I had an odd time with this novella! It's a Christmas-themed story set in the universe of the Brothers Sinister series, which I love, and I am a giant sucker for stories set during the festive period, so it should be exactly up my alley. And I definitely enjoyed it, and felt happy enough with the resolution, but something about it didn't quite click for me.
Part of it may just be that the setup and circumstances of the story felt simultaneously too big for a novella while the conflict between the two characters felt too slight. Dr. Jonas Grantham first meets Lydia Charingford when she's an unwed teenager who has gotten pregnant by a married man who deceived her into believing they were engaged. He is apprenticing for a doctor who is extremely severe with Lydia, and prescribes her a poison that could have killed her and almost certainly caused her to miscarry. Her pregnancy is never widely known and so her reputation isn't ruined, so when they meet again five years later, the main conflict there is that Jonas is the one man who could still ruin her by spreading the gossip. But he would never want to do that, and is falling in love with her, but she doesn't trust men (for good reason) and doesn't want to feel the anger she should at both the man who deceived her and the doctor who judged her, and I don't know. Jonas is very gruff and then makes her a bet so that they have to see each other when he does his rounds with patients at their homes and she brings Christmas baskets, and you can see the developing interest between the two of them, but everything is simultaneously too easy and not easy enough. There's a lot of interesting historical discussion about medicine and women not being trusted to know what's happening with their own bodies and so forth, but I didn't always believe them as characters.
And yet, it's a Courtney Milan book, so it's extremely readable, and I was very happy when they got together in the end, so if you've read the rest of the Brothers Sinister books and just need one more taste of it, I would definitely recommend reading it. It's just not quite up to the same standard, for me.
Grade: B
Part of it may just be that the setup and circumstances of the story felt simultaneously too big for a novella while the conflict between the two characters felt too slight. Dr. Jonas Grantham first meets Lydia Charingford when she's an unwed teenager who has gotten pregnant by a married man who deceived her into believing they were engaged. He is apprenticing for a doctor who is extremely severe with Lydia, and prescribes her a poison that could have killed her and almost certainly caused her to miscarry. Her pregnancy is never widely known and so her reputation isn't ruined, so when they meet again five years later, the main conflict there is that Jonas is the one man who could still ruin her by spreading the gossip. But he would never want to do that, and is falling in love with her, but she doesn't trust men (for good reason) and doesn't want to feel the anger she should at both the man who deceived her and the doctor who judged her, and I don't know. Jonas is very gruff and then makes her a bet so that they have to see each other when he does his rounds with patients at their homes and she brings Christmas baskets, and you can see the developing interest between the two of them, but everything is simultaneously too easy and not easy enough. There's a lot of interesting historical discussion about medicine and women not being trusted to know what's happening with their own bodies and so forth, but I didn't always believe them as characters.
And yet, it's a Courtney Milan book, so it's extremely readable, and I was very happy when they got together in the end, so if you've read the rest of the Brothers Sinister books and just need one more taste of it, I would definitely recommend reading it. It's just not quite up to the same standard, for me.
Grade: B
