Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake by Sarah MacLean

Narrated by Carolyn Morris

Sarah MacLean’s first historical romance is a rake-meets-wallflower story which, I confess, is one of my favourite tropes in the genre. I do so love watching the sophisticated ladies’ man and serial avoider of emotional entanglements falling under the spell of the “girl least likely to” and Nine Rules is a highly enjoyable version of that particular story.

But Ms MacLean doesn’t stop there, and ingeniously combines it with the idea of a wallflower “bucket list”, as the heroine, Lady Calpurnia Hartwell, decides she’s old enough and high enough up on the shelf to be able to risk doing some of the things she’s always wanted to do. It’s perhaps an implausible premise, but it’s easy to understand Callie’s motives, given that she’s followed the rules her entire life and the one thing she’s always wanted – love – has eluded her.

What’s on Callie’s list? Well, first of all, she wants to kiss someone passionately. Then there are all the sorts of things a man can do with impunity, like drinking whiskey, smoking a cheroot, attending a duel, firing a pistol, fencing, riding astride, gambling… that a woman can’t. But where to start? For Callie, there’s only one place. The man she’s secretly longed for for the past decade.

Gabriel St. John, the Marquess of Ralston is young, handsome, rich and a rake of the first order. He has also just discovered that he and his twin brother, Nicholas, have a half-sister, Juliana Fiori, the result of their mother’s liaison with a wealthy Venetian merchant. Welcoming their sister with open arms, the brothers are faced with the challenge of introducing her to society and smoothing her path, which isn’t going to be an easy one given her illegitimacy and the fact that she is half Italian. So when the upstanding and irreproachable Lady Calpurnia Hartwell suddenly appears in Gabriel’s bedchamber – of all places – asking him to kiss her, he sees his chance to help his sister. In exchange for the kiss, Callie will agree to prepare Julianna for her début and will sponsor her in society.

Not surprised that a gorgeous man like Ralston wouldn’t want to kiss her for the sake of kissing her, Callie agrees – and gets just the sort of passionate kiss she’d hoped for. Ralston, though, gets more than he’d bargained for, a warm, lush armful of innocence mixed with sensuality that quite takes him aback. In the days and weeks that follow, Callie’s association with Juliana throws her into his path regularly – as do her list-related activities – and he finds himself becoming more and more intrigued and less and less able to keep his hands off her.

While the story is predictable, it’s very well put together and the leads have terrific chemistry. Callie is not at all bitter about the way her life has turned out, just rather sad when faced with the prospect of never having a husband and family of her own and living the rest of her life as a spinster aunt. She is warm, clever and witty, but lacks self-confidence when it comes to her looks and her desirability, believing herself to be overly plump and plain. I admit that this sometimes gets a bit wearing, especially when Ralston so frequently provides her with evidence to the contrary, kissing her and touching her at every available opportunity; but that said, a lack of confidence in one’s looks is often something that is deeply ingrained and Callie has had ten years of being overlooked to reinforce her opinion.

Ralston is a delicious hero, regardless of the fact that he’s straight out of the “my parents’ marriage was a disaster so love isn’t for me” book. This is such an oft-used cliché that I tend to just roll my eyes and move on; but fortunately, Ms MacLean doesn’t dwell overly much on that aspect of Ralston’s background, telling us enough to make us aware why he thinks the way he does, but not dredging it up at every available opportunity.

One of the things I enjoyed most about the story is the way in which Ralston’s changing perception of Callie so clearly shows him falling in love with her, making the listener privy to his feelings long before he recognises them for what they are. At the start of their relationship, he doesn’t find her unattractive although he wouldn’t call her a beauty; but the more he sees of her, the more he likes what he sees, and the deeper he falls, the more beautiful she becomes to him. And Callie’s transformation from wallflower to beauty isn’t so much a physical one as it is one of self-perception and being made to feel beautiful by the man she loves. That’s one of the things that makes her such a relatable heroine; together with her inner strength and her humour and her imperfections, she is wonderfully ‘normal’ with all the same sorts of insecurities and hang-ups as the rest of us. Albeit in a longer frock and a corset ;)

I’ve missed seeing Carolyn Morris listed as a narrator of historical romances recently, and listening to this reminded me of why I put her on my list of favourite narrators in the first place. Unlike Rosalyn Landor or Kate Reading, she doesn’t have an especially deep voice, but she does have a way of making her heroes sound masculine and sexy without lowering her pitch too much. She makes the most of the humour in the story, but is also able to handle the deeper emotional moments with sincerity and conviction. She differentiates well between the two brothers – Gabriel and Nick – and between them and Callie’s brother, Benedick; and gives the smarmy Baron Oxford a suitably cad-like drawl and smug inflection. All the minor characters are performed appropriately, and with a French modiste, an Italian sister and a Greek opera singer featuring in the story, Ms Morris is also given a chance to show off her ability to perform a variety of European accents, which she does convincingly and consistently throughout. For some reason, however, a handful of mispronunciations has been allowed to go uncorrected, the most egregious of which is the word “Marquess”, which is sometimes pronounced correctly and sometimes wrongly as “mark-ess”. I can’t work out how this wasn’t spotted and corrected, especially because, as the hero’s title, it appears frequently throughout the text. But even though it was jarring, it didn’t spoil the audiobook, which is one I can recommend wholeheartedly to historical romance fans. Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake is, in spite of the ridiculous title, a wonderfully witty and sexy story, and most definitely one of the best of its kind.

Caz

Narration: B+

Book Content: A-

Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence Rating: Minimal

Genre: Historical Romance

Publisher: Harper Audio