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As I approached the end of May, it was time to pick up the the Smart Women Read Romance Patreon exclusive book for May. The theme was non-aristocratic hero and the book that won the poll was Rules for a Proper Governess. This is the 7th book in Jennifer Ashley's popular MacKenzies and McBrides series. I was also able to use this for the prompts starts with the letter R for the first board of Love Has Sprung and Lover (embrace on the cover) for the Taylor Swift Quarterly Challenge.
Roberta aka Bertie is watching the trial of a friend of hers that is being falsely charged for the murder of her mistress. Bertie is upset her friend is going to go down for the murder, but when the barrister turns the tides and surprisingly reveals the real murderer, Bertie can't take her eyes off of him. Once everyone has left, Bertie sees the change from his barrister "persona" to the sadness he deals with day to day after his wife passed several years ago. When she's forced to steal something from him by her father since her father's friend's friend was the murder and now arrested, they are drawn to each other. Bertie can't stay away and "finds" herself at his house. When she sees trouble with his two children and the governess, she steps in. The kids befriend Bertie and hold her hostage until Sinclair comes home and can hire her as his new governess. Sinclair is worried that he'll be even more drawn to Bertie and doesn't want to put her in a potentially bad situation, but Bertie wants it all.
I forgot how much I enjoy Jennifer Ashley's writing. I really loved the connection between Bertie and Sinclair and their tension was really good too. The sass Bertie brought to the table was bringing me everything I could need and I really enjoyed seeing how she maneuvered through everything. The kiddos were also really well done I loved that they were two completely different characters and felt like real children. His daughter also broke my heart since she was still kind of processing and dealing with her mother's passing.
Overall this was really well done, but there were a couple things that detracted for me a little bit. The biggest was how much the stakes suddenly increased and didn't feel natural. There were life and death stakes a couple of times. Now the first instance was kind of explained away, but even then it just felt like for what the "villains" were using as their reasons for acting out against Sinclair didn't match their fervor or how they were wanting to get revenge. It just felt disjointed to me. Also, while this mostly read well as a standalone, there were a couple of times when I was obviously missing what's going on or all the names of people that were mentioned mean nothing to me (except Ian and Beth). While I know those are meant to be more of an easter egg, because this was book 7, there was a lot of people involved with couples and their kids from the previous 6 books. Plus we had family members that will most likely be in the remaining 5. It wasn't all the time, but it did stick out to me a little bit because there were so many people involved.
I really enjoyed my time and this was a good reminder that I still have the rest of the series on my tbr. I'll need to bump it up on my list for sure. Jennifer Ashley writes so well and this is a good option if you're looking for a historical romance set in a Regency-esque time period but with main characters that aren't apart of the aristocracy. I'm basic and usually prefer to read in the aristocracy, but this series has a lot of aristocracy adjacent characters that would fit the bill!
Have you read Rules for a Proper Governess?
Bookishly Yours,
Stasi🍎
STATISTICS: Rules for a Proper Governess, Jennifer Ashley, 4-stars, 1 day, eBook, 320 pages, published in 2014, traditionally published
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