A Lady of Persuasion (Toby and Isabel, Book Three): Tessa Dare

"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.

After You (Me Before You, Book Two): Jojo Moyes

"How do you move on after losing the person you loved?  How do you build a life worth living?

"You're going to feel uncomfortable in your new world for a bit.  But I hope you feel a bit exhilarated, too.  Live boldly.  Push yourself.  Don't settle.  Just live well.  Just live.  Love, Will.

"Louisa Clark is no longer just an ordinary girl living an ordinary life.  After the transformative six months spent with Will Traynor, she is struggling without him.  When an extraordinary accident forces Lou to return home to her family, she can't help but feel she's right back where she started.

"Her body heals, but Lou knows that she needs to be kick-started back to life.  Which is how she ends up in a church basement with the members of the Moving On support group, who share insights, laughter, frustrations, and terrible cookies.  They will also lead her to the strong, capable Sam Fielding--the paramedic whose business is life and death, and the one man who might be able to understand her.  Then a figure from Will's past appears and hijacks all her plans, propelling her  into a very different future....

"For Lou Clark, life after Will Trainer means learning to fall in love again, with all the risks that brings.  But here Jojo Moyes gives us two families, as real as our own, whose joys and sorrows will touch you deeply, and for whom both changes and surprises await.

"After You is quintessential Jojo Moyes--a novel that will make you laugh, cry, and rejoice at being back in the world she creates.  Here she does what few novelists can do--revisits beloved characters and takes them to places neither they nor we expected."

I know, I know…  I did exactly what I said I wouldn’t do and read the sequel to Me Before You very soon after finishing the first book.  I know I said I wanted to “sit” with the characters a bit more before I delved into the sequel, but I went to my local library and After You just so happened to be sitting in a prominent place on a display; it kind of seemed meant to be.  Mind you, I put off reading it right away and instead opted to read this little number by Tessa Dare instead.  That one was a great quick read, however, so it wasn’t very long before it was time to read After You.  I had the choice between reading the third book in Dare’s trilogy or diving back into the world created by Jojo Moyes.  I opted for Moyes.

Let me start off by saying I had my reservations about a sequel like this.  Moyes made it very clear that she wrote this book following the wave of interest and success of her first and the subsequent excitement over the film adaptation (which I have yet to see; I may force my husband to watch it with me this weekend).  Books spurred by these fan-driven questions rarely live up to the first.  I was nervous about reading After You because I didn’t want it to destroy my enjoyment and remaining “high” from Me Before You.  After reading it, however, I will say that I was only slightly right.

I enjoyed Lou a lot less than I did the first time around.  I get that she’s grieving for Will, probably dealing with some really serious depression, and her world has changed dramatically after Will’s assisted suicide, but she seemed to change too much – almost to the point where she seemed like a completely different character.  Her mannerisms, habits, and even her speech felt different to me.  I was hoping to see even a glimmer of the Lou I’d so enjoyed from the first book.  While we eventually get to see some of it, I missed her quirkiness and perception of the world.  Don’t get me wrong, I can see where Moyes was going with it – losing Will changed Lou’s entire outlook – but the change was so dramatic to the point where I almost didn’t enjoy it.  Parts of her life felt like they dragged on far too long, which is probably why this book took me so much longer to finish.  Some of it felt rather forced and beaten to death…

Sam, on the other hand, was an excellent character.  I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel about having someone take Will’s place because I’d loved Will so much, but I grew to love Sam.  He was very caring and so much of what he did endeared him to me.  He showed another way of handling grief that provided relief from Lou’s all-consuming depression.  Like the Moving On group, he demonstrated that there is more than one way to grieve (and that some ways are healthier than others).

The purpose of the book seemed to be that Moyes wanted to convey an undercurrent/underlying message:  grieve, but move on and live.  The story sometimes felt more didactic than “for fun” because of this.

Like so many other readers out there, I enjoy pondering what happens to characters after a book ends.  Epilogues can provide snippets to guide these imaginings, but some authors take it a step further and pen a sequel.  This is what Moyes did.  As she said, she wrote this book after receiving an outpouring of interest in what happened after the conclusion of Me Before You. As a result, it sometimes felt as if she was forcing it; like she was trying to answer a million questions asked by fans instead of writing for the characters' sakes.  I enjoyed some of the characters (who will remain unnamed because I don’t want to give the plot away), and others were not as organic.  There were a lot of rather obvious metaphors (especially with Sam and Lou’s blossoming relationship and the circumstances of their meeting) and some over-the-top situations that lessened my enjoyment because of their heavy-handedness.

I understand and appreciate what Moyes was trying to do and where she was trying to go with this book, but it did not even come close to my enjoyment of Me Before You.  Don’t get me wrong, I did like the book (even though the above seems like I’m being critical of it), but the first one in the series was just too big of an act to follow.  Parts of this book were sweet, parts were funny and painfully awkward (in an amusing sort of way), but others just didn’t live up to their potential.  I liked this book less than Me Before You, but that doesn’t mean I’d warn readers off of it.  It’s still worth the read if you’re interested in seeing where Lou ended up.  I found her lack of motivation and misplaced priorities to be maddening (I suppose I felt much the same way her family did).  Don’t think I’m unsympathetic to Lou’s depression and sense of loss, because I am.  I merely think she made poor choices in this sequel and was lucky to have things pan out as they did.  Lou’s difference in character from the first to the second book was probably the biggest hurdle for me.  I know her life was forever changed after her time with Will, but she felt like a completely different person.  I couldn’t connect with her as much as I did before.  Overall, the book was well-written and easily readable.  While I had some difficulties connecting with Lou and one or two other supporting characters, I enjoyed Sam very much.  I didn’t understand why so much time was spent on Lou’s current job, but it began to feel a little bit unnecessary and excessive - we get it, it sucks and she has to wear a terrible uniform.  As a follow up book, this was fine.  I still like the author’s style.  If this were a standalone book, however, I don’t know if would have been so forgiving.

Side note:  I did find a couple of typos in this book.  One was a quotation mark where it should not have been, the other was "th" instead of "the" toward the latter half of the book.  I caught these errors without looking for them, so I wonder how many others there were without me noticing them.

Surrender of a Siren (Toby and Isabel Trilogy, Book Two): Tessa Dare

"New author Tessa Dare takes passion to the high seas in this steamy tale of a runaway bride and a devilishly disarming privateer.

"Desperate to escape a loveless marriage and society's constraints, pampered heiress Sophia Hathaway jilts her groom, packs up her paints and sketchbook, and assumes a new identity, posing as a governess to secure passage on the Aphrodite.  She wants a life of her own:  unsheltered, unconventional, uninhibited.  But it's one thing to sketch her most wanton fantasies, and quite another to face the dangerously handsome libertine who would steal both her virtue and her gold.

"To any well-bred lady, Benedict 'Gray' Grayson is trouble in snug-fitting boots.  A conscienceless scoundrel who said the seas for pleasure and profit, Gray lives for conquest -- until Sophia's perception and artistry stir his heart.  Suddenly he'll brave sharks, fire, storm, and sea just to keep her at his side.  She's beautiful, refined, and ripe for seduction.  Could this counterfeit governess be a rogue's redemption?  Or will the runaway heiress's secrets destroy their only chance at love?"

I finally get to do my RAIR method again!  (Granted, I’m nearly done with the book, but I’m just going to say this counts because I’m not done yet!)  I was happy to see Sophia get a book of her own.  She was very flat and almost non-existent in the first half of Goddess of the Hunt.  She felt more like a doll than an actual human being; that was, until she and Lucy bonded over Lucy’s budding romance with Jeremy.  I was very surprised by the ending of that book – I hadn’t expected Sophia to run off like she did; especially after Toby finally showed some physical and romantic attention toward her, just as she’d desired.

Sophia is a far more complex character than she seemed in the first book in the series.  Her knack for lying/weaving tales is interesting – if a bit bolder than I would have thought her capable.  This is probably the only thing I find a bit shaky about the story thus far – the ease with which Sophia spins lurid tales.  It is one thing for her to imagine them and make up stories for Lucy, quite another thing for her to tell them to Gray.  I like that “Gervais” made another appearance in this book.  I get that Sophia was drawing a lot of inspiration for her stories from the “dirty” book Lucy had given her, but I think her boldness with some of her audiences was a bit unbelievable

I like Gray thus far.  Unlike Jeremy in the first book, I felt like I got a very good sense of what he looked like from the get-go.  I also appreciate how the descriptions of him are told from the mind of an artist; the details are managed very well and I think they keep very true to Sophia’s mindset and training as an artist.  As for Sophia, I already learned about her from the first book, though I still feel like Dare is doing a good job writing from Gray’s point of view.  She threw in a bit of a character quirk about him (I won’t reveal it here, even though it’s not some jaw-dropping revelation) which, thinking back on it, I realize Dare kept very true to throughout the story.  I’m impressed.  She clearly gives a lot of thought to her characters.

Thus far, I feel like both Sophia and Grey are well-developed characters.  Dare will sometimes develop either her male or female lead more than the other, but she has done a great job of balancing this out in this book.  When she does do this, the chemistry is excellent and it’s so easy to fall into the book and lose yourself.

I’m finding Gray’s self-deprecating behavior and statements a bit annoying.  I struggle with the fact that even I, the reader, don’t think Gray has done things “evil” enough to warrant his poor opinion of himself.  Maybe some worse confession is coming?  I’m not sure, but I’m nearly done with the book and I can’t quite see why Gray thinks he’s such a bad person.  He wasn’t a real pirate, but a privateer and sanctioned by the Crown.  Sure, he was sometimes selfish when it came to his brother, but he’s genuinely trying to make things right and it seems like he’s taken great strides toward doing so.  He’s trying to keep his promises, but I’m sometimes left frowning at the voracity with which he sometimes does this.  I guess his motivation is a little bit unclear and I’m wondering if it will be clarified as I read further.

I really like the book so far.  It’s a fun read and I’m having a difficult time putting it down.  I’m looking forward to finishing it and seeing how everything ends up!

…

Tessa Dare has done it again.  I sincerely enjoy her writing style, her storytelling abilities, her captivating plots, and the vibrant characters she weaves.  As a follow-up to Goddess of the Hunt, I thought this was a very appropriate book.

I will admit that I became a little bit annoyed at both Sophia and Gray.  Gray’s self-deprecating behavior felt a little bit overly dramatic and Sophia’s own self-deprecating behavior was overblown.  However, I will say that I got over this and really enjoyed the book nonetheless.  I realize there has to be some conflict and personality quirks to make the characters believable and create an interesting plot – Dare was only doing what she needed to do in order to create a unique story and (what I feel to be) her trademark captivating characters.  I’m always so impressed with how different her characters are from book to book.  I’ve read quite a few books by Dare (as I’m sure you can tell) and not once have I even sensed a hint of laziness or repetition in the creation of her characters.  This is a pretty remarkable accomplishment and one I think I’ve only ever experienced with Sherrilyn Kenyon’s works (very different branch of the romance novel genre – much darker and more paranormal).  A few authors I’ve read have fallen into this trap where they need to write another book and they recycle traits or personality quirks from other stories; part of me wonders if they always realize they’re even doing this because some of those authors are such prolific writers.  Still, Dare continues to impress me.

Overall, I thought the book was very good.  It’s definitely still one of Dare’s earlier works, but I enjoyed it a great deal nonetheless.  As I mentioned, there were points when I grew frustrated with some of the characters’ adamancy that they were “bad” people.  I never did quite understand why Gray thought himself such a wretched human being.  Sophia’s anxieties were a bit more solidified, but still a tiny bit frustrating.  I loved the chemistry between Sophia and Gray, though.  Gray was a powerful, confident male lead.  Sophia was so much better developed than she was in Goddess of the Hunt (of course, this is to be expected because this is, after all, her book).  I thought the dialogue was witty, the romance was sweet, and the characters were unique.  There was one bit toward the end that literally had me laughing out loud (I’m pretty sure my dogs thought I was crazy), but I won’t give it away so you can all enjoy it as much as I did.  I thought the last two chapters wrapped everything up quite nicely – even if I am a bit “unsatisfied” (for lack of a better word) about how Sophia chose to spend her trust (while a nice gesture, I don’t think it quite fit with everything else).  Sophia was brave, Gray was selfless, and we were introduced to Bel, a.k.a. Isabel – she stars in the final book in this trilogy.  As of right now, I’m a bit unsure about Bel.  While I realize she’s supposed to be selfless and pious, I just don’t see her being much of a romantic heroine at this point in time.  She was too good, too pure, too much a servant of God and missionary-like that I am unsure how Dare is going to pull off the final book.  I have faith in her abilities as an author, though, and that’s what’s driving me to read the final installment in the series.

I don’t think this is much of a spoiler, but I thought I would warn you just in case:  I liked how Lucy was brought back in at the end of the story.  I love seeing former “leads” return in other books in a series; it lends an air of realism and really rounds everything out.  I just thought Lucy might say something about how Sophia had changed because, at the very least, her appearance would be far different from when she’d last seen Lucy – before spending months at sea.  This is a small note, however.

I recommend this book.  Dare obviously did an insane amount of research after she decided to have this book set (at least 95% of it) on a ship.  She used excellent sailing terminology and it really helped to sell the story.  I already have the third book in this series waiting in my purse for me to read on lunch at work today, but I’m torn about whether or not I should dive into it just yet.  I love Dare’s writing, but I don’t know if I necessarily want to plow through this series in the span of a couple of weeks.  I should probably take a break and do some more of my Shakespeare reading for grad school.  While I absolutely love Shakespeare, I think I might love Dare’s writing just a smidgen more.