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Series Hub · Rachel Van Dyken · 8 titles, more than one series

London Fairy Tales

Regency romance built on fairy tale bones. Wallflowers, ugly ducklings, sleeping beauties and beasts, moved into ballrooms and given titles.

The conceitThe eight booksA note on coversOn the shelf
AuthorRachel Van Dyken
Length8 on this shelf
SettingRegency London
PublisherIndependent
Correction: these eight titles are not one series. This Library had all eight filed together under London Fairy Tales. Checking against the publisher listings, that is wrong in at least two ways.

London Fairy Tales is a four book series. Upon a Midnight Dream is book one and When Ash Falls is book four, and the latter is not on this shelf at all.

Waltzing with the Wallflower is a separate three book series with its own numbering, ending at Taming Wilde. It is also co-written with Leah Sanders, who was missing from this shelf record entirely.

Which of the remaining titles belongs to which run has not been established and is not guessed at below. The shelf record has been corrected for the two titles confirmed so far.

The conceit

Fairy tales in evening dress

The titles give the game away and are meant to. This is a set of Regency romances each built on a recognisable fairy tale or fairy tale shape, transposed into the ton: the overlooked girl who turns out to be the beauty, the sleeping enchantment, the beast who needs a bride, the wallflower nobody asked to dance.

They are short, fast and unashamedly comfort reading, which is a legitimate thing for a shelf to contain. Rachel Van Dyken is an independently published author working at speed, and these are not trying to be Sarah MacLean. They are trying to be exactly what they are, and eight of them ended up here, which is its own kind of verdict.

Reading order: loosely connected rather than sequential. Characters recur and there is a shared social world, but each stands on its own, so the order below is publication order rather than a required sequence.

The books

All eight titles on this shelf

Fairy tale shapeWaltzing With the WallflowerThe overlooked girl and the season she decides to stop being overlooked in. The one most people start with.
Fairy tale shapeBeguiling BridgetA companion piece to the wallflower book, following the friend rather than the heroine.
Ugly ducklingThe Ugly Duckling DebutanteThe title is the entire premise and the book is not coy about it.
Sleeping beautyUpon a Midnight DreamThe enchanted-sleep shape, moved into a Regency house party.
Beauty and the beastThe Devil Duke Takes a BrideA duke with a reputation as a monster, and the bride who declines to be frightened.
RedemptionThe Redemption of Lord RawlingsA rake given a second chance he has not obviously earned.
Seduction plotThe Seduction of Sebastian St. JamesA courtship conducted deliberately and badly, on purpose.
Alliance plotAn Unlikely AllianceTwo people who should not work together, working together.

A note

Why there are no covers here

Every other series hub on this site shows the publishers’ covers. This one does not, and the reason is worth stating rather than hiding behind a design choice.

These books are independently published, and independent titles are thinly catalogued. Open Library has a usable cover for exactly one of the eight, and the Barnes & Noble image service returns nothing for the ISBNs that do exist. Rather than pad the page with one cover and seven gray rectangles, or scrape a low-resolution thumbnail that would look broken at card size, the books are listed as text.

If cover art matters for this series, the fastest fix is to pull the images from the owner’s own NOOK library listing, where every title displays a cover. Those are small (roughly 145 pixels wide) but real, and would at least be accurate.

Coverage

Where this sits

Eight titles by this author sit on the shelf, but they are not a single run. See the correction above: they span at least two separate series, one of them co-written.

Nothing in these novels has been read directly. The fairy tale shapes above are inferred from the titles and the series framing, which is unusually safe to do here because the titles are explicit by design, but they are inferences and are flagged as such. Where a book’s shape was not obvious from its title, the description says what kind of plot it is rather than claiming to know the story.

See the whole Library → · Rachel Van Dyken has 8 titles on this shelf →

No cover images available for this series from the sources used. No part of these novels has been read directly for this page, and the per-book descriptions are inferred from titles and series framing rather than from the text.

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