This book should be held up as the Platonic ideal for how to write a romance story with stakes. Oliver Marshall and Jane Fairfield are fully adult humans with adult foibles (some of them of grave political consequence). Every conversation between them just crackles with tension, even though there is very little snideness in their interactions.

While the story references the husband-hunting rigmarole that frames most specimens of this genre, it has little patience for the cutesy accoutrements of it. Jane in particular has such a fraught relationship with power and the aristocracy, facing each ball and garden outing like a seasoned gladiator anticipating a trip into the arena.

A lot of things happen within less than 300 pages, and there is more intrusion of sideplots here than is to my taste, as compelling as they are. I just personally prefer romances that are laser focused on the couple like it was in The Duchess War. But every one of the ancillary elements are crystalline and perfect, so I can't complain that much.

Courtney Milan has an unerring sense of how to write historical romance that challenges the problematic tropes of the genre and the historical moment in which they are set. Even more acute, however, is her fierce love of romance writing and her protectiveness of its value and dignity. The decision to set the Brothers Sinister series in Victorian England is so smart, because it allows her to inject the story with the tension that existed then across all political spectrums--from gender, colonialism, proletariat struggle, racism, and more. Come for the mature romantic dynamic between the main characters, stay for the exegesis on Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and universal suffrage!