Honestly, what in the living fuck was this?

It started off very well. He doesn't think much of her, she insults him. Then, somewhere between performing with the actor's troupe and the village charging on the tavern, things took a turn for the ridiculous. I gritted my teeth and soldiered on, telling myself it would improve. Oh, how wrong I was.

I can handle ridiculous. I can't handle stupidity. The last… twenty? thirty? percent is downright stupid.

Basically, at this point Colin and Pru both realise they love each other, but because Colin thinks Melody is his daughter he has to marry Chantal, whom he believes to be Melody's mother, in order for Melody to be recognised as legitimate and to have a chance in society. Thus Colin and Pru must separate, but not before having one night together.

It's the most melodramatic thing I've read in my life, made worse by the fact that Bradley insists on randomly inserting into italics each character's inner monologue, which is always some variation of 'oh, my own true love, I cannot bear to be parted from you but woe is me I have to suffer it anyway and I will love only you forever'. Honestly I think they secretly enjoyed the whole 'lovers who have to part for the sake of a higher duty' thing because neither of them bothered to examine the circumstances of why exactly they did have to part. There is literally no reliable evidence that Melody is Colin's daughter. Colin wants her to be, because he's very attached to her, but in the previous book they'd vaguely accepted that she was Jack's daughter. So what happens is that we have to sit through a load of Colin and Pru not demonstrating critical thinking skills, for all they are apparently smart and resourceful people, and their tiresome desirous thoughts for one another which we the reader know are labouring under misapprehension. Maybe it would've been tolerable if I believed more in their love for each other, but I didn't. They had a pretty nice dynamic going until they gave into their feelings of desire — at which point it fled.

I've gone through all the reviews and I can't believe no one's brought up the fact that there are TOO MANY EXCLAMATION MARKS IN THIS. I did a search, and there are 645. Minus maybe twenty or so for the reviews and preview of the next book — that's still WELL OVER SIX HUNDRED. For reference, I searched through three other historical romances, chosen by random, all by different authors, and they contained 180, 57 and 165 exclamation marks respectively. So you see how ludicrous 645 is. Adding exclamation marks onto everything is the kind of thing you outgrow in primary school, so I've no idea why a professional writer still persists in sticking one onto the end of every fucking sentence. Does she not know what an exclamation mark means? Does she not know that it, of all the punctuation marks, is the one which has to be used with the most caution? Using too many ellipses makes you sound like an old person on Twitter, sure, but that's not fatal. Using too many commas suggests you don't know when to stop a sentence, but that's the kind of thing you can learn. But using too many exclamation marks? It shows a complete absence of the sense of delicacy and balance needed to be truly funny — and past the age of 25, I don't think humour can be learnt — as well as a sort of personal failing as (one presumes) you have read your manuscript containing over six hundred exclamation marks, and not possessed the observational skills to think: "Oh! Perhaps I've gone a bit overboard! Only a mad person's mind is constantly exclaiming things." Maybe that explains it? The author is mad? Well I'm mad too, because I have read this sentence:

What would this mighty weapon do to her?

Yes, the mighty weapon is what you think it is. Rightly you point out that that quote doesn't have an exclamation mark. This one has plenty though, and it's said by Colin in protest as Pru is in the middle of seducing him for their tragic one night together:

"You will marry someday! You must be pure!"

You know what I mean? Sometimes you see something so bad you hope to God it's ironic. Unfortunately for both of us, that line was not.

What else? Oh yeah, the Goodreads description for this is a lie — Pru only makes a tiny deal of the fact that Colin is titled. Honestly I liked Pru, except for when she was being moony over Colin. There's an excellent part where she just snaps and quite right calls Chantal "a one-woman disaster on wheels". On the other hand, Colin is not what book 1 cracked him up to be and I am bitterly disappointed. Together he and Pru were kind of dull and kind of sickening. Evan, Pru's brother, was well-sketched out and Melody was as good as she was in the first book. However I do hold deep reservations about her marriage (which is happening about twenty years after the romances of the books) because at the beginning she desperately asks how can she know if she'll love her husband forever. To my mind if she doesn't at least believe (despite reasonable doubt) that she will love him forever, she shouldn't be marrying him. At some point love becomes a choice, and you can't make that kind of choice without believing in it. So lowkey I think she's in a pickle that will be drawn out for three books, but then again what do I know? I've never been married.

I am probably being too harsh on this. There's a really nice moment when Colin thinks of Pru as his best friend, which is a thing I don't think I've ever read before in historical romance? and I've read quite a few. But the onslaught of exclamation marks reduced my already thinning patience with the weirdly-plotted romance, and anyway I've never pretended to be anything other than opinionated and analytical in my reviews. So here we are.