The Mistress Experience marks the first time I’ve ever been disappointed by Scarlet Peckham. Perhaps it’s because this book takes a step away from drama and toward broad comedy, or perhaps it’s because I felt as though Thaïs – so indomitable in the other books – has to change too much of the way she’s living to make a good match for the hero. In any event, this is the first time I’ve ever read one of her books and liked, but not loved it.

Thaïs Magdalene is arguably the Society of Sirens’ most daring member. A courtesan who gives her favors to one man each month for a single day a week with no repeat customers, she is highly in demand for the novelty of her well-trained intimate practices alone. When she auctions off her services for a good cause, it understandably causes a stir as she’s offering the winning gentleman an entire month of her undivided attention.

The beyond-reproach Alastair, Lord Eden is that gentleman, and he’s purchased Thaïs’ services in the hope of learning how to make the sex enjoyable for his future bride. A radical politician as well as a Lord, it’s been ten years since he’s bedded a woman – and all of the times he’s tried since have resulted in premature ejaculation. Eden has a tragic backstory; his childhood was marred by the suicide of his mentally unstable mother, his devastated father sent him off to school and ruined the estate, and when his father married for a second time both he and Alastair’s stepmother were carried off by a fever, leaving the new Lord Eden and his new little sister, Anna, to navigate the world together.

He hopes his month with the much sought-after Thaïs will help him overcome his bedroom issues – and that she will help him to select a suitable bride.

Thaïs metaphonrically rolls up her sleeves, claps her hands together and announces she’ll put Alastair on a monthlong course toward intercourse. Unfortunately, they have to do things that don’t involve bedplay, which means country walks, writing lessons, and visits from Thaïs’ final single friend, Elinor. Then the two of them do the one thing that Thaïs has never done with any of her clients – they start to catch feelings. While the courtesan’s frank earthiness may just be what Eden needs to overcome his problems, might he be the true love and provider of real orgasms she’s been looking for?

Eden and Thaïs have a bizarre chemistry to say the least. His innocence and naivety is almost too expansive to be believed (example: he is shocked and blushing that the infamous courtesan he hired to teach him about sex sleeps in the nude). He’s not a virgin, it’s just been ten years since he’s had sex, so this all feels a little odd, and sometimes he comes off as a virginal little boy instead of a firebrand political orator. Their completely different desired modes of living (Thaïs does not like the country, Eden loves it; she’s an evening person, he’s a late afternoon person who keeps trying to force her to live by “country hours,” etc.) made me wonder how they’d fit together as people once the month was up. The established characterization also feels off; watching an extremely elegant woman such as Thaïs – who’s so poised in the other volumes of the series – flail around running in a duck pond because she wants to pet a goose (which promptly tries to bite her) – is mind-boggling. Do they not have geese in London? Or not know about geese? The issue is not that that this is mainly a comedic book’; it’s simply that it feels… off.

Sadly, The Mistress Experience turned out to be a bit of a miss for me, and it’s a shame because the individual parts are pretty good. I love this series and bawdy, plush Thaïs has been a favorite over the past two books. I really liked Alastair as a hero; he’s a total cinnamon roll and a sweetheart who treats Thaïs like a whole human being. The problem is that I didn’t feel they really work well together as a couple. Their banter is cute and he really cares about her, but aside from a few gestures, I didn’t feel she cares for him all that much. Alastair is tender and attentive – she makes him a cake and he cries over it for heaven’s sake! – and is the sort of man who gives her secretly-romantic self a run for the money. He’s the beta her alpha nature deserves.

But I also kind of felt like he deserved better than her. She’s faking orgasms with him past the midway point of the book, and when she does come she’s tied up and blindfolded because he has that many layers of control to get through. At one point narrator-Thaïs tells us they’re fucking four times a day until they’re literally sore and she’s faking every single orgasm but could totally let herself come if she wants to and I’m like… just let yourself come? It sounds like you’re chafing your hoo-ha raw for no gain! And aren’t you supposed to be teaching this guy how to Do Good Sex, and isn’t faking it a strike against that? The book does address this and it almost makes sense – she wants to keep control (and she’s an occasional squirter (because of course she is – that’s the new standard of orgasming for modern historicals) and doesn’t want that to get around – but surely she’s also too sensible a person to fake orgasms for that amount of time? And isn’t she breaking her end of the bargain by doing so?

And then, when Thaïs suddenly reveals she just wants babies and a family I had to groan. None of Peckham’s other heroines are secretly harboring such traditional desires; her boldest secretly wanting a family is A Choice, I suppose.

Is it weird to say that I think Alastair is Peckham’s best hero but the romance is just a mess? And that I loved Thaïs until this book? That’s how I feel about The Mistress Experience, my least favorite Peckham yet. Let’s see what Elinor’s story has in waiting for us.

PS: The epilogue for this book has a pretty major, if confusing, spoiler for Elinor’s story, and I can’t figure out why Peckham jumped that far ahead, unless it was to give us (spoilers) babies ever after?

PPS: We are three books into the series and I still only have the vaguest idea what the Institute for the Equality of Women does, but I find it disappointing that Peckham doesn’t commit to realism the way Elizabeth Everett does with her Victorian-set feminists who have to dodge bomb threats just to swirl around a beaker. But I guess nuns and noblewomen and courtesans would all go to a school funded by an ex-prostitute, an ex-libertine writer, a radical feminist and a radical feminist artist. I’m aware that the author has intentionally designed the whole school plotline to serve as a pain-free alternative to reality, but my own mind cannot reconcile itself to it.

PPPS:  Look at that old-school cover!  Unlike the current plethora of nondescript cartoon covers, nobody can complain they don’t know what they’re getting when they look at this one!