Chapel Orahamm

Roger not only had to prove himself to the Council, he also had to prove himself to Wyndham Wrenwhistle.

Fae and humans alike are returning to London for the Season, but the excitement is marred by the growing poverty rate among humans with low magical scores.

Tenacious Roger Barnes proposes a new rubric for testing magic to the Council, hoping to resolve the predicament for his fellow humans. But when he is paired with Wyndham Wrenwhistle, a dashing fae who has disliked him since childhood, the project seems destined to fail. Even after reaching a tentative truce, their fragile partnership crumbles due to malicious lies.

Adding to the disarray, a popular gossip column unexpectedly announces that Roger and Wyn are engaged. Obliged to go along with the falsehood to save their families from scandal, they are forced to reconcile their differences for the sake of the rubric — and for their impending marriage. As the project bleeds into their wedding plans, the pressure to flawlessly execute both mounts even higher.

Together, they have the chance to solve a crisis decades in the making — but they’ll need more than magic to succeed.

So, my introduction to Sarah Wallace was her book Letters from Half-Moon Street. And I bemoaned my wish in my review that I wished to read something other than letters by her. That I felt like there was a type of depth she would have to her stories. Primarily the world-building.

Imagine my surprise to run across another of her works – just to say it, I don’t really go looking for authors, I just let the Kobo algorithm give me recommendations because their filter system is kinda bogus. I do wish they’d get someone to run a better user interface on the front end, but that is going to be a different review.

Circling back – I hadn’t really put in too much more thought on finding another of Wallace’s works outside of that random comment. Initially, I was going to keep my blog to single stories rather than doing sets by authors so that it didn’t just become one long review of a single author. That went out the door with Cooper. So, I’m coming back to Wallace’s writings and exploring a worldbuild with character development outside of a letter system.

And…I can’t say I was disappointed. But I found I skipped over paragraphs or skimmed frequently. It was more dense, and the pacing slowed considerably for the builds. It….I wanted to trim it. And I don’t think that was fair to the author. There has to be readers who liked the amount of time she spent in smoothing out the MC and LI’s characters.

The premise of some random gossip column writer making these two characters get engaged also didn’t quite sit as believable for me to root for them. It would have made better sense to bring a lawsuit against the writer for defamation or libel. That might just be an Americanism by me, though.

Still, I couldn’t quite click with Wrenwhistle or his mother. And that made it hard for me to really give this story more than a peruse.

I think also I need a bit more of an outline about the inheritance scheme with these stories, let alone where money is coming from for all these upper echelon kids’ families that can’t give them an inheritance. I think I like ‘historic’ romances like Regency and Victorian that give just a modicum of time to how the folk have their money, whether that’s through invested shipping, owning multiple building companies, etc. etc. That balances something for me in setting up a ‘safe’ relationship. In here, it looks like the MC is trying to establish other methods to help people gain a foothold in society, and that ends up with him making his way onto a board, which means he’d have some money independently. That much I get, but…like…whose parents’ own townhouses and multiple country houses? Why? Where did the money come from? That’s just my curiosity. Not a plot hole. Could be a plot hole. If the reader is focusing on that type of question, it probably needed to be addressed. Wallace has a whole series in this world and I just picked one at random, so it probably is addressed somewhere and taking an entire chapter to explain it all over again gets really tedious to dedicated readers, so I will tame my opinion on this particular point.

The editing was fine. I can’t complain about it at the grammar/typo stage. But the pacing was off. It could have been trimmed and not lost much for it.

I shouldn’t complain about pacing – I’m actively writing a piece with the intention of it exceeding 300K because I want a high epic fantasy that’ll go for a few years on here. So, pacing shouldn’t be something I’m biting at. I just couldn’t keep my focus wholly on a decent number of paragraphs and didn’t lose much of the experience for it.

The on page spice was also…enough? With these two, it could have been left at fade-to-black and not lost much. The aspect of one of the scenes giving the MC his choice in keeping his shirt on because he was aware of being a heavier individual and not wanting to expose that was a nice nod toward that option for some people who are nervous about body image. But I couldn’t quite ever put my finger on their relationship being much more than almost platonic. The MC was in that aesthetic interest broadly swinging to intellectual interest – something in the demi/ace camp. I don’t know – I’m pan and have a bit harder time picking up on those distinctions for the opposite end of the spectrum. I think these two could have probably ‘just been friends’ and the story wouldn’t have suffered for it.

Would I suggest it? I…

I don’t know? I think some people would probably genuinely enjoy the depiction for a heavier MC finding love. It was a cozy style of writing that would be comforting for some people. I think the story build just didn’t ring for me because it felt like an easy enough thing to undo – the premise of the engagement.

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