Series: The Fifth Avenue Rebels, #4
Traits & Tropes: titled hero; ruined heroine; indebted hero needs to marry for money
Publication Date: 01.24.23
Genre/Setting: Historical; Gilded Age; Newport, RI/New York City, NY, USA, 1895/1896
Heat Level: 3
Rating: 3.5/5
Vivacious heiress Eleanor Young has always eschewed the institution of marriage, sabotaging her own reputation to make herself unwelcome on New York City’s marriage mart. She lives for herself and her own pleasures, including indulging in kisses with a handsome stranger on a moonlit beach.
Andrew Talbot, the Duke of Lockwood, needs to marry a wealthy heiress and quickly if he has any hope of saving his dukedom from the debt his father left it languishing in. He’s the ultimate gentleman to all of New York high society, but he’s hiding a much darker side of himself and determined to avoid another scandal after being jilted by the last three heiresses he courted.
Nellie sees right through Lockwood’s façade and knows he’s much more than he seems. The more she uncovers of the real man beneath the proper duke, the more irresistible she finds him. This fascination leads to an affair that soon burns much hotter than either Nellie or Lockwood anticipated, but Nellie isn’t willing to compromise on her unconventionality, leaving Lockwood to decide how much he’s willing to give up to be with her.
This book is so difficult to rate because there were parts of it that I absolutely adored and others that didn’t really work for me at all. I’m not sure where exactly to begin, so perhaps it is wise to first include the caveat that I had incredibly high hopes and expectations for this book. Nellie has been a favorite supporting character for me throughout this entire series and it’s impossible not to want unlucky-in-love Lockwood to finally get his HEA. There was also clearly something between him and Nellie this whole time so there’s been a lot of build up and anticipation for me to figure out just what that was.
This was a very emotional and character-driven story, which I loved, but the pacing definitely felt off. Not a lot happens in the first half or two-thirds of the book other than Nellie and Andrew getting to know each other better and having some pretty great steamy times. That’s the character-driven aspect of this book and I was here for it. However, in the last quarter or third or so of the book, a ton of things are packed in, and a new storyline is introduced for Nellie that just didn’t really seem to fit since it wasn’t really mentioned in the first half of the book. I’ll discuss this in more detail below but read the book first as it may get spoilery.
Lockwood was a likable character I could really root for, though I still wanted more of an in-depth characterization for him than what we got. I wanted to explore his fascination with pain during sex more, for instance, and it felt like that door was opened just a crack and then slammed shut. Nonetheless, I liked his platonic friendship with Katie as it was so genuine and showed and male/female friendship in a romance in such a healthy way, something that I think is pretty rare. It was also nice that, though he was struggling and had no money, through no fault of his own, that wasn’t what defined him and he didn’t mention it all the time with any sort of woe-is-me attitude. The fortune hunter is usually the villain of the story, so it was nice to get the humanizing story of how this had happened to him.
Nellie was hard to like as a heroine for me. She was very judgmental of Andrew without even realizing it, too caught up in her own views and her assurance that he must be a stuffy aristocrat. Even when he proved himself to her over and over, she still persisted in doubting him and judging him and that got so old for me. It’s behavior I wouldn’t want in a romance hero and it doesn’t fly any better for me coming from a heroine, especially when it’s couched as her being independent or however it was supposed to come off. It annoyed me that she made decisions for Lockwood (that he couldn’t have a future with her because she’d ruin his reputation), yet this is the very thing she doesn’t want happening to her. This smacked of blatant hypocrisy and it got on my nerves. If he’s not allowed to make any sort of decisions for her, then why is it ok when she’s doing it for him? She pushed him away so much and went through her reasoning of how she was leaving him or couldn’t be with him for his own good that it became very repetitive and a bit tedious.
Nellie’s antics seemed more frivolous than I think they were meant to. She’s meant to be this feminist powerhouse but really she’s naïve and has no concept of consequences for others that may result from her actions. Again, fair warning there may be spoilers ahead. Nellie’s desire to help women get access to contraception was great, noble even, but her way of going about it was less so. Case in point: her storyline with Mrs. Ingram. Nellie went off rashly, albeit with good intentions, but without a thought to how she could be putting an innocent woman in even more danger, all so Nellie could have a public platform for her crusade for access to contraceptives. I don’t disagree at all with what she was trying to do, but the way she went about it was narrow-minded and failed to consider the potential consequences to others with less privilege or access to funds than she had. She acted as if an arrest was something she intended to happen all along and that it was good for her platform, but for me that was just another example of Nellie being reckless and not really considering others.
Neither she nor Lockwood was really the person they portrayed to the world, and I wanted to see more of them uncovering one another’s true selves on the page than we really got. There was a lot of this in a delicious build-up in the first half of the book and then it just sort of fell off and never really recovered. The same thing happened with the steamy scenes. Nellie and Andrew really came together and learned deep rooted secrets about one another in the bedroom and yet, we have no steam past the 66% mark. With the physical aspect of their relationship being such a key factor in cementing their emotional connection, this was incredibly disappointing for me. I wanted at least one culminating scene with them together after they were finally on the same page, had admitted their love, and solidified a future together and instead we get two weirdly implied, fade-to-black scenes. Even in the end, after her grand romantic gesture, Nellie is still bargaining and demanding, trying to get the upper hand on Andrew, holding things over him and keeping the threat of divorce alive if he ever steps out of line, wanting property in her name rather than both their names, and generally ensuring that he always feels like he’s on the back foot. I’m sure this wasn’t actually the intention, but that’s how it came off to me and I just really wanted more of a partnership. As it stood, even after Nellie and Lockwood are reunited and the grand romantic gesture is over, there was too much negotiation still going on for this to feel like a solid, permanent relationship to me.
I loved Nellie’s Irish family and definitely wanted to see more of them interacting with Lockwood. I have a ton of highlights from Aunt Riona’s advice to Nellie and I’d love to see more of her, perhaps a spinoff series for Finn and her other two sons? I loved how Nellie and Lockwood grew together but there were a few too many rejections on Nellie’s part and too much lack of stability in the relationship for me to love this as much as I wanted to. For a series conclusion with so many high hopes resting on it, I did want a bit more.
I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
https://www.bookbub.com/reviews/1875412813
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5014963422
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