The Gentleman's Gambit

 The Gentleman's Gambit (The League of Extraordinary Women #4)- Evie Dunmore

Berkley Publishing 

Release Date: December 5, 2023

Rating: 📚📚📚

Synopsis: Bookish suffragist Catriona Campbell is busy: An ailing estate, academic writer's block, a tense time for England's women's rights campaign--the last thing she needs is to be stuck playing host to her father's distractingly attractive young colleague.

Deeply introverted Catriona lives for her work at Oxford and her fight for women's suffrage. She dreams of romance, too, but since all her attempts at love have ended badly, she now keeps her desires firmly locked inside her head--until she climbs out of a Scottish loch after a good swim and finds herself rather exposed to her new colleague.

Elias Khoury has wheedled his way into Professor Campbell's circle under false pretenses: he did not come to Oxford to classify ancient artefacts, he is determined to take them back to his homeland in the Middle East. Winning Catriona's favor could be the key to his success. Unfortunately, seducing the coolly intense lady scholar quickly becomes a mission in itself and his well-laid plans are in danger of derailing...

Forced into close proximity in Oxford's hallowed halls, two very different people have to face the fact that they might just be a perfect match. Soon, a risky new game begins that asks Catriona one more time to put her heart and wildest dreams at stake.

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I had mixed reactions to this book. Some of it I liked. I liked Catriona and Elias, two people trying to figure out where they belong in the world and how to do what they think is right to the best of their abilities. Catriona is a brilliant linguist and suffragist, she's been trying to find the time to write a book but keeps getting pulled into other people's projects instead. She worries she falls for the sort of person who just wants to take from her, never accept her as she is, and leaves her heartbroken- so when she meets Elias Khoury and feels a familiar spark, she is determined not to fall for him. Elias is charming and brilliant, he has ethics that challenge everything the scholars of Oxford and their collections have never bothered to think about. He knows he shouldn't be attracted to Catriona when he's in England to take back artifacts, but the two definitely have a slow-burn attraction that's hard to avoid. The circling they do is interesting, as each tries to figure the other out, and Catriona tries to figure out her own reactions as well.

I loved the discussions Elias brought up about repatriation and who owns artifacts, and the fact that Catriona and her friends could see this in terms of the suffrage work they'd been doing and see the similarities was a great way to bring the two together. 

The book did drag in places, and while trying to give Catriona and Elias their own bubble for a romance to grow, the rest of the book felt like it suffered as a result. There were ups and downs to it, since they got to know each other better at the same time. By the end, I was frustrated with Catriona not being brave enough to trust Elias and needing a pretty huge grand gesture to fix things (no further details because of spoilers!). I don't know if that was me being frustrated that the book kept on going when it could have ended earlier, or what. In some ways, this book felt like it was crammed with too many things going on, so not everything got the full development it could have. The result was a bit of a flat book for me, but hopefully, others will like it more.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

There Should Have Been Eight

 

There Should Have Been Eight- Nalini Singh

Berkley

Release Date: November 21, 2023

Rating: 📚📚📚📚📚

Synopsis:  They met when they were teenagers. Now they’re adults, and time has been kind to some and unkind to others—none more so than to Bea, the one they lost nine long years ago. They’ve gathered to reminisce at Bea’s family’s estate, a once-glorious mansion straight out of a gothic novel. Best friends, old flames, secret enemies, and new lovers are all under one roof—but when the weather turns and they’re snowed in at the edge of eternity, there’s nowhere left to hide from their shared history.

As the walls close in, the pretense of normality gives way to long-buried grief, bitterness, and rage. Underneath it all, there’s the nagging feeling that Bea’s shocking death wasn’t what it was claimed to be. And before the weekend is through, the truth will be unleashed—no matter the cost.

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A reunion for a group of university friends turns into much, much more in Nalini Singh's latest psychological thriller, There Should Have Been Eight. 

Drifting apart after graduation is normal even among a tight group of friends, but what cracked this group was the suicide of their group's center, Bea. A young woman who loved life, light, and people, her disappearance and subsequent suicide, and losing the chance to have a funeral for her due to her sister Darcie's choices, have always haunted the group- especially main character Luna. She's hoping to confront Darcie and get some closure at the reunion on Darcie's family estate. But things are odd almost from the beginning, and soon accidents are happening with increasing severity. As a freak snowstorm traps the group inside, past and present collide and Luna will have to discover the truth before it's too late to save the innocent.

There's nothing better (for me) than a locked house mystery where you know not everything is what it seems, and some people are lying- but you aren't sure who is lying and whether their secrets are personal or deadly. Nalini Singh hits all the perfect notes in There Should Have Been Eight: a group of people who think they know each other, a crumbling gothic mansion providing its own atmosphere of neglect and ghostly terror (complete with past family secrets of madness and murder), and then a snowstorm to add an extra layer of being cut off from the world. Luna's personal secret, that she is suffering from a disease that is causing her to slowly go blind, adds a layer of personal panic and claustrophobia from the narrator's perspective that ups the emotional atmosphere for the reader. 

This was a slow-burn thriller in the beginning, as Singh brings her characters into the mansion at the edge of the world and the hints and red herrings begin, then mind-tricks and incidents ramp things up to the subtle yet shocking conclusion. I thought the pacing and writing was brilliant, the story and characters haunting me long after I'd finished reading. This incredibly powerful book is one I'll be recommending to thriller/mystery fans and rereading many times!   

I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

A Rome of One's Own

 

A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Romane Empire- Emma Southon 

Abrams Press

Release Date: November 7, 2023

Rating:📚📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: The history of Rome has long been narrow and one-sided, essentially a history of “The Doing of Important Things,” and as far as Roman historians have been concerned, women don’t make that history. From Romulus through “the political stab-fest of the late Republic,” and then on to all the emperors, Roman historians may deign to give you a wife or a mother to show how bad things become when women get out of control, but history is more than that.

 
Emma Southon’s A Rome of One’s Own is the best kind of correction. This is a retelling of the history of Rome with all the things Roman history writers relegate to the background, or designate as domestic, feminine, or worthless. This is a history of women who caused outrage, led armies in rebellion, wrote poetry; who lived independently or under the thumb of emperors. Told with humor and verve as well as a deep scholarly background, A Rome of One’s Own highlights women overlooked and misunderstood, and through them offers a fascinating and groundbreaking chronicle of the ancient world.

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Emma Southon is my absolute favorite historian when it comes to exploring ancient Rome. First off, she literally wrote a book on murder in Rome (A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) and I feel like that is a book everyone needs in their life.  I know I did. Secondly, she examines Roman history a)within its historical context b)looking at the historical sources in their context and c)with a dry wit and humor that makes me feel like I'm having a conversation with a friend about something that I would actually regularly talk to a friend about (because that's the kind of person I am). It's also the sort of humor that would make people not necessarily interested in ancient history really get into it. And have I mentioned that she doesn't look at what Traditional Historians usually look at: Important Battles In History? 

Instead, Emma Southon has been on the cutting edge of examining ancient Roman history from the point of view of women since her fabulous book on Agrippina came out in 2019 and she hasn't looked back since. In A Rome of One's Own she builds on Agrippina's success by exploring the lives of 21 Roman women who historians both past and present have relegated to footnotes (if they get mentioned at all) and reframe the story to remind us that really, it's the women who are incredibly important in the story of Rome. Even the Romans knew that, little though some of them liked to admit it. 

A Rome of One's Own spans the entire length and timeline of the Roman Empire, from the early women of Rome (Tarpeia and Hersilia- you probably never heard of them) to one of the most famous (Lucretia- Roman men loved to turn her into a literary trope and make it all about them). From Boudicca (you might have heard of her, here's as close to the real story as Southon can get) to Julia Felix (a Pompeii businesswoman you've never heard of, but she'll make you question what you think you know about Romane women) and into the strange world of Christian martyrdom (Perpetua, in her own words) and the end of the Roman Empire, when Christians ruled and everyone was still fighting (Galla Placidia). Some of these women ruled behind the scenes, or not so behind the scenes, some just wanted to run a business and stay away from the murder-happy aristocrats. But Southon gives us compelling arguments that their stories, and the thousands like them that are not told here, are more the "real" Roman Empire than all of the Important Things and Battles we read so much about. Here are the true people of Rome, the lives both small and large, overlooked and misunderstood, and completely fascinating to read.

Full of fascinating facts and delightful humor, A Rome of One's Own is one of those books everyone should read!

I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review