A review by paperbacks_and_planners
The Stranger I Wed by Harper St. George

3.0

Thank you so much to Berkley Romance, PRH Audio, and Netgalley for providing advanced copies of this! All thoughts and opinions are still my own.

I really enjoyed Harper St. George's debut series and was excited to check out this spinoff. Historical is definitely not my most read subgenere, but I loved interconnected series like this.

Unfortunately this one wasn't my favorite. However! I actually quite liked the romance aspect itself.

In this we are following a young woman who needs to marry someone with a title in order to get an inheritance from the father & family that never claimed her as their own. So she strikes up a deal with an Earl who needs the money she can bring to the marriage.

I love a good marriage of convenience romance. The forced proximity aspect just brings such good tension to the romance.

And I really enjoyed this couples chemistry together. I loved the stolen nights in her room, faking the consummation, tense carriage rides... all of it was top tier.

But this book had - quite literally - zero plot. There was nothing driving this story forward. Instead it was 300+ pages of these 2 characters getting to know each other.

They are together from the very beginning. No big drama, just a quick marriage of convenience. And from there it is sharing secrets, meeting the family, attending dinners, and long talks.

While I love a slow, character driven story, this needed something. Because at the end of this book I was left feeling like there was no point to this story. There was no end goal they were working towards. Nothing they needed to overcome. It was just... a play by play of the first few months of their marriage.

Not sure if I'll continue on with this series. Not because I think it's bad. But because it's a genre I reach for so infrequently, and I don't think this series will intrigue me enough to reach for in the future.