#TBRChallenge 2023: Historical Romance Novella Round-Up

I got a spring head cold a few weeks back that turned out to be a bit of a vampire. It was my first cold since before COVID (I know!) and it wiped me out. Lucky me, I got better just in time for My Man to come down with it! So, yeah. My reading mojo got derailed for a bit and this month's TBR Challenge snuck up on me.  My answer to this? Find some novellas, and quick! Which worked out well for this month's Freebie theme. I like to read short, I like novellas, so when authors offer them up as promotional free downloads, I tend to snap up them up.  I ended up devouring three of them late one night and like all things novellas - it was a decidedly mixed bag.

First up was A Sweet Surrender by Lena Hart, which I downloaded back in 2017 and was originally published in the For Love & Liberty anthology that also featured Be Not Afraid by Alyssa Cole.  Set during the American Revolution, this one features a half-Native, half-Black heroine and a British officer dude she nurses back to health after he's wounded in an ambush.  

Here's the problem, it features all the problematic "stuff" readers have come to expect in romances featuring indigenous people and colonizers - and a novella is just too little room to adequately explore that. On top of that there's a heaping dose of dubious consent (she says "no," he convinces her otherwise...) and these two decide they're madly in love with each other at a lightning pace.  It's wildly uneven. In order for a story like this to have a chance of working, it needs to be a doorstopper saga. Multigenerational wouldn't hurt either.  As a novella?  Nope.  Also, the story itself is around 80 pages, but the Kindle edition clocks in at 152, which means you get a rather large excerpt for the second story in the series after this one ends. Not a big deal for me since I downloaded this for free, but I know that kind of thing really irritates some readers.  

Final Grade = D

I don't have a record of downloading The French Maid by Sabrina Jeffries from Big Brother Amazon, which means I'm pretty sure I got this as a free download at (most likely) an RWA conference.  This is a short story that clocks in around 30 pages. The writing is smooth, and I liked the story - but it's also the kind of story that if you look at it for too long it starts to irritate you.  

Our heroine is no raving beauty, but she's smart and well-connected, making her the perfect wife for our hero with ambitions to one day be Prime Minister.  They've been married a year and she's feeling neglected. He's the type of guy who schedules intimacy with his wife (Wednesday nights) and the rest of the time he pays about as much attention to her as a potted plant.  When her lady's maid leaves their employment to marry, he does have the presence of mind to hire his wife a new one (a French one!) but of course doesn't consult her on this matter in the least. 

The moral of this story is that marriage takes work and if you neglect it, it will die on the vine. I liked that Babette basically tells the heroine, "Yeah, he's neglecting you but what exactly have you done about it? (The answer is nothing, the heroine is suffering in silence) You're both being lazy." Of course how do these two start to come together? A makeover of course. It takes the hero seeing the heroine all prettied up to start the process of getting his head out of his ass, and if I think about that too long I'm just annoyed.  Look pretty girls or be doomed to a life of neglect from your husband.

Final Grade = C

Harlequin has about as much luck with novella lines (see: Harlequin Historical Undone, Spice Briefs and Carina Press's Dirty Bits) as they do romantic comedy category romance lines, but I liked Undone. They were quick, short, and typically ran sexier than regular Harlequin Historicals. I thought I had read all the ones I owned, but then I found An Imprudent Lady by Elaine Golden buried on my Kindle, having downloaded it as a freebie back in 2011!

The heroine (a Lady) is in her 30s and officially a dried up old spinster. When she was younger she fell passionately in love with a doctor's son - a mere mister. This was a scandal of epic proportions for her parents, so they pull all the strings and bingo-bango, the hero's exiled to India.  Well, guess what? He's back. Her father may be dead, but her mother has a dang fit of apoplexy.  With the youngest daughter having her first Season and Evil Mama determined to make an excellent match, the scandal reigniting is the last thing they need!  Of course the heroine and hero are still hung up on each other, and as the story moves forward we learn the lengths the heroine's family went to to keep the two star-crossed lovers apart.

If you're a fan of the star-crossed trope, this one really worked for me. There's secrets, there's lies, and it's all in a short enough package (80 pages) that it never wears out it's welcome.  There's also passion and sizzle between the couple, with some well done sexy-times to spice up the proceedings.  It's the first book in a trilogy of novellas, with the youngest daughter and the heroine's older brother getting their own stories.  I can't believe I missed this one the first go around (I read SO many of these Undones back in the day!) but I was glad to find it now.

Final Grade = B