I read a fair amount of historical romance this year, and a great deal of it was dreck. (Mostly my fault, since I tend to buy historical romance almost solely when it’s cheap.) But there were some good books.

Historical Romance

The Thief-Takers
Set in London in 1872

I picked up the first book because: Thief-Takers. That makes it a mystery of sorts, right? Well, not so much a mystery, and there is boinking, but it was interesting enough that I got the second book.

I quite like the second sister. Esther, like her older sister Charlotte, is damaged. Their father raised them to be good thieves and con artists, and it’s been difficult for Esther to move past that.

No one person’s good opinion should mean so much that another person should feel compelled to change who they are to obtain it.”

But she slowly does, and she and her sister come to terms with their past and how it shaped them.
A Gift for Guile (2016) Alissa Johnson : 8/10

Courtney Milan : The Worth Saga
Set in London in 1866

Courtney Milan writes a lot of damaged characters, but she does it very well, and the damage is often something that would less damaging in the modern world than it was at the time. In this story, both the hero and the heroine’s younger sister have what would today be classified as mental illnesses. It’s enlightening and distressing to see how such characteristics that are today mostly accepted were hidden and treated.

Demolition, then division: He’d separated the bits first by size, and when that seemed unsatisfying on some gut level, by deviation from roundness.

Then, he’d very carefully started eating— from the most irregularly shaped crumb toward the most symmetrical.

He was almost finished with the infuriatingly oblong bits when Judith came in.

Once Upon a Marquess (2015) Courtney Milan : 8/10

The Brothers Sinister
A Kiss for Midwinter is set in England in 1863.

Miss Lydia Charingford has been ruined. But thanks to her best friend Minnie, no one knows about her ruin except Minnie, her family, and the doctors who saw her.

Jonas Grantham is a doctor–it has been his dream. And once he became a doctor, he vowed never to allow anyone to act against his principles as he did when a doctor he was following all but attempted to murder the pregnant young girl he was seeing.

The Suffragette Scandal is set in England in 1877

This is set more than a decade after the other books in the series, which allows it to be set during the first calls for universal suffrage.

I like both characters in this story, but what I especially like about her writing is her dialog and humor.

“Are you really left-handed?” Mr. Marshall asked.

“No. I’ve just been pretending to use my left hand my entire life because I enjoy never being able to work scissors properly.”

Lots of boinking in all her books.
A Kiss for Midwinter (2012) Courtney Milan : 8.5/10
The Suffragette Scandal (2014) Courtney Milan : 9/10

The Turner Series
Unclaimed  is set in England in 1841.

Why do I like this story?

“But, Sir Mark! She’s wearing scarlet. She made you give up your coat. You can’t really believe she’s an innocent. She…she could be a fallen woman!”

“There is no such thing as a fallen woman—you just need to look for the man who pushed her.”
…
“When someone falls,” Mark said, “you don’t throw her back down in the dirt. You offer her a hand up. It’s the Christian thing to do.”

That’s why.

Unraveled  is set in England in 1843.

You have to feel sorry for a man whose mother named him Smite. He is badly damaged by his past, but what I particularly liked is that although he found someone to love him, he is not miraculously healed by that love. He is still a prickly difficult person–no magic adoration can change that.
Unclaimed (2011) Courtney Milan  : 8/10
Unraveled (2011) Courtney Milan : 8.5/10

If you click through any of the Amazon links and buy something, it’ll get me hapenny or so, which will eventually let me buy another book.