The Best Marriage in the Series, in the Fewest Pages
A hundred and fifteen pages that understand more about how a marriage fails than the four novels around it manage between them.
The short version
The smallest book in the series and the most grown up. It is also the one I would hand to somebody who thinks historical romance is all ballrooms and dukes, because it is about a woman in a comfortable marriage discovering that comfortable is the problem.
What it gets right
It diagnoses the marriage correctly
Most romances about a troubled marriage reach for a betrayal. This one reaches for silence, and it names the problem on page ten with unusual precision: “They no longer had the passion needed for argument or debate. Or for anything else.”
Nothing has gone wrong. That is what has gone wrong. Amelia is not lonely for company, she is lonely for friction, and she actively looks forward to the possibility of a row because a row would mean he was still there.
The heroine is the strategist
Across five books Victoria Alexander keeps giving the woman more information than the man thinks she has, and this is the purest version. Amelia does not take a lover. She invents one, orders her own anonymous flowers, and blackmails her brother-in-law into supplying them, all to manufacture an opponent because the real problem has no shape.
Meanwhile her husband believes he is running a campaign to win her back. He is a participant in hers.
It is genuinely funny in the way adults are funny
The brandy scene is the best comic writing in the series. “Goodness, Robert, I’m not hiring a servant, I’m looking for a lover” and then, worse, “Very good. I’m impressed” when he manages to have heard one thing she said. Complimenting your husband on his listening is a devastating weapon and she wields it with a full glass in her hand.
The ending
I am not going to restate it. It is in the reacts. What I will say is that it takes the tiredest device in the book, identical twins swapping places, and reveals that the woman was never fooled by it once in twenty years. That single reveal converts the whole novella from a farce into a definition of intimacy, and it does it in about eight lines of dialogue.
Robert is written fairly
It would have been easy to make him a neglectful husband who deserves what is coming. Instead he is reserved by temperament, genuinely ambitious, actually listening, and simply unaware that a marriage requires maintenance. When Amelia says he pays no notice, his “And yet I did notice that” is true and is not a defense. He heard everything and responded to none of it.
What does not work
It is too short for its own ending
This is the real complaint. The reveal at page 103 is strong enough to carry a full novel, and it arrives with a dozen pages left. There is no room to sit in it, no scene of the two of them living in the new arrangement, no proper reckoning between Robert and Harry about six years of Amelia’s silence.
A novella can absolutely do this story. This one just spends its middle on a courtship campaign that is pleasant rather than necessary, and then has to sprint.
Harry gets used and never gets a conversation
He kissed his brother’s wife under false pretenses, was quietly forgiven for six years by the only person who knew, and is then blackmailed with it. That is a rich situation, and the novella never puts him and Robert in a room to deal with it. His moral line is the firmest in the book and it is treated mostly as an obstacle to route around.
The middle is a holding pattern
Between the declaration and the carriage there is a stretch of flowers, maneuvering and near misses that generates pleasant scenes and very little pressure. That impression was formed on the first, sampled pass through it.
Who should read it
| You will like it if | You will not if |
|---|---|
| You want a romance that starts after the wedding | You want a courtship and a first kiss |
| You like a heroine running the whole operation | Blackmail as flirtation puts you off |
| You have had the argument about nothing being wrong | You need a villain |
| You will read a novella for two perfect scenes | You want a full novel’s worth of resolution |
Where it sits in the series
Numbered fifth. Read it third.
The closing scene has Oliver and Sinclair at the club with both of them still unmarried, which puts this between book two and book three. Reading it there means Sinclair’s speech about fighting to his last dying breath lands as a promise rather than an artifact, and you get the tontine at its exact halfway point.
Read last, as the numbering suggests, it is a pleasant coda. Read third, it is a hinge.
As a book, it is better than Secrets of a Proper Lady, whose third act collapses onto an unread letter, and shorter than it deserves next to Seduction of a Proper Gentleman, which has the room to land properly. Best single scene in the series. Not the best book in it.
Read directly from the novella, Kindle edition, and described in our own words. No review copy, no publisher relationship. · Book hub · All RaeRae Reviews