Brazen and the Beast
Brazen and the Beast is vintage Sarah MacLean. Which is, for me, a good thing. I was completely absorbed in the romance, which is perfectly paced and gets off to a good start, but unfortunately, not everything else is as good and the villains (except one, who features in the next book) are underdeveloped, underutilized, and not very villainous. These factors detract from this entertaining and romantic story featuring a non-traditional heroine you can’t help but like. Brazen and the Beast is an enjoyable and entertaining continuation of The Bareknuckle Bastards series, but like its predecessor, it failed to live up to my (admittedly high) expectations.
On the eve of her twenty-ninth birthday, Lady Henrietta Sedley is looking forward to The Year of Hattie. She’s traded her dreams of finding true love or marrying and having children, for a much different future altogether – a four point plan to captain her own fate. Business: Owning/running Sedley Shipping (despite her father’s plan for older brother August to inherit); Home (one of her own – although, she seems to have complete freedom to come and go from the one she currently inhabits); Fortune (presumably from said shipping business); Future (to live life on her own terms). Oh, and a fifth – Body. Before she can undertake The Year of Hattie, she’s made arrangements to remove one last possible obstacle to her plans – marriage – by ruining herself. Pleasurably. When Brazen and the Beast begins, Hattie is ready to depart for a rendezvous at a discreet and upscale bordello wherein she will lose her virginity and with it, the possibility of marriage. Her co-conspirator and driver for this adventure is her best friend Lady Eleanora Madewell (Nora). Unfortunately, the clandestine plan hits a snag when Hattie steps into the carriage and discovers a strange man, bound and unconscious, within.
They’d left the hitched – and most definitely empty – carriage in the dark rear drive of Sedley house not three quarters of an hour earlier, before hiking upstairs to exchange carriage-hitching dresses for attire more appropriate for their evening plans.
Hattie isn’t willing to let three months of planning for this night go to waste. After confirming he’s still alive (and that he’s beautiful), Hattie tells Nora to carry on – they’ll drop him off somewhere along the way. (As one does.)
After the last three Bareknuckle Bastard shipments of smuggled goods were ambushed, Beast (brother of Devil, Wicked and the Wallflower), is determined to find out who dares to challenge them. Expecting an ambush, he accompanied the shipment – but he isn’t sure how he wound up trussed in a luxurious carriage with a sweet smelling woman muttering to herself. He remembers hearing a shot and then a shout from one of his injured outriders, stepping outside the carriage to check on the boy, and then everything went black after he was hit from behind. Few would dare to cross Beast or his brother Devil, but he suspects Ewan, Duke of Marwick, is behind the attacks. If he is, then who is the woman holding him hostage in the carriage?
Hattie is annoyed – and curious. Clearly, her brother August and his ne’er do well valet have something to do with the beautiful man trussed up in the carriage, but since he won’t answer her questions – responding with hard questions of his own – they’re at a standstill. So Hattie gets her Year of Hattie off to an early start by kissing her surprised captive, cutting the knots at his hands and feet (with her convenient pocket knife), apologizing, and shoving him out of the carriage. After watching to see he lands more or less on his feet, she refocuses her attention on her coming appointment. Beast is less satisfied with the abrupt end to their acquaintance, and since Covent Garden (where Hattie is headed) is his territory, he promptly follows her to a surprisingly familiar address.
A fierce (and clever, sharp and sexy) re-negotiation of Hattie’s ‘Business; Home; Fortune; Future; Pleasure’ plan ensues after Beast runs his unwary quarry to ground; and although they eventually agree on a new plan, they part with very different interpretations of what they’ve mutually agreed to… and thus, Brazen and the Beast truly gets underway. Despite the absolutely ridiculous set up, I wanted to fall in love with it. Hattie and Beast have wonderful chemistry, their dialogue is sparkling and witty and sharp, and the sexual undercurrents and tension are terrifically well done. Beast has a difficult and unhappy backstory that ties into the overarching bastard storyline and it’s hard not to love him after learning about his origins. His quiet intensity and fierceness are a nice foil for Hattie’s bright light, and they’re great together. I also loved the cameos featuring Devil and Felicity (although I wish there were more of them), and the sub- plot involving Nora and an enforcer in the Barenuckle Bastards family. These things work. So what doesn’t and why isn’t this a DIK?
Hattie is (on paper) a magnificent heroine: unapologetically industrious, bright and clever, tall and voluptuous, fiercely independent, loyal, generous and confident – yet she’s still plagued with insecurities about her appearance and her appeal to the opposite sex. She’s relatable. But while MacLean mostly gives us that Hattie, she fails to deliver on the single most significant part of this characterization (and the one on which the entire story hinges): Hattie’s brilliance as a business woman. With the exception of one clever maneuver at the tail end of the book (and an earlier recitation of all the things Hattie did to prove herself to her father), Hattie never actually works or spends time at the shipping office or docks or demonstrates any aptitude for running a business during this story. She’s disappointed that her father plans to pass the business onto his only son, so she strikes a deal with her stupid brother and an underworld kingpin to circumvent him. Friends, I want to believe in these atypical feminist heroines. I do! But only in a delusional fantasy world can a woman believe these two deals equal a winning business strategy, or that spending most of the hours of your day flirting and arguing with a handsome, sexy underworld kingpin nicknamed Beast is proof you’re meant to take over the family business.
The resolution of the suspense plot (who has been hijacking the shipments) is also a mess. Right away MacLean establishes Hattie’s brother as a bad guy – and then does ABSOLUTELY nothing else with him. He (and his partner) are shunted to the periphery of the story when their relationship to the machiavellian Ewan, Duke of Marwick, is revealed. Ewan, meanwhile, is deranged by love for a character whose name I can’t reveal. Frankly, his appearances are bizarre and weird, and overly complicate this underwhelming plot. The romance works; the story – rooted in Hattie’s desire to run the family business and Beast’s desire for revenge – doesn’t.
If you’re a MacLean fan, you might be able to overlook the problems in this novel and enjoy it anyway. I did. I was entertained from start to finish, and I’m still invested in the overarching storyline. But if you aren’t, this one will be a hard sell. We still don’t know enough about Ewan or his lost love, and the suspense plot is weak. Brazen and the Beast is a solid, if problematic, second book in The Barenuckle Bastards series.
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Book Details
Reviewer: | Em Wittmann |
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Review Date: | July 29, 2019 |
Publication Date: | 07/2019 |
Grade: | B |
Sensuality | Warm |
Book Type: | Historical Romance |
Review Tags: | Bareknuckle Bastards series |
There are only a handful of HR authors that can consistently qualify their characters and make them then drive the plot through actions that demonstrates that the characters are in fact who they made the character out to be . Loretta Chase, Meredith Duran, Courtney Milan and Sherry Thomas are the only that come to mind. The others just provide the formulastic outline and fill it in with flirty banter, cutesy humour, illogical conflict, some sexy scenes, quick and vexatious resolution and charge us $9.99 for the fluffy entertainment.
Chase, Duran and Thomas are the authors I’d point to as well, although sadly, I’ve taken Milan off the list now, because her last few books haven’t worked for me; the romance has got lost amid all the didacticism.
I don’t think we need to suspend disbelief because a feminist heroine is not necessarily out of place in historical romance. However, we do need to see her work rather than just be told about it. After all, there were businesswomen and female scientists long before the 21st C. When an author simply tells us a woman is brilliant at business but spends 99% of the book focussed on flirting (as fun as that may be), it does undercut the assertion. Maya Rodale’s “Lady Claire Is All That” wasn’t a perfect book, but I did believe that Claire was dedicated to mathematics because it is a thread that runs through the book and we see her attending lectures, talking to people about her ideas, and her passion when math is discussed – a passion only outmatched, in the end, by her passion for the hero, who is himself mathematically challenged but charming nonetheless.
100%. There have been many historical romances with feminist heroines who pursued intellectual/professional goals. But books where those heroines’ work and attitudes are blithely described end up being in an odd way, given that they’re shooting for a modern ethos, wallpapery to me.
100% to both this and Susan’s comment.
I honestly feel this way about the majority of the contemporary heroines who are supposed to be scholars/in STEM/&c., to the point where I have reservations about reading them… even though I’m a feminist who has spent her entire adult life in academia or tech and therefore really ought to be the target audience for these.
Em, thank you for your comments about the sorts of atypical heroines who are flooding the pages of historical romance; you put into words something I’ve been thinking for quite some time.
Kim – I’m in total agreement with you.
I enjoyed her Love by Numbers series, but since then her books have been a hit-or-miss for me. She seems to want each book to carry a feminist message, but that doesn’t always work in an historical setting unless you suspend disbelief.
Competence is so attractive and being told over and over again is not showing it and merely serves to impress upon me that the character is lacking in some way that is why the author is asserting their competence so much.
It drives me crazy when authors barrage us with assertions that a character is The Greatest at something without providing any evidence, especially in a story that takes place over the course of weeks or months. You first hear “show, don’t tell” from your middle school teacher.
I was just talking to a friend about this tendency in historical romance, The characters always have some random amazing skill that seems to come from nowhere. In MacLean’s last one the heroine was completely sheltered but also a skilled locksmith!
I know Tessa Dare’s books are called contemporary in corsets, but I appreciate that the heroines she writes at least do the quirky thing they’re about, whether it’s logical or not. And I think Eva Leigh’s heroines are always intelligent and capable women.
I keep reading MacLean books hoping one will wow me and they haven’t yet. I always feel they have a dragging start and then sex, without the romance, because she gets so focused on subplots. I also despise silly nicknames and she loves them. I can’t picture anyone calling these guys Beast and Devil with a straight face.
Have you read Ten Ways to Be Adored When Landing a Lord? I really liked the pacing of that love story and the heroine’s believable competency.
This sounds like another case of an author wanting a modern love story but being determined to shove it into a historical romance. MacLean’s books used to be fun but haven’t been since her Rule of Scoundrels series