Clear your schedules, I am going to talk about a book so entirely in my wheelhouse that it and my wheelhouse are basically coterminous. (That’s an exaggeration but not really.) I refer to KJ Charles’s latest book, The Henchmen of Zenda.
Before I get into The Henchmen of Zenda, I need to confess that I have this weird soft spot for old-time British adventure novels. There’s no defense I can or should make about this. These are horribly sexist and racist books that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. I like the swashbuckling. So when I heard that one of my favorite romance authors was doing a queer rewrite of one of my favorite old-time trash adventure novels, I nearly hit the ceiling.
KJ Charles:
Jasper Detchard is a disgraced British officer, now selling his blade to the highest bidder. Currently that’s Michael Elphberg, half-brother to the King of Ruritania. Michael wants the throne for himself, and Jasper is one of the scoundrels he hires to help him take it. But when Michael makes his move, things don’t go entirely to plan—and the penalty for treason is death.
Rupert of Hentzau is Michael’s newest addition to his sinister band of henchmen. Charming, lethal, and intolerably handsome, Rupert is out for his own ends—which seem to include getting Jasper into bed. But Jasper needs to work out what Rupert’s really up to amid a maelstrom of plots, swordfights, scheming, impersonation, desire, betrayal, and murder.
Nobody can be trusted. Everyone has a secret. And love is the worst mistake you can make.
Me:
The Henchmen of Zenda was exactly what I wanted it to be: An adventure novel packed with fun characters, a dastardly villain or three, and an all-you-can-eat buffet of machinations for the royal throne. If you’re reading romance mainly for the squishy parts, this book is perhaps not directly in your wheelhouse. The leads bang (quite a bit) and end up sharing a life (though they aren’t particularly sentimental about it), but the main dish in Henchmen is the machinations around the crown of Ruritania.
(Y’all don’t know how delighted I am to write the word Ruritania in a blog post. God The Prisoner of Zenda is wonderful slash terrible. My feelings about it are weird. I don’t know why I’m like this.)
Because there are SO MANY machinations, it’s hard to talk about the ones that specifically delighted me without spoiling other parts of the story. I really want y’all to enjoy these machinations for yourself, and I am aware that not everyone shares my cavaliar attitude to spoilers. I’ll just say, then, that while Jasper is a good time and Rupert of Hentzau is as delightful as in the original, KJ Charles does an excellent job of giving us female characters to root for. And I think that’s legitimately all I can say about that. You will root for some ladies while reading this book.
Can you read The Henchmen of Zenda without having read The Prisoner of Zenda? This is hard for me to say, because I have read The Prisoner of Zenda with such intense enthusiasm that it formed a keystone of my reading pleasure for KJ Charles’s adaptation. But on the whole, I think that yes, you can. I remembered the characters more than the plot of the original (though neither of those elements is like, earth-shattering — it’s just not that great a book apart from how fucking hilarious and silly it is), and I followed along just fine with the many machinations of Henchmen.
Can you read The Prisoner of Zenda after reading The Henchmen of Zenda? As I said, I can’t recommend any of my trashy guilty pleasure British adventure novels. I cannot recommend PC Wren and I cannot recommend Anthony Hope and I cannot recommend H. Rider Haggard and I cannot recommend Rafael Sabatini. However, should you happen to read The Prisoner of Zenda or any of the others, I would be delighted to chat with you about them on Twitter.
(I received a copy of this book from the author for review consideration.)
In news nearly equally as frabjous, one of my all-time faves, Meredith Duran, has a new book out called The Sins of Lord Lockwood. If you’re an angst fan like me, set Meredith Duran to auto-buy. This one’s about a lord who was kidnapped and transported by his very wicked cousin on his actual wedding night, and now he’s back from the prison camps of Australia, much to the displeasure of his wife, who for four years has believed that he just up and left her. She’s not sad about it. It was a marriage of convenience anyway. She’s not sad about it.
As y’all know if you’ve spent time around these parts, I mostly do not truck with romances that are even faintly Scottish. The Sins of Lord Lockwood really is only faintly Scottish, with a heroine whose Scottish wealth belongs to her exclusively. The action takes place almost completely not in Scotland. Phew.
Anna, our heroine, is tall and tough and ambitious — a Meredith Duran specialty! In the years of her husband’s absence, she’s managed his estates superbly because she enjoys managing estates. I love heroines like this. She just wants more estates to manage! Badly managed estates annoy her! Turns out she’s pretty maddened by Liam’s London house, which is staffed mainly by, as it turns out, convicts who were with him in the prison camp. So it’s a second-chance romance, the hero is angsty and has PTSD, there’s a staff full of loyal ex-cons, there’s a whole REVENGE plotline that the hero has to get against his scummy cousin. It’s tropey and fun, and Meredith Duran is honestly a really talented and insightful writer.
One of my romance goals for the year is to read more f/f, as I’ve noticed that my current methods of finding new romance books and authors have not been netting me a whole lot of f/f recs. But I’m changing all that, starting with Tamsen Parker’s In Her Court.
Van is excited to have a summer’s escape from her suffocating career in academia, but less excited when her best friend Nate breaks his leg and has to send his baby sister Willa to fill in for him as resident tennis instructor. She’s stuck sharing a room with Willa, who’s gorgeous and off-limits and in danger of making all the same professional mistakes Van has.
Oh there are so many of my favorite tropes in In Her Court, I just loved reading this — and I don’t tend to read a lot of, like, sportsy romances. Van and Willa have to share a room while secretly being wildly attracted to each other; Willa’s the best friend’s sister, which is always fun as long as the author can avoid (as Tamsen Parker does!) any sexist implications or yuckiness; they’re both charming geeks who share a lot of the same passions. In Her Court is a super fun and sweet romance that prioritizes honesty and communication in a way that I found really lovely.
Last but not at all least, I read an absolutely charming historical by Vanessa Riley, The Bashful Bride. This turned out to be the second in a series about black women in Regency London advertising for husbands.
Heiress Ester Croome has to elope as quickly as possible, to avoid the marriage her father has arranged for her. So when her friend’s newspaper advertisement for a husband brings in Ester’s favorite actor, Arthur Bex, Ester seizes the opportunity to run away with him to Gretna Green. But Bex is hiding dark secrets about his past, which threaten his happy future with Ester.
The Bashful Bride is an immensely sweet romance, most of which is taken up by the road trip that takes Ester and Bex to Gretna Green to be married. I was slightly frustrated with all of Ester’s going back and forth on whether she really wanted to run away with Bex or not, and would have liked to see her pick a side and stick with it. However, I absolutely love that Riley explores abolitionism and the challenges a black woman would face in and outside of London. Even something as simple as getting a room for the night is nearly impossible for Ester and Bex together. If you love historicals (and don’t mind “closed-door” romances) but wish they featured more characters of color, Vanessa Riley is an author to check out! I’m looking forward to read more of the books in this series.
(I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review consideration.)