Series: N/A
Traits & Tropes: widower; grumpy/sunshine; home alone;
Publication Date: 10.18.22
Genre/Setting: Historical; Regency; London, England, December, 1813
Heat Level: 0
Rating: 3/5
Lady Myrtle McQuoid has never felt like she truly fits in with her family, and this Christmas season is no different. When she wakes up to a silent house, absent her noisy family, Myrtle realizes they’ve headed out for their seat in Scotland and forgotten her. She just needs to find food and heat until they realize she’s been left behind and return for her.
Valentine Bancroft, the Duke of Aragon, has shut himself away from the world since his wife’s death four years previously. He wants to be left alone, with only his loyal dog for company, and he has no use for his noisy magpie of a neighbor with her incessant chatter and forthright opinions.
But with Myrtle left alone and a potential threat to her father’s house, she has to find the nerve to approach the gruff duke for help and honorable Val can’t refuse a lady in need no matter how much he may want to.
I’m not sure what sort of vortex I’ve fallen into, but somehow almost all of my festive Christmas reads this year have wound up having heavy grief themes. This has been an incredibly difficult year for me with a lot of loss so that makes these books tough to read and I’m trying not to allow that to affect any of my reviews, but I do want to put that caveat out there.
This book was terribly sweet, and I did enjoy how things wrapped up, but it was perhaps a bit too sweet at times. There was a lot of lovely build up between the MCs here and then it all faded out into nothing and that did leave me feeling just a little bit shortchanged. Myrtle is the ultimate golden retriever heroine with Val as her foil, the ultimate broody duke. They are both perhaps just a bit overdrawn in their characters, with some of her behavior being just excessively silly and some of his gruffness going so far as to be comical, perhaps unintendedly so. Her being described as between childhood and womanhood when he’s clearly quite a bit older and much more experienced did feel a bit icky for me, but I don’t remember his age ever being mentioned so I’m not sure of the gap there. This was something I was able to get over when her age and the fact that she was about to have her first season wasn’t being mentioned, though it was mentioned a lot. Myrtle is so sweet and bubbly that at times she came off as a bit of a simpleton and some of her inner monologues grew very repetitive. She was also a bit judgmental and gullible, fully believing when they first met that Val had murdered all his servants and that’s why he was alone. Her character is a bit exaggerated, to the point that it was very easy to sympathize with Val’s wanting her gone, especially as she chattered in a fairly condescending manner at first, hardly allowing him a word edgewise. His story was incredibly tragic and that seemed to cheapen it a bit for me, though I believe it was meant to lighten up the darker theme of the book. We also had the slapstick villains for that lightness, though only briefly, but their threat was pretty vague and there were large stretches in which they did not appear, so I had almost forgotten about them. For this reason, I think some parts of the plot could’ve been shortened a bit without damaging the story. Nonetheless, this author handles darker themes very well, but her dramatic style was a bit less suited to the sweeter parts of the book.
I really liked Val’s growth and seeing him rediscover the joys of life after facing so much pain. Though his transformation happens very quickly, and we don’t get to see very much of the changed Val on the page, it did wrap up the book on a very hopeful note. Given the bittersweetness of this season, that positivity was something I needed, and I only wish we’d had more of it. All in all, I enjoyed this sweet, if a bit slow-paced, read, and, though I did wish for more Christmas festivities and less repetition in the dialogues between Val and Myrtle, his proposal was especially adorable.
I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
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