Delilah Marvelle’s romance stories have always had a heart besides being unbelievably sensual and sweet all at the same time. This one had taken the sensuality just a bit further and made this story too erotically charged for me. That however had not stopped me from enjoying this wonderful story told from both points of view of our hero and heroine.

After six books, The School of Gallantry series is at an end and we finally get the story of its Mistress.

I actually loved that Ms. Marvelle dedicated a good chunk of this book to the back story of both, Therese and Gerard. Because of it, both of their characters were well-developed and by the time I had entered into the “present” telling of the story, I was well invested in finding out the end.

The story starts with young Therese making a life altering decision to take flight from her home, therefore escaping a marriage to an old man her father had ordered her to do, and she’s excited to reach Paris and her cousin so she can start her acting career. Along the way she muses about her life and her ambitions while at the same time getting lost. After two days of wandering about, she encounters a rider on a magnificent horse, all dressed up as a highwayman. Surmising that she’s better off asking this man for directions, than wondering around and risking being tracked by her family, she stops and asks him if she’s on the right road to Paris.

And the rest, as they say, is history and what a history it is.

If you love second chance at love tropes, than you’ll like reading this story, but you’ll also appreciate the historical aspect of it as well. Throughout the story Ms. Marvelle seamlessly weaves the most terrifying and ugly part of French history, yet through wonderful dialogue and inner thoughts of her main characters, she still manages to make me chuckle from time to time.

That said, I’d like to warn you all non-erotica bookworms. I wouldn’t want you to miss out on an entertaining and at times sweet love story because of a handful of paragraphs, so do what I do when faced with the same problem: skim through those parts. Trust me, it’ll be worth it in the end.

Melanie for b2b

Complimentary copy provided by the author ( )

Finally we learn the whirlwind, heartbreaking romance between Madame de Maitenon and Duc de Andelot.

He is on a quest to save the King of France and she is on her way to Paris to conquer the theater. She allies as a spy with him to help in his quest to save the throne. But the chemistry between them is undeniable and the attraction an unstoppable force. In spite of infrequent meetings neither is able to get the other out of their mind. Their love blossoms in the midst of the French Revelation and tragedy in never far from their lives. Circumstances require them to separate and the events that occurs due to these circumstances keep them apart for ore than 30 years. I won't be mentioning any of the details because this book is worth the reads. What I can tell you is that there is a very well deserved happy ending.

Free copy provided in exchange for an honest review ( )

This is a difficult book for me to review. If I came to it with no baggage, I think I'd give it a solid A. As always with Marvelle's books, the characters are fascinating and the dialogue is sharp and entertaining. Furthermore, we have the Marquis de Sade running around being on who can tell whose side and generally entertaining. What's not to love?

On the other hand, I do have baggage. I have baggage about portrayals of the French Revolution in fiction and I have baggage in reference to the Romance genre, Marvelle's previous work, and my expectations for this book. And because of my baggage, there are lots of things that bother me. One is simply that, like most fiction about the French Revolution that I've read, it takes place in what I call the Charles Dickens French Revolution. There are only two groups in political terms, royalists and revolutionaries, and although some of the royalists are evil bastard aristocrats and some are good patriots, none of the revolutionaries are motivated by anything but bloodthirstiness and even people who disapprove of conditions under the Ancien Regime become royalists rather than a different faction of republican when confronted with any act of violence in the name of the Republic. This book was actually better than most in that it made a passing mention of the facts that the Revolutionary government freed the slaves in France, gave men and women equal divorce rights, and gave Jews the full rights of French citizens, although if you didn't have any other information you'd wonder why these things happened since nobody in power in the Republic seems to have any political ideals separate from their bloodlust and, well, actual lust. But I'm not certain I've seen any English language fiction other than Susanne Alleyn's that does any differently, and I keep reading it even though I keep longing for something else.

Secondly, there's a combination of my expectations for this book and baggage from the romance genre in general. I've accumulated that baggage from Marvelle almost as much as from any other author, as she's one of my favorites, but there are still things that bother you the tenth time you read them even if they may not have the first time. Firstly, pre-publication this book was described as a sweeping saga, which I read to mean that it would follow Madame de Maitenon from the French Revolution through 1830, not spend seventy-five percent of the book in the former and then jump to the latter. Ok, that was probably a misunderstanding on my part and I realized I was probably mistaken when I saw that it wasn't considerably longer than other books in the series. Aside from that, the rest of it can be summed up as: this book isn't as edgy as it thinks it is. Yes, Madame de Maitenon was a courtesan, but none of her relationships with men apart from Andelot ever appear on the page. Her brief engagement with Lord Hughes is clearly not based on a romantic relationship. Not only does that mean there's no real tension in the last quarter of the book, but it means that we never see her enjoying sex or romance with anybody but the love of her life. (I realize I'm rather ignoring Andelot here, even though the book is named after him, but let's be honest: Madame de Maitenon has been fascinating since she first appeared at the beginning of Mistress of Pleasure, while Andelot appeared later in the series as a mysterious, shadowy subplot.) She's been conventionalized as much as she can be while still having been a courtesan off-page. There's also vague rumors about Andelot tying women up in a London brothel for purposes of setting up the next, related series. Andelot reveals that this is actually not true, he is apparently good with elaborate knots but hasn't tied any women up in fifteen years. So there's a hint of kink that, apart from providing a link to the upcoming Whipping Society series, doesn't actually do anything except provide the bit of kink that is apparently now mandatory in any romance with explicit sexual content because I guess vanilla isn't interesting enough, but *without* Andelot actually being a kinky person who actually is tying up those women. That plot element needed to get off the fence. Like I said, not as edgy as it thinks it is.

Clearly, there were a lot of elements of this book that I found maddening. I also didn't want to put it down. Overall, I think I have to let my two competing opinions meet in the middle and call it a confusing B. ( )