Don’t get me started on the epilogue.
I think that is the single most – well, okay, probably the ONLY – genuine embrace I’ve ever seen on a romance cover. You get light-headed over him… because he’s squishing your lungs 🙂
I hate this book. The hero is a schmuck, and the heroine…what she does to her fiance is unforgivable. They don’t deserve a HEA.
I just love a good Romeo and Juliet but happy story, so I definitely have to read this. My patience won’t allow me to read in order though. I’ll have to read this one and then the series and then reread this one lol
I’m having trouble remembering the previous books. Did anything happen to Chase and Rosalind from “Since the Surrender” that would make their omission from the wedding/epilogue make sense, or did the author just forget about them?
I realize that I’m coming super late to the party, but there was a mother of a wait for the ebook version of this book at my library!