Anne Mallory

Ok. This book won me over. At first I was really annoyed because the hero started out really unlikable, and was constantly negging the heroine. I doubted that the the author would be able to make me like him, but she made me like him. How he behaves is pretty well rationalized, even though I think that I would have liked the book more if more time had been spent on his relationship with his family because we get an explanation, but they do not really change the way they act. The reveal was very predicable, but I don't consider that a bad thing. It was not badly executed, just weirdly paced.… (mere)

The bickering between the two MMCs ran a little too long at times and reminded me of childhood verbal spars with my sibling. Anyway, this book was fine and the writing was fine.

some thoughts added hours later: where this book DOES deserve credit is in the sex scenes - there really isn't much "his manly whatnots" and "her feminine thingies" which runs wild throughout histrom (current ones mind you). And there was beauty in some of these scenes that were not weighed down by flowery language (this is a dig at Meredith Duran's unsexily worded and cringey love scenes from A Lady's Code of Misconduct which I also recently read). I appreciate Mallory's ability to write these scenes without relying so heavily on gender-essentialist language (for the most part).… (mere)

I'm waffling between 4 and 5 stars. At times I am like, "YES, this is 5 stars." and then I think, "wait. maybe not..." anyway, it's probably 5 stars but I'm going to go with 4 for now. Including my internal conflict seemed like a novel idea at the time and now I understand it is very silly lol

ANYWAY - This was published first, but it made me think of Joanna Shupe's The Prince of Broadway (I read the Shupe first and did not like it much) they both have similar characters - FMCs that are upperclass and MMCs that are from "the underground" and have non traditional endings but I find One Night is Never Enough to have been more satisfying and better executed.

so, who knows, 4.5 stars?… (mere)