The Wicked Wallflower by Maya Rodale

Narrated by Carolyn Morris

Maya Rodale’s new series under the umbrella title of Bad Boys and Wallflowers consists of both Historical and Contemporary romances, in which I believe the contemporaries are modern re-workings of the historicals.

This first book in the series was a very enjoyable piece of well-written fluff, although if you like a little more actual history in your historical romances, this may not be the audiobook for you. Good fluff is hard to pull off, and there’s no doubt that Ms. Rodale has the talent for it. Her characters are very engaging, the dialogue is snappy, and the sexual tension between the two protagonists crackles from their very first meeting.

But the whole thing has a very anachronistic feel to it that I found difficult to ignore, even though I enjoyed the story and the performance. There are quite a few terms used which I’m not sure would have been prevalent in England in 1824 – for example, I really can’t imagine a duke referring to his great-aunt as an “old broad” or to the heroine’s other suitor as “lover boy” – and there is a complete disregard for the social conventions of the time when the hero and heroine embark on a journey over a couple of days and there is no mention of a chaperone. There’s also what felt like a very self-conscious use of slogans to describe the way women swoon at the merest sight of our handsome hero. Phrases such as “London’s Least Likely” or “The Ashbrooke Effect” became tiresome very quickly.

Lady Emma Avery and her two friends, Prudence and Olivia, have collectively become known as “London’s Least Likely…” as they have been through four London seasons without so far finding a husband. Emma’s epithet is “London’s Least Likely to Misbehave” and, although she has been courted (after a fashion) for three years by Benedict – the impoverished younger son of a Viscount, he shows no sign of coming up to scratch.

One night, after yet another ball at which all three girls spent most of the night propping up the wall, they end up getting tipsy on sherry and deciding the best way to get Emma married is to actually announce her betrothal to Benedict in the paper. Emma – being slightly less sloshed than her friends – is against the idea but Olivia and Prudence will not be dissuaded. Then they hit upon what seems, to them, an even better idea. If they’re going to tell a fib, they might as well make it a BIG one, so they write a letter announcing Emma’s engagement to the gorgeous, dissolute, and unattainable Duke of Ashbrooke, a man so handsome that he can make women swoon at fifty paces.

Unforeseen circumstances lead to the letter actually being published, much to Emma’s horror. Incredibly, however, Ashbrooke – a man she’s never before met – for his own reasons decides to play along, telling Emma that she can cry off in a few weeks’ time.

Blake Auden (and there’s a poetic name if ever there was one!), Duke of Ashbrooke, is a rake of the first order. Not a week goes by without his name appearing in one scandal sheet or other and the ton loves to gossip about his latest drunken carouse. A rake he may be, but Ashbrooke is also a highly intelligent young man who is trying to generate funding in order to build one of his inventions, a Difference Engine (an early form of mechanical calculator). It’s something he’s passionate about. His parents died when he was a child, crushed to death when an unstable building collapsed, and such a machine will eliminate human error in calculations used in many fields of business –including architecture.

The problem is that no one will take him seriously enough to invest sufficient funds in the project, which I thought was an interesting role reversal. It’s usually the gorgeous female who has problems convincing anyone that someone so beautiful could possibly have any brains.

Blake reasons that an engagement to someone like Emma – an eminently respectable, well brought-up young woman, could do much to restore his reputation. He invites her to visit his childhood home in Kent, where his great-aunt Augusta is about to host her annual “Fortune Games.”

This is another point in the story where I groaned and rolled my eyes. The idea of an elderly, unconventional matriarch calling together her relatives each year to have them compete for the chance to inherit her wealth felt too implausible and too much like a cross between Big Brother and The Hunger Games.

Emma is the only woman Blake has met who hasn’t immediately succumbed to his manifest charms and that intrigues him. He determines to seduce her for the hell of it, but finds himself falling hard and fast for her, while Emma is completely unable to believe that “London’s Most Devastatingly Attractive and Eligible” could possibly be interested in a plain wallflower like her.

I liked the way their relationship developed and I enjoyed their flirtatious banter. Blake’s relationship with his great-aunt was beautifully handled and all the better for being understated.

Carolyn Morris is another of those new names to have appeared on the expanding list of narrators of historical romances and she now has a handful of titles to her name at Audible. She has a light, pleasant voice which worked very well to bring out the humour in this particular story, and her characterisations were generally appropriate, clearly defined and consistent.

I have yet to hear her narrate anything else and, although I enjoyed her performance of The Wicked Wallflower enough to want to listen to her again, it seems safe to say that she doesn’t have a particularly wide range in terms of pitch, so the voices of her male characters lie more or less in the same register as the female ones. She does, however, make use of changes in timbre and tone that enable the listener to successfully differentiate between the sexes. In this way, her delivery reminded me very much of Ashford MacNab’s work in Elizabeth Hoyt’s Maiden Lane series which, given that I enjoyed those performances, is definitely a compliment to Ms. Morris.

I enjoyed the print version of The Wicked Wallflower, but the story is definitely enhanced in the audio version. Ms. Morris’ narration is well-paced and her talent for bringing out the humour actually served to reduce the impact of some of the elements I found problematic.

Caz

Narration:  B

Book Content:  B-

Steam Factor:  Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence:  Minimal

Genre:  Historical Romance

Publisher:  Harper Audio

The Wicked Wallflower was provided to AudioGals for review by Harper Audio.