Lord Perfect

I liked Benedict quite a bit, which is saying something when he was one half of my least favorite romance tropes (She's Just Not Good Enough For Me). I won't spoil any plot details, but know that things progressed smoothly without any overt asshattedness on his part, and Bathsheba (best heroine name ever, btw), works through her own half of the book without any egregious self-confidence issues.

Not a re-read, but enjoyable. ( )

I thought this was a pretty enjoyable read from Loretta Chase. Bathsheba and Rathbourne had great chemistry, and though they were more mature—each had been married before—they were still adorable as they discovered their feelings for each other. Before reading the book, I had expected that the parts with the children on the run would be tedious, interrupting the romance, but in actuality, this wasn’t the case at all. The kids’ storyline broke up the monotony of the two adults traveling in search of them. After all, there’s only so much you can read about Rathbourne and Bathsheba’s growing feelings for each other as they pass through one town after another.

One of the main conflicts of the story, the inappropriateness of Rathbourne giving into his attraction to a woman from a scandalous family, didn’t seem really high stakes to me. Readers kept *being told* that this would be bad, but we weren’t *shown* how it would be bad and difficult to overcome. We didn’t really get exposed to Rathbourne’s fearsome father or the rest of his family; we didn’t meet Bathsheba’s scandalous family ourselves; nor did we get any scenes with the rest of society. Instead, we mostly hear about how any attraction has to be extinguished because it would be a Bad Idea from Rathbourne and Bathsheba themselves. So we didn’t have our own sense of the types of family and societal pressure they’d face that would make being together difficult. As a result, this didn’t convince me that it was a major obstacle. Just compare the stakes here to the stakes in a book like Sarah Maclean’s Eleven Scandals to Start to Win a Duke’s Heart and you’ll see what I mean; in that one, the hero really did have a lot to lose.
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Scrumptious reading, I loved this one, best in the series so far! Some parts are hilarious!

http://ktleyed.blogspot.com/2012/01/lord-perfect-by-loretta-chase.html ( )

Lady Wombat says:

Not as inventive or compelling as the two earlier volumes in the Carsington Brothers series. But still an enjoyable read.

Benedict Carsington, Viscount Rathbourne, has to look after his nephew Peregrine while his parents are staying in Scotland. When Peregrine joins his teacher's daughter, Olivia, in a mad treasure hunt, Benedict has to chase after the children in order to save them from unknown perils. He is accompanied by the teacher, beautiful Batsheba Wingate, who he's wildly attracted to...This is an absolutely wonderful book, I enjoyed every minute of reading it. The characters are actual characters rather than stereotypes. They have quirks and characteristics like actual people, and the chemistry between the hero and heroine is so intense that you can see that they belong together - even though they both know that they can never marry (until the book's happy end, of course). And really, I could never resist a book with a declaration of love like this:
He smiled. "I shall never forgive you for that, Batsheba. For that and a great deal else. I believe I shall nurse a...grudge...to the end of my days."
"Ah, well, at least you won't forget me", she said.
"Forget you? I should as easily forget a bout of whooping cough. [...]" ( )