What A Lady Wants
She stood on a balcony at an indefensible hour and asked the universe for a perfect man. A pistol went off next door. A man came down the neighbors’ ivy at speed. She decided that counted.
Overview
Careful what you wish for, and then be extremely specific
Lady Felicity Melville has done the arithmetic on her own life and does not like the answer. She is at the age where offers stop arriving, and she has more or less resigned herself to settling. She would prefer not to. She is preparing to anyway.
So one night on her balcony she puts in a request, half a joke, addressed to whatever power handles this sort of thing. A French musketeer would do. Then a shot rings out next door and Nigel Cavendish comes down the ivy in considerable haste, leaving a married woman’s bedroom while her husband fires at him.
The boring bit
Receipts
Story plotline
Three ways in, all of them spoilers
The wedding is the complication rather than the resolution, which is the structural decision everything else depends on. These three pages take the book apart from different angles.
What actually happens
Beat by beat with page numbers, from the wish on the balcony to a man kneeling in front of his own wife.
Two people avoiding the same test
He arranged his life so nobody could measure him. She has been measured every season since she came out. Only one of them could afford the strategy.
Tropes and themes
All standard furniture, two pieces turned inside out. The marriage sits in the middle and the grand gesture is a question.
Characters
Who you are dealing with
Three of five here. The other two, including the man who shapes the entire novel without appearing in it, are on the full character page.
Lady Felicity Melville
Offered a choice between safety and finding out, she leans over the railing. Every time, and it costs her.
Nigel Cavendish
Performing stupidity as a full-time job, and doing it well enough that his own family believes it.
Madeline, Lady Windham
Engineers the whole thing, tells the truth about her brother by accident, and calls him an idiot on her way out.
See the full character hub, including the father who never appears and the woman on page one who pays for everything.
The series
Five books, one bet, and every novel is somebody losing it
Four friends put up a shilling and a bottle of cognac on which of them stays unmarried longest. Cavendish is named at that table in book one, and the closing toast there turns out to be a running order rather than a joke.
A Little Bit Wicked
Sold as a merry widow in red silk. Actually about coercion and ten years of misplaced guilt.
Secrets of a Proper Lady
Both of them are lying, and neither one knows it.
Seduction of a Proper Gentleman
The winner loses. Third man down.
The full series hub, including book five and what the four of them have in common.
The author
Who wrote it
RaeRae Reviews
The verdict
The comic premise is a decoy
Better than book one, and book one was good. The trellis on the cover sells a farce. What is actually underneath is a woman deciding what she will accept and a man discovering he is capable. What it gets right, what it flinches from, and who should skip it.
Waiting on the other three
Two books into five, a series verdict would be a guess in a nice font. The series hub covers what the five share until the real thing exists.
RaeRae Reacts
Four scenes that would not leave
Not the loudest moments in the book. The ones still taking up space days later. One is gratitude in the wrong direction, one is the line the title has been waiting for, one is a man alone in a room, and one involves a pistol and a very poor explanation. All four open into the full react, which runs six.
She stops on the steps and thanks the star
Felicity is leaving. She stops on the way to the carriage, looks up, and thanks the star she wished on in chapter one. Not bitterly. She got exactly what she asked for, and she is grateful, which is so much worse than anger.
You have forfeited the right to ask
Nigel asks her what she wants. She tells him the question is no longer his to ask. The whole title pays off in one sentence, and it lands as a door closing rather than a speech.
Behind his father’s desk. No. His desk.
The most consequential scene in the novel is a man sitting down with an account book and privately revising his opinion of himself. No audience, no declaration. He simply discovers he can do this.
She is holding a pistol and he is explaining himself badly
Funny until you notice the arrangement. She is the one who is armed, she is the one who is calm, and he is talking far too much. The book keeps handing her the position of power in scenes that are dressed as jokes.
RaeRae Rants
One thing I am not letting go
He refused to be measured and the bill never came
Fifteen years of doing nothing in particular costs Nigel a reputation as a charming disappointment, and that is the entire invoice. Any woman in this book who ran the same strategy would be finished by thirty. Same choice, wildly different price.
Because the book knows
This is not a flaw I am catching the novel in. Alexander is holding the double standard up deliberately and letting it sit there. Bad books irritate. Good books make you furious on behalf of somebody who is not real.
Regency 101
Things the book assumes you already know
What a widow could actually do
Why widowhood was the only position in the period that gave a woman her own money, her own house, and the right to say no.
Red flags, green flags, and why the hot one is never the test
Romance is read young and arrives years before most readers have anything to compare it against. The pattern, in the order it actually happens.
Read directly from the novel, Kindle edition, and described in our own words. · Last Man Standing · Victoria Alexander · The Library