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The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen
4/5. M/M historical about a newly-entitled baronet and the smuggler he used to bang, whoops.
Ah, this is some good fuckbuddies-to-enemies-to-lovers shit, is what.
Somebody can correct me if I’m wrong, but AFAIK this is Charles’s first novel of modern length – i.e. not one of these slim 70,000 word books she puts out. And yes, more of this please. The thing is, she’s so damn good at packing intensity and emotion and context and history and community into the smaller books. Each of her words, taken by itself, is doing a lot of work. And she carried that through to these 100,000 plus words, so you get this great love story and also a truly excellent sense of place and time and also a good dozen vivid and interesting secondary characters and also also some good jokes. The broader cast here, and their interlocking stories, is so great that I was occasionally like oh yeah, this is a romance, I forgot when we turned back to that. This is not an insult.
Content notes: Parental abandonment, violence and threats.
4/5. M/M historical about a newly-entitled baronet and the smuggler he used to bang, whoops.
Ah, this is some good fuckbuddies-to-enemies-to-lovers shit, is what.
Somebody can correct me if I’m wrong, but AFAIK this is Charles’s first novel of modern length – i.e. not one of these slim 70,000 word books she puts out. And yes, more of this please. The thing is, she’s so damn good at packing intensity and emotion and context and history and community into the smaller books. Each of her words, taken by itself, is doing a lot of work. And she carried that through to these 100,000 plus words, so you get this great love story and also a truly excellent sense of place and time and also a good dozen vivid and interesting secondary characters and also also some good jokes. The broader cast here, and their interlocking stories, is so great that I was occasionally like oh yeah, this is a romance, I forgot when we turned back to that. This is not an insult.
Content notes: Parental abandonment, violence and threats.