A sweet Regency romance with a healthy dose of mystery and resolution.
Matchmaker, matchmaker, make yourself a match.
Arthur Shelton, Earl of Macklin, is known for his heavy hand in other people’s love lives—a widower himself, he’s helped many young men heal their broken hearts by finding true love. And when he realizes he’s ready to find love again, he heads to London to visit old friends—“and who knew what else might turn up?” But it’s not in a ballroom where he finds his match; instead, while walking down the street with a friend, he meets Teresa Alvarez de Granada and feels an instant attraction though he knows little about her—and she intends to keep it that way. Teresa, having escaped a difficult life in Spain, wants nothing to do with Arthur or any other man, especially a nobleman—she only wants to paint for the theater and enjoy her quiet apartment. But when several dancers at Teresa's theater go missing and Arthur offers to use his standing to help find them, the investigation brings the two closer together. Despite Teresa's attempts to keep Arthur at a distance, she finds herself starting to believe he really is the man he seems to be, but just as they start to connect, pieces of her past reappear and may keep them apart. The finale to Ashford’s The Way to a Lord’s Heart series will satisfy readers who have wondered about the mysterious nobleman from the previous entries. Ashford explores the ideas of privilege and nobility with the help of Lord Macklin as well as cameos from characters from earlier books, which is satisfying. Though there are awkward moments, particularly with Teresa’s inconsistent use of Spanish, the story is quite sweet despite some dark moments in the discovery of the missing dancers. As with earlier entries, Ashford’s greatest strength is in depicting moments of true connection in relationships, both friendly and romantic, and readers more interested in those moments than steamy love scenes will find much to enjoy here.
A sweet Regency romance with a healthy dose of mystery and resolution.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4926-6347-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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