"Tessa Dare spins a witty, wanton tale of passion and conquest, as a reformer and a rake find unexpected love."Only one thing could convince Sir Tobias Aldridge, an incorrigible libertine, to profess undying fidelity to a woman he's just met. Revenge. What better way to get back at an enemy than by stealing that scoundrel's sister? Not that Toby finds it a chore, seducing a beguiling, sultry beauty freshly arrived from the West Indies. When the prize is Isabel Grayson, vengeance is doubly rewarding.
"Isabel is determined to marry a wealthy, powerful lord and become a lady of influence, using her rank and fortune to fight social injustice. Sir Toby, with his paltry title and infamous reputation, is unsuitable husband material--but he makes her blood race, her heart pound, and her long-buried passions come to the surface. If she can reform the charming devil, she'll get exactly what she craves: society's respect. But it's a dangerous gamble. For if Toby wins this battle of persuasion, Isabel could lose her heart."
Another gem from Tessa Dare! A Lady of Persuasion is the culmination of this trilogy and I thought it fitting and appropriate. Dare’s worlds are lately my absolute favorite into which to escape. She writes such vivid stories and lively characters! Her style is highly-readable and extremely enjoyable. She is definitely a notch above even a large number of non-romance authors. In fact, I would gladly read any book of hers if she decided to branch out and write other genres. For now, however, I’m very happy to be reading Dare’s romance novels.
I went into this book very happy to finally see Toby get his own story (side note, I really fell in love with the name “Toby” – I struggle a little bit with the proper name “Tobias” because of the Divergent series, but Toby is so sweet). He was essentially absent from the second book in the series (Sophia and Grey’s book following Sophia’s flight from her marriage to Toby), but he had a larger role in the first book (Jeremy and Lucy’s story where Lucy fancied herself in love with him, but he proposed to Sophia instead). Toby felt a bit flat in the first book – probably just because he was not actually the “male lead” in that story. I absolutely loved him in this book, however. He was charming, witty, fun, intelligent, and devoted; such a dynamic character. I love seeing characters grow throughout the duration of a story or series. We were introduced to Isabel (Bel) at the end of the second book in the trilogy; she is the younger sister of Joss and Gray, and Sophia’s sister-in-law. (The complex character- and family dynamics make for a very interesting overarching plot.) Personally, I’m not a very religious person, so that little taste of hyper-religious and philanthropic Bel from the second book made me apprehensive about what her part in a romance novel would be and just how much Bel would talk about God. She seemed so pious and goody-goody that I became nervous that Dare had pigeonholed her too much to make for an interesting “female lead” in the third book. Thankfully (for my personal tastes, that is) Dare seems to have toned her pious nature down quite a bit for this book. It certainly helped make the story more palatable and believable. I came to enjoy Bel's selflessness. While a bit extreme, it added character and made her quite unique in this genre.
Along the same lines of the other books in this early series of Dares, I've noticed she tends to leave out a lot of physical descriptions that I, personally, find necessary to "play out" the book like a film in my head (and no, I'm not talking about that kind of physical descriptions...). For Toby, she seemed to rely upon minor physical descriptions from the first book in the series because very little time is spent on his physical description in this book. I think she mentions his hair color, but I can't recall what color his eyes are. Bel is only slightly more developed, but, again, I doubt I could recall her eye color if asked. This is a trend upon which Dare improves in later books (and I can say this from experience). Personally, I like when authors use these kinds of things to help bring the characters to life. To be sure, Dare provides her characters with some of the richest backstories I've ever encountered, but I still need a way to be able to shape them in my mind. She did a great job of this in the second book of this series (likely because of Sophia's artistic eye), slightly less so in the first book, and this third one in the trilogy was the least proficient in this field.
Additionally, I have to note how a little romance for Joss was brought into this book (don't worry, I won't give too much away). While I liked what Dare did (I really wanted to see Joss come out of his shell), I found myself wondering if its inclusion was because she didn't have enough material for Bel and Toby, or she crammed it into Bel and Toby's story because she knew she couldn't come up with enough for Joss to have his own book. However, the little snippets were well-placed and broke up some of the tenser parts of the book, which was nice.
As always, Dare provided her fans with an extremely well-written and well-thought-out book. She has found a lifelong fan in me, to be sure. I will say this, however: The conclusion of this book (prior to the epilogue) was awkward. Jem and Gray (somewhat inexplicably) show up at the official closing of the polls in Toby's borough. Dare seems to realize the awkwardness and nonsensicalness of this situation and voices it in Jem's bewildered and annoyed commentary. It's as if she's saying, "I get it, it's strange that all of the men would be here in this place because there's no real reason, but here they are." I wonder if she was told to write it this way, because their presence was not really integral to the conclusion. It seemed uncharacteristically awkward for Dare - especially because Jem and Gray didn't even seem to behave as I would have expected them to, given all I'd learned about their personalities from the prior books. I will say that I really enjoyed the epilogue. I love a good, clean wrapping-up of a series, and this served that purpose perfectly. I loved the conversation between Lucy and Toby; it was really amazing to think how differently everything could have turned out had Lucy gone to Toby as she'd intended instead of Jem. It's amazing how many lives one little decision can change!
Overall, I love Dare's writing. This book was not one of my favorites of hers, but that should by no means deter you from reading it. She's eloquent, creative, and captivating.
No comments:
Post a Comment