Violet and the Bow Street Runner is the second in Emily Larkin’s Garland Cousins series but can be read as a standalone. The titular Lady Violet Garland has the unique ability to fly, given to her by her family’s faerie godmother (see the Baleful Godmother series). She uses this ability to help Principal Officer Perry…
While I did enjoy Primrose and the Dreadful Duke, it seemed the author couldn’t decide what kind of novel she was writing, a light and fluffy romance or a dark mystery. Ms. Larkin tries to do both, but the levity of the principal relationship – a light-hearted, often silly and mostly lovely friends-to-lovers romance, juxtaposed…
Readers who have been following Emily Larkin’s Baleful Godmother series will know that the various novels and novellas are linked by virtue of the fact that the heroines all receive a carefully chosen magical gift upon a landmark birthday (twenty-one, twenty-three or twenty-five, depending on the particular branch of the family they belong to) in…
This fifth instalment in Emily Larkin’s Baleful Godmother series is a charming and beautifully romantic road-trip story that pairs up a most unlikely couple. As she has demonstrated in all the books in this series, Ms. Larkin is a fabulous storyteller with the ability to create memorable, likeable characters and inject new life into well-used…
Authors who create homosexual partnerships in an historical setting have to walk a very fine line between expressing a deep love between same sex characters while keeping in mind just how dangerous their relationship could be. Emily Larkin manages that tightrope with ease in her novella Claiming Mister Kemp. Lucas Kemp and Thomas Matlock have…
Trusting Miss Trentham is the third book in Emily Larkin’s Baleful Godmother series of historical romances with a paranormal twist. Owing to the good deed done by one of their ancestresses, each of the heroines is entitled to receive a gift from their Faerie Godmother – whom they call Baletongue – on their twenty-first or…
Sir Barnaby Ware was introduced in Unmasking Miss Appleby as the other man in an affair that broke up a marriage and destroyed a life-long friendship. He could have been easy to dislike, but his deep remorse showed there was much more to him. It’s a rare thing when a secondary character can steal a…
It’s no secret that my least favourite trope is the one in which the heroine passes herself off as a man. I find it too difficult to believe that nobody would notice she wasn’t one, even within the idealised setting of a romantic novel. That’s not to say that some authors haven’t managed to pull…