TEST
Joanna Shupe takes us back to the Gilded Age with The Lady Gets Lucky, part of the Fifth Avenue Rebels series. Alice Lusk persuades Kit Ward to teach her to flirt and seduce so that she can land a husband who is interested in her, not just her dowry. In exchange, Kit wants the recipes Alice has learned from a megastar chef so he can license them for his new supper club. As a genre reader will anticipate, the lessons work best of all on Kit himself. Flawed, formulaic characters are the biggest difficulty here.
Nothing we are told about Alice lines up with what we are shown. She is well-behaved and incredibly shy, which we know because she tells Kit so after she sneaks into his room to ask him to tutor her in seduction. If you can’t see the inherent issues with that sentence, this may be the book for you. We also find out that she knows the recipes because she loves cooking and has, for months, been sneaking down to the hotel kitchen to be tutored by the chef (gosh, what a meek young lady!).
Kit is a mishmash of generic hero qualities. He’s extremely rich and popular and God’s gift to the ladies, but he has to open a supper club to prove he’s a success. Even if he falls in love with Alice, he could never marry her, because he’s not the kind of guy who gets married. (This is literally the circular logic used here). Besides, imagine how Alice would suffer if she married a rich man of an established family, but one whose dad nobody likes! Also, he MUST have the hotel chef’s recipes, but only Alice can cook them, so she agrees to help him for opening night. Kit’s plans for future evenings are… nonexistent. This seems a dubious business decision.
I think this must be the second book in the Fifth Avenue Rebels series, (it is – book one is The Heiress Hunt – Ed.) because the first third of the book takes place at a house party where, in the background of Alice and Kit’s hook-ups, another couple of characters named Harrison and Maddie get together. They don’t get enough page count to be a secondary couple, and they get too much page count considering we don’t know or care about them. Watching randos relive the courtship from their own book in the background of this one is as fun as reading about their blissful HEAs, which is to say, not at all.
All right then, why aren’t we in D territory? Well, the prose is good. Shupe is a strong writer of sex scenes. The setting details of a Newport house party, a posh Fifth Avenue hotel, and a Gilded Age supper club are interesting and clearly historically grounded without feeling like wedged-in textbook sequences. One supporting character, an English Duke in search of an heiress bride (with repeatedly poor luck) is deeply likeable. I hope his inevitable sequel will be better than this.
But while those elements might salvage the book from a D grade, they aren’t enough to take it higher than a C. Ultimately, the lady might have gotten lucky, but this reader certainly did not.
Buy it at: Amazon, Audible, or your local independent retailer
Visit our Amazon Storefront
Grade: C
Book Type: American Historical Romance
Sensuality: Warm
Review Date: 24/10/21
Publication Date: 10/2021
Recent Comments …
Yep
This sounds delightful! I’m grabbing it, thanks
excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.
I don’t think anyone expects you to post UK prices – it’s just a shame that such a great sale…
I’m sorry about that. We don’t have any way to post British prices as an American based site.
I have several of her books on my TBR and after reading this am moving them up the pile.
I'm a history geek and educator, and I've lived in five different countries in North America, Asia, and Europe. In addition to the usual subgenres, I'm partial to YA, Sci-fi/Fantasy, and graphic novels. I love to cook.
Related Reviews
Darn, and the local library just emailed me that the book came in and is ready for me to pick up. :-(
Man, Shupe used to be better than this. ALWAYS make sure your hero’s and heroine’s stated personalities at least match their actions.
I too found this one blah. I’ve loved many of Shupe’s work but this series isn’t doing it for me.
I enjoyed Shupe’s first two Gilded Age series (The Knickerbocker Club & The Four Hundred), but I’ve stopped reading her now as she seems to have become one of those authors (and there are quite a few of them writing HR now) for whom a strong heroine has to treat the hero like crap in order to be seen as strong. I see nothing romantic in that whatsoever.