A MINOR INCONVENIENCE, charming Regency spy story seasoned with gayness

A MINOR INCONVENIENCE
SARAH GRANGER
Entangled: Select Historical (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A French musket ball to the leg takes Captain Hugh Fanshawe from the battlefield and leaves him enduring long, quiet days compiling paperwork at Horse Guards headquarters. He knows his lameness makes him the object of pity and distaste at the stifling social engagements he dutifully escorts his mother and sister to, but everything in his orderly life changes when Colonel Theo Lindsay arrives.

Theo is everything Hugh is not. He’s a man of physical perfection and an enjoyable companion, and their friendship deepens into love. But when the army suspects there’s a French spy at Horse Guards, Hugh discovers nothing is as it seems, and the paper he shuffles daily could save his lover’s life.

I RECEIVED THIS BOOK FROM THE GOODREADS M/M GIFT EXCHANGE. THANKS!

My Review: A steamless spy drama set in an underused Napoleonic Wars setting, with a lovely little gay romance on top of it. The men who fall in love aren't in rut, they're in a more Heyeresque kind of connection. The author uses on-page euphemism, as opposed to more old-fashioned "the fire flickered and died," to gloss over the physicality of sexual activity. Even a visit to a molly-house is...social, not exclusively sexual. Hugh meets Theo there, yet does not connect this to Theo's later act of seeking him out at the workplace they share.

It is the kind of story I enjoy, set in what feels like a reasonably accurate Regency re-creation. I didn't point and laugh at the...heightened...Heyerlike language, which is a feat. Trying to make champagne with Thompson seedless grapes is usually how the imitators come across; Author Granger, not so much. The spirited exchanges are there to keep me entertained while thinking "shouldn't they be fucking?"

If you're not interested in the steamier side of a story, this one will keep you busy with Hugh's idolizing of Theo as a dashing, omnicompetent godlike beauty. With his serious self-image problems. With his wounded-warrior syndrome. There is a lot to be recovering from after being crippled by a war wound, and by a lifetime of being told you're wrong just for existing.

Add in some amusing family shenanigans (his younger sister keeps Hugh and his mother on the hop, steering her away from trouble), and there was enough oddness with his friend Emily and her ambiguously intentioned attention to him to keep subplots going.

What there is not is the always desirable HEA, because that was not on offer in 1810s England. If Hugh and Thheo transgress bounds of propriety in their attention to each other, they face dreadful consequences. This results in HFN endings being the best one can hope for in this milieu...if that's a deal-breaker, be alert for it now.

A good historical story without sexual content beyond social bounds.

LADIES IN HATING (Belvoir's Library #3), charming sapphic Regency romance

LADIES IN HATING (Belvoir's Library #3)
ALEXANDRA VASTI
St. Martin's Griffin (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A pair of Gothic novelists trade rivalry for love in this swoony, steamy, sapphic Regency by USA Today bestselling author Alexandra Vasti.

Celebrated authoress Lady Georgiana Cleeve has achieved fame and fortune. Unfortunately, she’s also acquired an enemy: the enigmatic Lady Darling, whose spine-tingling plots appear to be pulled straight from Georgiana’s own manuscripts. What’s a stubborn, steely writer to do? Unmask her rival, of course.

But unmasking doesn’t go according to plan—because Lady Darling is actually Cat Lacey, the butler’s daughter and object of Georgiana’s very secret, very embarrassing teenage infatuation.

Cat Lacey has spent a decade clawing her family out of poverty. The last thing she needs is to be distracted by the stunning(ly pretentious) Lady Georgiana Cleeve. But Cat can’t seem to escape her infuriatingly beautiful rival—including at the eerie manor where they both plan to set their next books. The plot unexpectedly thickens, however, when the novelists find themselves trapped in the manor together. In between ghostly moans and spectral staff, Cat and Georgiana come face-to-face with real danger: the scorching passion that’s been haunting their rivalry all along.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Anyone need an enemies-to-lovers sapphic romance? This one will fill the need with verve and enthusiasm. I'm pretty sure the fact that the enemies are both lady novelists in Regency England is the biggest fantasy leap in the book. I suspect the family dynamic, the class dynamics, while all massaged for our twenty-first century sensibilities really did occur in some form. In reality, families usually find a way to heal where there was a solid foundation of love underpinning them.

As the third of a trilogy I've not read the first two of, I expected to be at sea. I was not. I assume that's down to the nature of romances, but it could easily be the author's real intent to make this a standalone that might convince one to go back and pick up the first two. (They're cishet so that's a firm no from me.) It did lend the story a richer background in that I felt I was coming into the action where everyone knew everyone else and I needed to figure that web of relationship out. I'm okay with that. If you are not, I'll reassure you that the author was careful to supply the kind of details that an experienced reader puts together readily. The picture created is a rich tapestry of emotional relationships that felt very realistic.

Immersed in this story was a very agreeable place to be in a news cycle so filled with horrifying and unnervingly personal murders. I live in the same world as some people with guns who hate me across multiple identity axes. It pays to put your mind into a better place, one where conflict exists but is not going to lead to lethal outcomes but resolutions and HEAs for its lovely people. I'm sure any of my QUILTBAG siblings could find comfort in this story of two of our forebears finding love and healing generational wounds. It should only happen for all of us in this vale of tears.

THE GENTLE ART OF FORTUNE HUNTING, exciting and artful while showing sharp teeth

THE GENTLE ART OF FORTUNE HUNTING
K.J. CHARLES
KJC Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Robin Loxleigh and his sister Marianne are the hit of the Season, so attractive and delightful that nobody looks behind their pretty faces.

Until Robin sets his sights on Sir John Hartlebury’s heiress niece. The notoriously graceless baronet isn’t impressed by good looks, or fooled by false charm. He’s sure Robin is a liar—a fortune hunter, a card sharp, and a heartless, greedy fraud—and he’ll protect his niece, whatever it takes.

Then, just when Hart thinks he has Robin at his mercy, things take a sharp left turn. And as the grumpy baronet and the glib fortune hunter start to understand each other, they also find themselves starting to care—more than either of them thought possible.

But Robin's cheated and lied and let people down for money. Can a professional rogue earn an honest happy ever after?

THIS WAS A LOVELY SURPRISE GIFT FROM MY YOUNG GENTLEMAN CALLER. THANK YOU, MY LOVE.

My Review: It requires a particular kind of innocence and faith to be a gambler. I have never had that innocence and I don't think the gods like it when one uses words like "faith" in connection to cynical, bitter people like me. So the fact that a significant portion of this tale takes place in gambling hells and among those who see some...merit? value?...in the damnfoolishness of gambling chafed on my nerve. I was, of course, perfectly prepared for the fortune hunting. After all, it's in the title. And I myownself have never had any negative judgment of fortune hunters who live up to their bargain. (I also see no problem with porn models and other sex workers getting paid to do things I did for free back when there was interest in having me do them. To me, it means they're better at business than I was, not immoral or broken or bad.)

An entirely different conversation, one far more impassioned and full of moral thunderation, would be had if we were to discuss the system that makes these options not only viable but desirable and even, on sadly frequent occasions, necessary. That is not where we are in this particular Regency romance.

It does, however, come very close to being the conversation that Robin and Hart end up having, in several different forms, several different times. What makes the read worth its frustrations (I am impatient in the face of self-righteousness and annoyed by selfish, self-serving blinders on powerful people) is the fact that Author Charles writes the scenes of conflict between privileged and petitioner without for a moment forgetting that each is, in the final analysis, correct; only their viewpoints need to be altered, their idées fixes challenged at the source. And it's no surprise to me that Author Charles knows the essential truth of change: to work, it has to be to not merely from. Which requires a huge jolt of Want. A clinging tendril of need can't help but speed up the fall of the old and the triumph of the new.

Does anyone know a better way to add powerful want and many tendrils of need than to use sex? I don't. And with Hart's Position and his Code, well...them changes were a-gonna smother before moving anything a millimeter. Robin's wantonness, his unfeigned joy in the glorious work of sensual pleasure, means he is in a unique and effective position (!) to effect badly needed, salubrious changes in the essentially caring heart within Hart.

“Sorry? You want to kiss me?”

Hart was still looking away, but Robin could see his ears redden. “You need not, if it is not to your taste.”

“Jesus wept. Of course it is to my taste. I thought it would be spikes and a dildo.” Hart made a spluttering noise.

There it is. Reduced to its essence, there is the book: Are we having the same conversation about the same subject? Do we trust each other enough to find out? And in the end, are there words for what we need...from Life, from each other?

Finding one whose ability to offer that which one actually needs and still isn't overmatched by their own needs...that is a dim, receding dream for many, if not most, people throughout history. It makes the offer of Happily Ever After one of the romance genre's sweetest siren songs. Add onto that dismal truth the way the world has (and still does) treat gay men...the need for a dose of unreality in the form of seeing others, imperfect others more like we actually are, succeed in its attainment is ever urgent. This story's achievement of the HEA is quite dramatic, very theatrical, and damn near begs to be committed to film. I'm not at all sure the sex scenes would make it onto the screen...hell, I'm quite sure they would not because the sex...it's really not suitable for straight people. I can say that, while I get it and would never demand that straight people open their minds a bit more as a group, some of the more willing to challenge their boundaries would do very well to make this book a toe-dipper into thinking without judgment about gay sex. There is absolutely no coercion, no forcing, no shortage of imaginative and playful coupling in the story. I think many IRL couples could do worse than emulate Hart and Robin's ways and means.

Why I'm rating this four stars, instead of the five it sounds like I'm awarding, is easily explained: These men are damned abrasive. The effort of reading while screaming in the first third of the story told against the thrill of the ball. It's not like everyone needs to be likeable or that all the traffic lights need to turn green immediately...the struggle to connect was effective, and it felt as though this HEA was earned.

The problem was the relentlessly self-righteous Hart and the revoltingly self-serving Robin. It was sold to me as "this is how these men are." It wasn't ever UNsold. It was a lot to ask me to simply...jettison...all that, even with the later pillow talk that blew the cobwebs away. Had it been more evenly apportioned throughout the book, say to other characters as well not simply the men in their safe cocoon sharing, I might've been less brought up short at the ball scene's events. I might've been more willing to invest in that sharing. As it was, I was already too set in my response of them being damaged to shift easily into feeling them to be as wounded, hurt as they each actually were.

It is not a fatal flaw. It was a case of seeing the road to the highest peak go on after I got off the ride. And yet, make no mistake, I'd go on the ride again! This read was a pleasure and a badly needed one for me. Author Charles makes her stories fizz and snap and sparkle. Come join the fun with this one.

IT TAKES TWO TO TUMBLE & A GENTLEMAN NEVER KEEPS SCORE, the first two "Seducing the Sedgwicks" queer Regency romances

IT TAKES TWO TO TUMBLE
CAT SEBASTIAN (Seducing the Sedgwicks #1)
Avon Impulse
$3.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Some of Ben Sedgwick’s favorite things:
    Helping his poor parishioners
    Baby animals
    Shamelessly flirting with the handsome Captain Phillip     Dacre

After an unconventional upbringing, Ben is perfectly content with the quiet, predictable life of a country vicar, free of strife or turmoil. When he’s asked to look after an absent naval captain’s three wild children, he reluctantly agrees, but instantly falls for the hellions. And when their stern but gloriously handsome father arrives, Ben is tempted in ways that make him doubt everything.

Some of Phillip Dacre’s favorite things:
  His ship
  People doing precisely as they're told
  Touching the irresistible vicar at every opportunity

Phillip can’t wait to leave England’s shores and be back on his ship, away from the grief that haunts him. But his children have driven off a succession of governesses and tutors and he must set things right. The unexpected presence of the cheerful, adorable vicar sets his world on its head and now he can’t seem to live without Ben’s winning smiles or devastating kisses.

LIBRARIES ARE AWESOME! SUPPORT THEM! USE THEM!

My Review: First, read this:

He didn’t even stop himself from thinking about the man, the taut muscles of his arms and the habit he had of biting back a smile as if smiles cost extra and he was saving up for an especially big one.
–and–
He wanted to watch the trees lose their leaves. He wanted to watch his children and the changes each day wrought in them. He wanted to belong here, to belong to his children and to Ben.
–and–
“This is all new to me. I’m in a new world without a map or a chart, but you’re my compass, Ben, and I know we’ll find a way.”

What a pleasure to escape into a late Regency world where two men grab their happiness instead of allowing the world to order them around. I think this happened, then as now, more often than They thought/think it does.

Several things got under my saddle and rubbed me wrong, but as they were reasonably minor and mostly ignorable, I flowed on past them with mere surface ripples in the stream of my enjoyment.

This mixing metaphors thing is fun. I'm gonna do it more often.

Some just lovely phrase-making, isn't it. There's humor and there's a bit of sentiment and then there's Author Sebastian's way with writing about horny men without making it crude. I'm becoming a Sebastianista. On to volume two!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

A GENTLEMAN NEVER KEEPS SCORE
CAT SEBASTIAN (Seducing the Sedgwicks #2)
Avon Impulse
$3.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Once beloved by London's fashionable elite, Hartley Sedgwick has become a recluse after a spate of salacious gossip exposed his most-private secrets. Rarely venturing from the house whose inheritance is a daily reminder of his downfall, he’s captivated by the exceedingly handsome man who seeks to rob him.

Since retiring from the boxing ring, Sam Fox has made his pub, The Bell, into a haven for those in his Free Black community. But when his best friend Kate implores him to find and destroy a scandalously revealing painting of her, he agrees. Sam would do anything to protect those he loves, even if it means stealing from a wealthy gentleman. But when he encounters Hartley, he soon finds himself wanting to steal more than just a painting from the lovely, lonely man—he wants to steal his heart.

Content Warning from Author: This book includes a main character who was sexually abused in the past; abuse happens off page but is alluded to.

LIBRARIES...MAN, JUST CAN'T SAY ENOUGH ABOUT THEIR AMAZINGNESS!

My Review: First, read this:

“Oh, to hell with decent people. They’re exhausting. Make one feel so evil, when really one simply has one’s own concerns.”
–and–
“Let me make this equally clear to you, because I think I've failed you on this score. I want to be with you, in rooms above a pub or anywhere you happen to be. A cave, a pirate ship, a desert island, doesn't matter.”
–and–
“Maybe you need to get rid of your idea of better. Your boots are better than mine, but they won’t fit my feet.”

I seriously love a pithy aperçu!

I quite like all the interconnectedness of these stories, and was gratified that Ben showed up despite being happily hooked up with his Phillip.

Not quite as easy for me was the nature of Hartley's problem barring him from easy intimacy with Sam. Saintly Sam got a smidge saccharine if you want to know the truth. The big problem separating them was, in the end, less resolved than treated with a massive injection of handwavium. I was in the fullness of my go-with-the-flow mood from Ben and Phillip's tale so I bobbed past that rock.

Right into the one that holed my boat and resulted in that missing star: Martin. I gather that Martin and Will are next in the series, so I will say nothing except: "Really."

My review of the third Seducing the Sedgwicks series, TWO ROGUES MAKE A RIGHT, comes out tomorrow is right here!

A FASHIONABLE INDULGENCE, Regency England romantic novel featuring men in love with each other

A FASHIONABLE INDULGENCE (Society of Gentlemen #1)
KJ CHARLES
Loveswept
$6.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In the first novel of an explosive new series from K. J. Charles, a young gentleman and his elegant mentor fight for love in a world of wealth, power, and manipulation.

When he learns that he could be the heir to an unexpected fortune, Harry Vane rejects his past as a Radical fighting for government reform and sets about wooing his lovely cousin. But his heart is captured instead by the most beautiful, chic man he’s ever met: the dandy tasked with instructing him in the manners and style of the ton. Harry’s new station demands conformity—and yet the one thing he desires is a taste of the wrong pair of lips.

After witnessing firsthand the horrors of Waterloo, Julius Norreys sought refuge behind the luxurious facade of the upper crust. Now he concerns himself exclusively with the cut of his coat and the quality of his boots. And yet his protégé is so unblemished by cynicism that he inspires the first flare of genuine desire Julius has felt in years. He cannot protect Harry from the worst excesses of society. But together they can withstand the high price of passion.

My Review: Don't dismiss Romances without reading at least one KJ Charles romantic novel first. This Regency possesses all the charms of the best in the field at conveying the sense of an exquisitely beautiful lifestyle lived by rather dreadful people being, nonetheless, quite extraordinarily tempting an offer. Harry Vane, legitimate son of a pair of narcissists from wildly different social milieux, has that offer made:

No, I don’t want to be sober and restrained {like his older Vane cousin}. I want to be beautiful. Bright. Confident. Perfect. I want to be you.
he thinks of his mentor, Julius, lusting and admiring and trying so hard to please:
“Again. No. With grace.”

Harry bowed hopelessly, a clumsy movement. “I don’t feel graceful.”

“Of course you don’t. You aren’t. You resemble a cart horse attempting to caracole. Very well, stop.”

Harry's noble father ran away from power, money, position to marry his mill-owner's daughter of a mother, and neither was ever going to be welcomed home because they embraced the Ned Ludd radicalism that led to them racing ahead of the hangman's noose to France. Napoleon's France. The one still reeling from their aborted revolution. And at daggers drawn with England.

Harry, in short, was never ever going to feel safe anywhere...but then his fortunes changed when his paternal grandfather needed him, now that he's twenty-three and has lived hand-to-mouth in London (after the parents had the balls to die at the same time) to carry on the family name. And it is here, my olds, that the action springs to life.

Julius is a man in misery, sadly, and the kind that warps one's view of humanity as much as Harry's uncertain upbringing does: He is Other, a queer gent in a time when that was a hanging offense; he is not on good terms with his family, not for his sexuality (one receives the distinct impression that they are in the dark about the subject), but for a tragic accident that took place at Waterloo. (No, not talkin' about it here. Read it for y'all's selves.) These two men, so young...Julius turns thirty during the story, and that's a big, big part of the story...and so damaged, gravitate together.

And everything he hated, the saliva, the fleshiness, the taste of other people’s food and breath and teeth and sweat, was here. Harry’s skin was as flawed as anyone’s close up. He had wide pores and what looked like red pinpricks, hairs in his nostrils and the sharp brown points of stubble, the first hints of what would be wrinkles when he aged, and stray hairs under his thick brows that could have been plucked away. He was imperfect flesh, like any man, and Julius buried himself in that imperfection because it was alive.

Harry's imperfections bother Julius; Julius's perfection bothers Harry:

“When my namesake, the great Caesar, rode in triumph,” Julius said, “he was accompanied by a slave whose role was to whisper to him, You are but mortal. To remind him he was merely a man who would one day die like any other.

If I could, I should have you at my side to remind me that I am alive, because I have not felt alive in so damned long, and with you, I do. No, I don’t want you to marry, any more than I want you to return to your dirty democrats. I want to show you the world, and see you smile, and keep you with me while my soul grows back. Don’t gape like that.”

The last line is directed at a completely overawed, overjoyed Harry, slackjawed that someone who opens his mouth and just spills this kind of guff verbiage would consider taking him as a pupil, still less as a lover!

So there are plot twists; Harry is banished forever (lasts about two weeks) from Julius's side because he wasn't completely honest once; Julius and the other men in their circle rally round Harry as some exceedingly horrible events transpire; a murder, a suicide, a long-awaited restoration of ma'at all occur. In short, it's a romance. And a fine one, replete with period details (look up "gamahuche"! Haw), and like all Author Charles's books, agreeably smutty and louche. (Straight-straight people: NO.)

I'd be deeply remiss if I didn't mention one major thread running through the read: Harry's parents flight from England cost one of their very staunchest supporters a flogging, which is no small matter in today's world but could then, if the flogged was unlucky, be fatal in the form of infection. Their supporter, Silas, nonetheless opens his home and his seditious printing shop to orphaned Harry when he has no one (certainly not his noble relatives!) to turn to. Harry, after being fished out of this cesspool of democratic radicals, leaves them all behind but with many a guilty twinge. He does finally go back after being Banished Forever by Julius (as if!), to talk to Silas:

He planted a thick, ink-stained finger on the table in front of Harry. “And here’s Mr. Aristocrat Vane, the clothes on your back enough to feed a family for a month, I’ll be bound, come crying to me because you’ve squabbled with a fop over a pink coat. Because you’ve sold yourself and you don’t like the price. Is that the best you can do?”
–then–
“If you can’t be happy, then be something else. Be useful, that would be good. Decorative, if you like. Selfish, if you must. But don’t whine about it.” He scowled, rubbing his hand over his short-cropped, brindled hair. “And be careful.”

It is that last that shows Silas for what he truly is: A mother hen of a man, always taking good care of whoever needs it and be damned to his own needs.

The usefulness of any read is what the reader needs from it at the time of the reading. I needed something to help me combat crippling wretchedness by reminding me that there is love, compassion, and commitment in the world. This story was exactly that for me. Is it Dostoevsky? No. I didn't want Litrachure and its many, many tedious foibles, as I needed to be convinced that the world has always been filled with better people than I am used to seeing on the news.

Success!

SPRIG MUSLIN, Georgette Heyer's 1956 Regency romantic novel

SPRIG MUSLIN
GEORGETTE HEYER
Sourcebooks Casablanca
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Finding so young and pretty a girl as Amanda wandering unattended, Sir Gareth Ludlow knows it is his duty as a man of honour to restore her to her family. But it is to prove no easy task for the Corinthian. His captive in spring muslin has more than her rapturous good looks and bandboxes to aid her - she is also possessed of a runaway imagination...

A typically enthralling historical novel, Sprig Muslin shows the skill which has kept Georgette Heyer a huge and devoted readership to this day.

This is an entry in the 1956 Club group of reviews.

My Review: I confess it true: I am such a noddycock that this is the first of the estimable Miss Heyer's trashy novels that I e'er did peruse. Dash it all, how was I to know she was a veritable caryatid of culture, a purveyoress of fine wordsmithing, an artiste?

Yeah, so she invented the Regency romance, or close enough to it. Yeah, she was an English homemaker. And by today's "so what did you smell like after you murdered those teenagers, Mr. Dahmer?" celebrity standards, she was a complete nonentity. Never gave an interview, never went on tour, never so much as blew a kiss to a crowd.

And still her legend lives on. I imagine the Regency period of English history would still be a giant snorefest for the youth of America if it were not for Miss Heyer's Regency-set romances. They spawned myriad imitatrixes to mine the rich seam, from the time she started out at age nineteen until this good day. And beyond, I suspect. She wrote well over 50 titles, she had a half-century career, she was a commercial powerhouse. She was a game-changer for the publishing industry. She was, in short, JRR Tolkien but female (and fun to read).

You won't spot historical inaccuracies in her books. You won't spot infelicities of style. You won't see violence or mayhem, though the odd lord does get shot or sliced with a sword.

What you will see is simple, direct, and graceful writing, not precious or cutesy-poo drivel. You will see implausible-but-consistent plotting. You will see clearly and concisely drawn characters, people one can believe really went to Almack's and faught in the Peninsular campaign and made their debuts to the ton. You will, if you climb down off your preconceived notions, get a rare treat...a book that's a pleasure to read and a disappointment to finish, but is just exactly the right length.

Yes yes yes, regressive social attitudes, emphasis on male privilege (even while the females are scheming to use the men to their own advantage, the minxes), society = Society and the Lower Orders in their place...if those givens are not to your taste, why are you reading a Regency-set romantic fiction? Still less one published in 1956. Really, don't. One isn't required to attend every fight to which one is invited.

That said I found the rising-forty hero falling in love with the seventeen-year-old heroine a bit rich for my blood, hence the not-quite-four-star rating. All of Heyer's romances are good, some are excellent; this is good(ish) and it's got that spark of wry wit that can, at times, become cruel in Heyer's hands. The Chicklaids, in this book, skate close to the snark line, uncomfortably so; it seems almost no thought was given to the way they're slotted into the plot to serve. But it's a cavil. Minor characters seldom get the fine brush. But Heyer, gifted quite beyond the ordinary, can and has done better, less lorgnette-goggling minor characters.

All that notwithstanding: Recommended. Most heartily. Damme if it's not.