No no is more upset than me that I didn’t love this book. Because this premise was amazing.

I love a second chance romance + status reversal story. Our hero went from a mere third son to inheriting the title. And our heroine went from being a diamond of the first water with a large dowry to no dowry and no prospects (because an accident left her blind).

I love this writer and I love when a heroine has such a different perspective. She was compellingly resilient. And there was some swoon.

But there were three things bothering me about this one:
✨ the classic—their first chance was doing a lot of work in this romance plot, but it was entirely off-page.
✨ we had my least favourite source of second chance tension, the ‘I love him/her too much to marry them’ storyline. Idk, is it lazy? Boring? Been done to death? Maybe all three. I just wasn’t buying this reasoning. And the more this aspect of the story controlled the plot, the more stars got knocked off my rating.
✨ the book gestured at familiar tropes from other books (Anne being too easily persuaded in Persuasion, McKenna’s revenge in Again the Magic, etc) rather than developing things within the story.

Not that this will stop me from picking up more from this author.