This is a series by Sarah M. Eden, each featuring a different member of the Dread Penny Society: a secret men's club made up of penny dreadful authors with a strong social conscience, who rescue children and women from the streets. Eden alternates between the point of view of the two protagonists, and includes her own short stories as penny dreadfuls written by series characters.
2019
3/5 stars
Headmistress Elizabeth Black is the clandestine author of penny dreadful serials written as Mr, King. Top-selling author and Dread Penny Society member, Fletcher Walker, has his income threatened by Mr. King's success, so he sets out to uncover King's identity. When Fletcher and Elizabeth meet by chance, they find an unlikely mutual spark that becomes something stronger the more they are together -- but Elizabeth must protect her hidden identity even from him, for the sake of her school.
First off, this is not my typical genre, as I don't generally enjoy romance novels. In addition, I'm coming to it with a background of extensive reading of Victorian sensational novels, and of having an above-the-average knowledge of Victorian England. Due to that, I seem to be a harsher critic than most of the reviewers on Goodreads and Audible.
The Lady and the Highwayman is a sweet and clean light romance with a bit of adventure, and faux penny dreadful novels thrown in the mix. The historical atmosphere was not convincing, and the combination of two greatly overused tropes (Victorian-lady-with-modern-views and Victorian-people-with-a-21st-century-amount-of-social-conscience) was trying. Eden's penny dreadful stories lacked a lot of the typical characteristics, so didn't feel authentic. I waded through situations highly improbable in Victorian society, complicatedly contrived occasions for meeting, decisions that made no sense, and plot lines that eventually led nowhere (all with an audio book narrator I don't care for), because the DPS appealed to me on many levels, and I was curious where the story would go. I wasn't fully satisfied by the ending, nor did I feel, given the social circumstances, that the romance would be possible for Elizabeth, yet. . . I did -- inexplicably -- rather enjoy this book. Enough that I will give the second volume of the series a chance.
The Gentleman and the Thief
2020
Did Not Finish
2020
Did Not Finish
I had the exact same problems as I did with The Lady and the Highwayman but, unfortunately, this one was so bland that I couldn't finish it. As I said above, it's not to my regular taste anyway, so it's shouldn't be much of a surprise that it didn't grab me.
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