Hey all, Sam here.
I’d love to have the energy and enthusiasm to write up a great intro for today’s post, but even just sticking to my blogging plan and getting these posts finished and scheduled is proving problematic thanks to my mental health being in a rough patch right now. But I’m going to get through these posts, at least for the next couple days, and then when I get to my “weekend,” which is Tuesday-Thursday, I’ll work on myself….I hope.
Today’s book review is for a book that I discovered thanks to TikTok. It was a series of shorts portraying a writer and her less-than-cooperative characters, and I quickly started going back and watching more and more of the series. When I learned that the series of videos was being turned into a novel, I was certainly intrigued, and I ended up pre-ordering a paperback copy….and then being impatient and buying the e-book on release day so I could read it.
Let’s jump into the review.
A desperate mother. A dubious escort. And a deranged author who won’t leave them alone.
Caroline Lindley is determined that her new romance novel will be her best one yet. Fantasy! Formal gowns! Fencing! And, of course, a twentysomething heroine to star in an enemies-to-lovers plot with all of Caroline’s favourite tropes.
But Lady Rosamund Hawkhurst is a thirty-six-year-old widow with two children, her sole focus is facilitating a peace treaty between her adopted nation and her homeland, and she flatly refuses to take the correct approach to there being Only One Bed.
What’s an author to do?
Based on her popular Fantasy Heroine YouTube Shorts series, Jill Bearup’s debut novel brings us the best of worlds both meta and medieval-inspired. Terry Pratchett aficionados will enjoy the political intrigue paired with convivial, tongue-in-cheek satire. And then there’s the slow-burn, fade-to-black romance too . . .
If you loved Stranger Than Fiction and The Princess Bride, you will soon find yourself cheering on enemies-to-BFFs Rosamund and Caroline as together they learn what it means to be the hero of your own story.
My Thoughts
Rating: 4 stars
The first roughly 60% or so was covered in the TikTok skits, so there will be a lot that feels VERY familiar, even down to the exact dialogue.
I definitely think that the story read fairly quickly, and it was interesting enough to hold my interest, but at the same time, the writing wasn’t exactly blowing me away. I didn’t particularly feel like there was a depth of description or world building or character introspection. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing, but I’m more used to epic fantasies, which tend to be more expansive on those elements.
While at first I enjoyed the fantasy scene interruptions that broke the fourth wall and had the protagonists and the author talking, they started to happen so frequently that it was a bit frustrating. Sometimes the scene would stop and start a few times as interruptions happened to discuss something that was happening. As a writer myself, I understand how sometimes we talk to our characters and have imagined conversations with them, so there was some amusement and enjoyment from the interactions, but it pushed the boundary of being done too much and losing the novelty of it all.
I did enjoy partway through the novel when the protagonists started pausing the scene to address the author, instead of waiting for the author to speak first. That was interesting.
I think this had the potential to be really really good, but it didn’t quite stick the landing. For most of the book I was feeling that this was good but overall just average, but there was some surprises towards the end of the story that bumped this from good but average to a solid good, which is why I rated it as 4 stars…and there was a hint at the possibility of future installments as the story added another level of Inception/Meta towards the end.
Overall this was a fun, not-as-serious, part fantasy, part contemporary romance, easy and quick to read story, and I did enjoy it.
All right. That is all from me for today. Thank you so much for stopping by, and hopefully I’ll be back tomorrow with more geeky content (mental health dependent, but I’m going to try).
Free State of Geek 