This has a tantalizing premise, a vicar who’s also a rake, but reading it was a dreary slog. The amount of plot in Wild Wild Rake almost reached 1990s crazysauce level, yet it wasn’t a compelling read.

I found most of the characters in Wild Wild Rake confusing, or unlikable. The hero was both. At the beginning of the book, Devan is a dissolute gentleman who’s cultivated a reputation as a womanizer, and publicly loathes the heroine. After a time jump of ten years, Devan’s reputation hasn’t changed, but he is now deeply religious. Why and how this happens isn’t clear. What hasn’t changed is his arrogance. Devan is protective, but frequently tells the heroine that her feelings are wrong. While the couple begin the book arguing, by the end the heroine happily agrees with him. This story felt like a description of Stockholm syndrome, not a loving relationship.

With a large stable of secondary characters who serve as plot devices, the many B storylines were hard to track. There’s so much going on, the story should have felt fast-paced, but because I didn’t like the characters, I had trouble caring about the subplots.

Avalon, the Marchioness of Warwyk, is a lonely woman whose cruel husband ignores her while flaunting his mistress, a courtesan named Mary. Avalon is miserable, and punishes the marquess by spending his money on herself. This strategy did not make me sympathize with her. She naively tries to befriend an embarrassed Mary when they run into one another while shopping, despite obvious cues screaming, “This woman is pregnant with your husband’s child.”

Avalon is bitter that her parents forced her to jilt the man she actually liked in order to make this wealthier match. Her former intended has moved on, and married happily (in a previous book). However, his friend, the rakish vicar Devan, still nurses a grudge on his behalf. Manchild Devan decides to punish Avalon for years, even though his friend has forgiven her. He teases Avalon in public, gossips about her to her husband and others, and gives her the not-remotely-witty nickname Lady Warlock.

A decade later, Avalon is now a widow and the patroness of a small town. With assistance from Mary, who she befriended, Avalon helps “fallen women” (mostly pregnant sex workers) escape London and settle in her community. She is engaged in a war via correspondence with her son’s long-distance guardian the Earl of Larkton, who is both her late husband’s best friend, and Devan’s brother.

Stay with me here.

Larkton is worried that Avalon is frittering away her son’s inheritance, and is also frustrated by his brother’s inability to land a heiress, so he plucks Devan from his parish and reassigns him to spy on Avalon under the guise of tutoring her son, Thane. Avalon is not amused, and is aware of Devan’s reputation for frolicking with women. Plus, he was an ass to her years earlier, and she’s rolling her eyes now that all the girls in town are falling over themselves to catch him. Avalon believes that “she and only she ruled the parish with a fair and impartial hand,” which felt a bit patronizing. She promptly tries to bribe Devan to leave town; he refuses. Yet, she can’t stop herself from inexplicably being attracted to him. He’s just SO beautiful, you see. Even if he’s still calling her Lady Warlock and ignoring her boundaries.

At this point, we’re about 10% into this long book. There are so many characters—I’ve glossed over most—and many annoyed me. I wish Mary, the enigmatic mistress who only appears in a handful of scenes, was a bigger part of Wild Wild Rake. By a third in, my relationship with this book had deteriorated to a point akin to where you start hating the way your boyfriend breathes.

1. Rakish vicar fun was the one thing I needed this book to deliver, and it failed. What I like best about rakes is their pleasure-seeking orientation, and defiance of social strictures. Devan, in contrast, embraces a fairly traditional role. For reasons that I never understood, he lets people think that he’s an heiress-seeking rogue, whose sexploits are printed repeatedly in the newspaper, when actually he is

I may have enjoyed a story where Devan was a religious man struggling with his deliciously unwholesome thoughts about Avalon. Instead, this is the finale episode of The Bachelor, where a kind, not very bright, vaguely Christian man falls for a pretty single mom.

2. The Mansplaining. Chapters from Devan’s POV tend to be preachy. Even his compassion is strident. At the beginning of the story, Devan judges Avalon for dumping his friend. Later, Devan lectures her for not realizing how much she needs him. He repeatedly foists his problem-solving skills on her, desperate to “do whatever he could to help” Avalon in her village work. But his actions made it appear that he didn’t think Avalon was capable of accurately assessing whether she needed his help.

Devan thinks he’s often relocated because he’s the only vicar who “had enough brains to solve whatever problems various parishes had seemed to create amongst their neighbors.” Sure. Devan has a high opinion of his own intelligence, and while he appreciates Avalon’s “strength,” he can’t help but explain his much better ideas. Most of their interactions include him instructing her. When she explains her work, he tells her she hasn’t considered the impact on the parish. When the local midwife asks Avalon for help, he intercepts the message and steps in instead, perplexed when Avalon angrily confronts him. While he agrees with Avalon that the Earl of Larkton’s plan to send Thane to school at Eton is wrong, he disagrees with Avalon’s rationale, based on his knowledge of Thane’s needs after spending only a few minutes with her son. I skipped to the end of the book, only to be confronted with more of Avalon sharing her feelings about her son, and Devan explaining to her, gently, that she’s just wrong. To be fair, Devan is usually right, and Avalon turns out to be wrong. I found this dynamic maddening. I would have preferred to see both of them recognize their arrogance over time. Instead, it felt like Avalon came to believe that Devan understood her (and everything) better than she understood herself. This made their partnership feel disempowering.

3. Inconsistent characterization. At the beginning of Wild Wild Rake, Devan is a playboy who enjoys torturing Avalon, who is a moral paragon shocked by the existence of her husband’s mistress. When they meet again, their roles have been reversed and she is the one now comfortable with moral ambiguity. I didn’t think it made sense for Devan to suddenly turn into a kindly father figure after being a bully, and I didn’t trust this transformation.

Meanwhile, Avalon fixates on Devan once he reappears in her life. She runs a constant inner monologue; Devan is a bad influence, he is a “pious killjoy”, he challenges her authority, he’s in league with his brother, he’s an attractive distraction. For example, in the midst of a detailed description of Devan’s first sermon, she begins to ponder why everyone seems to like him so much more than her:

Rumors from The Midnight Cryer swirled around him like bees pollinating flowers. There was always a hint of the forbidden about him. Murmurings that he loved to lavish attention on women, and in return, gloried in their return affections. She’d even heard that he’d had numerous lovers. But the simple fact that he was a man of the cloth made him deserve their respect—though grudgingly on her part—until he proved otherwise.

Still, she had no doubt that he’d had experience with women. Didn’t all men?

Avalon complains about Devan often, but she throws herself into Devan’s comforting arms, sobbing about a sick villager the first time they spend more than a few minutes alone. She says Devan is both a devious “enemy” and is easy to manipulate. How can both be true? I kept wondering “WHY” while reading Avalon’s behavior.

4. Thane. The ten-year old plot moppet’s dialogue was formal and made him sound like a mix of Dickens’ Tiny Tim and Richard Gilmore. Adding to the plot moppetry, readers first learn Devan is a virgin through a conversation with Thane:

Immediately, his parents popped into Devan’s thoughts. “My mother and father were deeply in love, and their marriage was a true gift to my siblings and me. They taught me so much.”

Thane blinked slowly. “Like scripture?”

As one side of his mouth tugged upward, Devan debated whether to proceed or change the subject. “Please tell me,” the young lord said. “There aren’t many who share important things with me.”

Lord Warwyk had to be lonely. Devan hadn’t met any boys the young lord’s age yet. “My parents gave me a wise piece of advice that I’ve followed. They told me to wait for my heart’s true match, and so I am.”

How surprising that he was sharing more of himself with a boy whom he’d just met hours ago than he’d ever shared with any of his friends or family. However, he’d not share all of his secrets, particularly the one that would cause his friends to reel in laughter if they ever discovered the truth.

It was something he’d only share with his wife: He was a virgin and would stay that way until he found that one true love, the woman he wanted to share the rest of his life with. “Maybe that’s what my mother wants.” Thane looked up from his papers and captured Devan’s gaze.

“Maybe she’s waiting for her one true love also.”

Ultimately, I found the characters insufferable, and the style overwrought. I ended up only reading the first and last thirds of the book.

That’s just in the two-thirds I read. There are so many secondary plots, and it all made me angry and bored. Despite a lovely cover, Wild Wild Rake failed to take advantage of the potential of this story, and left me frustrated instead of entertained.