REVIEW: The Beast Takes a Bride (The Palace of Rogues, #8) by Julie Ann Long

JennieB- Reviews / Book ReviewsEnglish historical romance / Estranged Couple / Series5 Comments

This is book eight in a series – I’ve read all the books except book three (I’ll get to it at some point!) and don’t feel like reading them out of order has caused issues, though the first book obviously establishes the setting, a boardinghouse called The Grand Palace on the Thames.

The proprietresses and denizens of TGPotT (I have felt the need to acronymize the title over the course of reading seven books) are – sometimes exhaustively – introduced and their foibles detailed in each book in the series. I feel like perhaps this series rivals Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series for dragging out all the secondary characters and the lore associated with them in each and every book. (If it’s not clear, I’m ambivalent at best about this feature, but it does make jumping in at any time easier).

I’ll start with the blurb, because why not:

A blue-blooded beauty bartered to a Beast…
He would pay any price to possess her. But even though Alexandra Bellamy sacrifices herself to save her family’s fortunes, a shocking betrayal sunders her marriage to a taciturn brute of a war hero, Colonel Magnus Brightwall, before it even begins. Five years of icy separation later, a scandal—with Alexandra at the middle—reunites them, and Magnus issues an edict: they will confront the ton, rescue their reputations, then Magnus will banish her to another continent—forever.

But alone in a suite at the Grand Palace on the Thames, a new battle begins—between pride and the unexpected volcanic passion stirring between them. The danger is real: Magnus rediscovers why Alexandra is the only woman who could ever break him. And even as she lays bare the beautiful heart beating beneath the battered hide of the near-stranger she married, Alexandra knows she may have already lost him—even as she finally falls fatally, irrevocably in love.

So, the scandal that reunites Alexandra and Magnus is…odd. Alexandra is inadvertently involved in her cousin’s theft of a carriage from a duke and she ends up in Newgate. At first this gave me the impression that Alexandra was living a different, more adventurous life than she actually was. I just wasn’t sure what the point of having Alexandra in Newgate threatened with hanging was. (I mean, the point was to bring Magnus running to save her and kick off their reunion, but it just felt like an unnecessarily dramatic and out-of-place setpiece.)

Anyway, Magnus shows up to get her out and takes her to TGPotT because he is selling her London house out from under her (rude). He then proposes (dictates) the plan detailed in the blurb – they have to go out in society and act normal before they can split forever, because…reasons? This did not make much sense to me either, alas. But it gave the two of them time to get reacquainted, as the story required.

When Alexandra and Magnus met, she was a young woman with looks, charm, and a standard-issue historical romance penurious and feckless father. He was an abandoned orphan turned war hero whose looks were more brutish than romantic. He falls pretty quickly and moves to essentially buy her from her father without much thought as to her feelings on the matter.

Anyway, Magnus storms off to Spain to sulk and do diplomatic things, Alexandra retreats into a quiet life with her family, and that’s where things stand until they meet again at Newgate.

The middle part of the book, where they actually get to know each other while attending balls and doing silly activities with other residents of TGPotT (there is a donkey race at one point), is pleasant, if not groundbreaking. I liked both Magnus and Alexandra and I did understand their conflict; I just didn’t feel that it warranted such a long separation and quite so much sturm und drang. That was pretty much all Magnus’ fault, a fact which also made the story feel a bit unbalanced. (For all that Alexandra does feel some guilt about the reasons for the estrangement.)

In my romance heyday, I LOVED sturm und drang, but even then, I would’ve preferred that the story go deeper, so it felt like there was real hurt and real reasons for that hurt. But I find that today’s historical romances don’t want to take those risks – it’s important somehow that Alexandra being essentially blameless, and that Magnus’ culpability is reduced and explained away (I guess by his bad childhood and not being conventionally handsome, though even that I feel like is me connecting dots that were faint in the story).

I liked The Beast Takes a Bride well enough but it was one of those books that I wanted to be a little different, a little darker. The bones for that were there but it wasn’t the direction that Long chose to go in (and by my recollection she doesn’t really write dark books, generally). My grade for this is a B-.

Best,

Jennie

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Jennie

has been an avid if often frustrated romance reader for the past 15 years. In that time she's read a lot of good romances, a few great ones, and, unfortunately, a whole lot of dreck. Many of her favorite authors (Ivory, Kinsale, Gaffney, Williamson, Ibbotson) have moved onto other genres or produce new books only rarely, so she's had to expand her horizons a bit. Newer authors she enjoys include Julie Ann Long, Megan Hart and J.R. Ward, and she eagerly anticipates each new Sookie Stackhouse novel. Strong prose and characterization go a long way with her, though if they are combined with an unusual plot or setting, all the better. When she's not reading romance she can usually be found reading historical non-fiction.

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