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 virtuoso performance from Li. Brava!
“What can a miserable man and a miserable woman do for each other?” Li illustrates how two Romantic era musicians navigated such a relationship.
An unusually placed coda serves as a prelude, not a conclusion, to Li’s recreation of the tumultuous lives of musicians Adelaide Percheron and John Field. Adelaide, an Indian-born orphan of mixed racial heritage, has just learned of the death of her estranged husband, John—credited with the development of the nocturne as a musical form—after years of living separately and pursuing their individual artistic passions. Following that intriguing introduction is an insightful account of the indirect paths each took to survive challenging early years and to advance in the world of music. John was born in Dublin in 1782 into a family of Irish musicians who invested heavily in his musical training, hoping to produce “the next Mozart” despite the talented boy’s sensitive and dreamy nature. The precocious and preternaturally self-possessed Adelaide learns the rudiments of the pianoforte from a governess and strategic life lessons from her grandmother. Eventually, she sets out from Pondicherry for the broader opportunities she believes await her in her father’s native France. Against a background of social upheaval across Europe due to revolutions and Napoleon’s rising power, the two grow and mature in musicality and pursue the lives they’ve imagined for themselves. John and Adelaide have just met, in 1807 Moscow, as this volume ends, leaving the door open for Li to explore their relationship in future installments. Peppered with interludes and glances into the future, Li’s novel explores both the modern commodification of music and the value of art as a means of ensuring immortality, a hedge against the “night” that falls when a life ends. Her keen psychological study of the musicians and their muses delivers the themes elegantly.
A virtuoso performance from Li. Brava!Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9780374613051
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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