{"id":4587,"date":"2022-10-20T15:27:31","date_gmt":"2022-10-20T15:27:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/?p=4587"},"modified":"2022-10-20T15:27:31","modified_gmt":"2022-10-20T15:27:31","slug":"review-a-confirmed-rake-by-martha-keyes-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/2022\/10\/20\/review-a-confirmed-rake-by-martha-keyes-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: A Confirmed Rake by Martha Keyes (2022)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"I\u2019m loving this new series of Martha Keyes\u2019. I recommend starting with the free (at the time of writing) prequel, Unrequited, and paying attention to the whole family – they really are an interesting lot. This one focuses on the sister and brother of the previous hero and heroine, one an unreformed rake and the other a girl who\u2019s been buried in the country for years finally making a belated appearance in society. It\u2019s a fascinating pairing.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the premise: Valentine Donovan is that staple of Regency romances, an out-and-out rake, a gambler, womaniser and thoroughly unreliable sort. He\u2019s butted heads with his Admiral father for years, dropping out of the naval career that was planned for him, and getting himself into all sorts of trouble ever since. Finding himself on his father\u2019s wrong side once more, he escapes to the Brighton home of his newly married sister, Diana. Creeping into the house through the kitchen window after a drunken night out, he encounters a girl enjoying a midnight feast, a girl like no one else he\u2019s ever met before.<\/p>\n

Rebecca Russell\u2019s brother has finally married, and at last she\u2019s able to leave the seclusion of her reclusive grandfather\u2019s home, where she mingled only with other elderly gentlemen, and make an appearance in Brighton society. She\u2019s never had a chance to develop the finely-tuned social skills she\u2019ll need in high society, and she has no idea how to behave. Her innocence gets her into all sorts of trouble, but she finds Valentine unexpectedly helpful. He knows he\u2019s bad for her, though, so he does his best to avoid her. But when his father gives him an ultimatum – at least try to behave with restraint and start courting a respectable young woman \u2014 Diana coaxes him to squire Rebecca around. It will be good for her, she argues, to learn about society while protected by a gentleman, and it will be good for him to demonstrate his good intentions to his father.<\/p>\n

Well, we can see where this is going, can\u2019t we? And two more mismatched people would be hard to find. But if Valentine is a conventional Regency character, Rebecca is anything but. She has no idea about anything, and approaches everything with an infectious joie-de-vivre that\u2019s an absolute delight. Her conversations with Valentine, where she asks in all innocence some very probing questions, are glorious. She learns a lot, and charmingly mangles all the terminology (she talks about \u2018foxing\u2019 and \u2018raking\u2019, instead of getting foxed or being a rake), making detailed and often wildly inappropriate lists of all sorts of things. And in explaining society ways in uncompromising detail, Valentine is forced to face up to his own misbehaviour. In gently steering Rebecca through the obstacle course of society life, he learns to take responsibility for himself, as well. And needless to say, the two are slowly falling in love.<\/p>\n

But the course of true love can\u2019t possibly be smooth (this is a Regency romance, after all), so both Valentine\u2019s father and Rebecca\u2019s brother have to be appeased, and Valentine\u2019s precarious financial situation has to become a lot worse before all is resolved. I don\u2019t recall any Americanisms or anything else to trip me up, although the monetary amounts stated seemed a bit on the low side to me. At one point, eight hundred pounds was quoted as allowing the purchase of a small estate, which seems a bit unlikely. A small house, maybe. But that\u2019s not a big deal.<\/p>\n

The only real problem I had was that the story was told from two points of view, but both were written in first person (\u2018I went\u2026\u2019 rather than \u2018Valentine went\u2026\u2019). Even though the chapters were labelled with the character name, I still sometimes got confused with the switches, and ended up at one point wondering why Valentine was wearing a gauzy overdress. Silly me. That\u2019s the author\u2019s stylistic choice, of course, which I perfectly respect, and I understand why it was done, but it can be problematic. I suppose I should read more slowly!<\/p>\n

Another lovely read in this series, which gave us some more wonderful characters, a deeper understanding of the family, and especially the Admiral, and a beautifully written evocation of the Regency. Five stars (again). And now on to book-loving brother Phineas\u2026<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m loving this new series of Martha Keyes\u2019. I recommend starting with the free (at the time of writing) prequel, Unrequited, and paying attention to the whole family – they really are an interesting lot. This one focuses on the sister and brother of the previous hero and heroine, one an unreformed rake and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[141],"class_list":["post-4587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","tag-keyes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4587"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4591,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4587\/revisions\/4591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}