The HR Addict

Confession: for me, this is the most boring book in this trilogy by one of my favorite RH authors. The premise, I’ll admit, is genuinely interesting. In an era when women lived subjugated to male power, the daughter of a late, dissipated aristocrat — who is responsible for raising her ten-year-old brother, the current Earl — turns the family house into a refuge for women who have no other option to be safe and choose a direction for their lives. Helped by a close-knit group of women, Lady Isabel Townsend fights the lack of money to keep that place alive and to educate her brother, all while dealing with visits from suitors, since her father used to gamble away his daughter’s hand in marriage whenever he ran short of funds to feed his gambling addiction. Desperate, Isabel decides to sell the only thing of value she has left: a collection of antique statues she inherited from her mother. Fate has it that she crosses paths with Lord Nicolas Saint John, who turns up in those parts searching for a duke’s young sister who fled home pregnant (he doesn’t know it yet, but that young woman is one of the women sheltered at Isabel’s house — Georgina, whose story is told in Never Judge a Lady by Her Cover).

Nicolas, aka Nick, is the brother of the hero of the first book in this series, (Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake), and leaves London, accepting the task of finding the runaway girl, if only to escape the attentions of marriage-minded young women. Because after a magazine named him one of the ton’s most desired Lords, they’ve been chasing him ever since. With his striking blue eyes and aristocratic features, he’s one of the most coveted bachelors around, but Nick has no wish to be tied down. He accepts the Duke’s request, follows the clues, and they eventually lead him to Isabel.

Desperate for money, and knowing that Nicolas is a well-known scholar of the classical period, Isabel — upon learning of his presence in the small village near her estate — ends up asking him to use his expertise to appraise the collection and help her sell it. Nick ends up trapped in the manor house by a storm, and while he slowly loses his mind over the determined, courageous Isabel, he’s also trying to work out what secrets that house is hiding.

The narrative builds around the couple’s attraction, Isabel and her friends’ efforts to keep their secret protected, and Nick’s growing suspicions about what’s going on in that house while he searches for the Duke’s daughter. Most of the story unfolds in Isabel’s family home, which doesn’t help the book’s pacing either — it drags a little at times. What we get is the conviction of Isabel’s friends (who also happen to be the butler, the cook, and the woman in charge of the stables, plus her cousin, Lara) that everything would be solved if she married an aristocrat (read: Lord Nicolas), and to convince and help Isabel, they use an article published in the women’s magazine Pearls and Pelisses, suggestively titled… Lessons in Landing a Lord. In the meantime, the attraction is moving forward in leaps and bounds, with Nick fascinated by that woman’s strength and Isabel by the antiquarian whose bearing and seductive tone are nothing like what she expected.

We understand from the start that Isabel is a fighter, struggling to keep her younger brother and everyone who depends on her safe. But she’s also an extremely lonely woman, carrying the full weight of that responsibility entirely on her own (unable, too, to share it), utterly exhausted — a woman whose father’s irresponsibility, an inveterate gambler, robbed her of the chance to be the pampered daughter of an aristocrat, with dreams of being courted, loved, protected. Isabel is on the edge of the abyss. She knows that if she doesn’t sell the statues, she has no way to help those women who depend on her, who live in that safe house (Minerva House). The weight is unbearable, but she insists on carrying on. Because the women seeking shelter at Minerva House need her.

As for our romantic hero… In my opinion, he lacks Isabel’s depth. Beyond being attractive, strong, and possessed of a protective instinct — the standard traits of the romantic hero since Mr. Darcy — he needs more than that. He lacks power. We know he’s not just an antiquarian. That he has a somewhat murky, adventurous past somewhere around Turkey, and that in that past there are countless episodes of him getting into trouble because of his tendency to protect defenseless women. And little else.

Maybe it was either Nick’s flat characterization or the fact that the book always takes place in the same setting that made it, for me, a bit dull. We gradually learn that Isabel has trust issues, since the only men she’s known have been the worst kind, and near the end, it’s revealed that Nick once loved a woman who ended up manipulating and betraying him. The focus of this book is therefore trust, since Nick and Isabel can only end up together if they learn to trust themselves, each other, and their own feelings.

Ah, let’s get to the sex scenes. Intense in their description, in classic Sarah MacLean fashion, but perhaps because of the lack of connection I felt with Nick, they didn’t leave much of an impression on me. Efficient, because, as always with this author, they’re very well written. But what makes the difference — what has to do with the characters, with what is theirs, and theirs alone, uniquely and unmistakably reflected in the acts of intimacy — is not the physical acts themselves. If the characters lack depth, lack distinctive traits, I felt the absence of that usual tension and chemistry.

Only toward the end does the story start to pick up pace. The Duke’s sister’s whereabouts are discovered, and her brother, Duke of Leighton, shows up at Isabel’s house, giving new energy to a lukewarm romance. The brother really is an interesting character, one we get to know better in the third and final book of the series (Eleven Scandals to Start to Win a Duke’s Heart). Isabel also travels to London in search of Nick, to finally tell him that she loves him, at a ball hosted by her sister-in-law that ends with vows of eternal love. A final spark that doesn’t quite erase the sense of drag from the rest of the novel.

Ten Ways to Be Adored When Landing a Lord – Score

Category: Chemistry between the protagonists

Score: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5)

Lukewarm for most of the book — the lack of depth in Nick’s characterization leaves the couple without the usual tension and chemistry, though the ending finally delivers a spark.

Category: Characters

Score: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)

Isabel is a fully realized, compelling heroine, exhausted, fierce, and utterly alone in her responsibilities. Nick, by contrast, remains flat, lacking the distinctive traits and depth that would match her.

Category: Dialogue

Score: ★★★☆☆ (3/5) Solid but unremarkable. Doesn’t reach the layered, double-meaning dialogue of the author’s stronger books in the series.

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Intimate scenes Score: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)

Intense and well-written, as always with this author, but forgettable. Without real character depth and connection behind them, the physical acts alone don’t leave a lasting impression.

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Prose/style Score: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)

Elegant, as expected from MacLean, but the single-setting structure and slower pacing weigh the book down for long stretches.

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Originality Score: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5)

Familiar romance-genre bones — the “marriage would solve everything” plot device, the flat mysterious-hero trope — without enough of a twist to elevate it.

Category: Overall score

Score: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)

The most boring book of the trilogy for me. The late-arriving spark — the Duke’s sister’s storyline and Isabel’s final confession in London — doesn’t erase the sense of drag that defines most of the novel.