Historical

Ahh, the last of the series! Unsurprisingly, I also really enjoyed this one, although admittedly I think it was my least favorite of the trilogy (although, to be fair, it being my “least favorite” of a series I liked a lot still means I enjoyed it more than many other books I’ve read).

This book follows Lord Courtenay, famously a rake and a libertine, as he falls in with Julian Medlock, self-made man who has taken it upon himself for his sister’s sake to rehabilitate Courtenay’s image. The two men don’t get along at all; Julian is condescending toward Courtenay and Courtenay seems to enjoy pissing Julian off. Of the three books in this series I think this one gets closest to the enemies-to-lovers trope, and also is the only book where the conflict is actually about interpersonal harm done by one party to the other instead of being a conflict to do with class or expectations the way it was in the previous two books.

In this book, which is a continuation following The Soldier’s Scoundrel, we follow Georgie Turner as he takes a new job with the famously insane Earl of Radnor in his dilapidated manor. Georgie is meant to be using the job as a way to get away from a deal gone bad and to brainstorm ways to get his old gang off his tail, but unexpectedly he finds himself rather taken with the mad Earl and enjoying his role as secretary. But the past does have a way of catching up to people, and Georgie is no exception.

As with the first book in this series, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked it! One thing I appreciated about the first book and am now beginning to feel is a theme for Cat Sebastian is that the homophobia and societal expectations of Edwardian England (or Victorian… honestly I can’t tell) are present on the fringes, but they aren’t the driving force behind the conflicts of the story. It comes up when it’s appropriate for it to come up, but otherwise the characters are able to recognize their mutual attraction and act on it, and although there is obviously a need to be discreet about their relationship, there’s no excessive shame or internalized homophobia about it. I find this really refreshing in comparison to some other historical gay romances I’ve read.

For New York poet and heiress Ivy Yada-Lovell, being thrust unexpectedly into the English gentry when her brother inherits a title is like entering a new world entirely. Berkshire is a place steeped in tradition; although women can marry women and men can marry men, titles can be inherited only by blood-related sons and well-bred women are expected to follow well-bred paths. At first, Ivy thinks her only duties in her new home will be to learn how the upper class works and find her brother a wife, but when she finds herself falling for one of the daughters from the neighboring estate, Ivy will be forced to not only confront her own presuppositions, but to much better understand the society in which she now lives if she has any hope of keeping her new love.

Hayley Kiyoko’s new novel “Where There’s Room for Us” is set in a reimagined Victorian England where queer marriage is legal, but almost everything else is the same, right down to the paternalism that pervaded much of particularly upper-class society at the time. When I first heard the premise I was honestly a little skeptical; after all, misogyny and homophobia are extremely closely tied together, so I wondered how Kiyoko would handle writing a society where homophobia seems largely absent (or at least not enshrined in law the way it really was in Victorian times), but misogyny persists. As I read, though, I found myself pleasantly surprised by how the topic was addressed. Men who marry men and adopt male children are able to pass down titles, but women who marry women and adopt male children can’t do the same. Women are still unable to vote or manage their own accounts, and there is still a sense of the “proper place” for a woman in society, regardless of who she marries.