Book Review: Slightly Scandalous by Mary Balogh

This was, by Mary Balogh’s standards, a fairly poor book. Which isn’t exactly a bad book by general standards, but still. I get that any author who’s written dozens of novels is likely to redo certain themes or tropes, to a certain extent. But Slightly Scandalous is just…too much. Too much, I say.

Readers first met Freyja Bedwyn in A Summer to Remember, which was about Kit and Lauren. To sum up the plot of that particular book: the heir of a title dies unexpectedly, forcing his brother to assume his duties. New heir (AKA hero) is expected to marry a certain woman his relatives have picked out for him. Hero doesn’t like this, so decides to have a fake engagement with heroine, a woman who has decided she never wants to marry again after the “love of her life” left her for someone else. Over the course of the fake engagement, hero and heroine falle in love. Boom, HEA.

Okay, so that is the plot of A Summer to Remember, and in that book, Freyja, the heroine of this book, was the woman the hero wanted to avoid marrying.

So now we have this book, Slightly Scandalous. Here’s the basic plot: After being thwarted in love and thoroughly humiliated (see above), Frejya has decided she doesn’t want to be married ever. Enter Joshua, the reluctant heir of a marquessate, whose scheming aunt wants him to marry her daughter. The only clear way to avoid this is a fake engagement, which naturally turns into a real one over time.

…like, haven’t we read this same story already, Balogh? Haven’t we???

It’s especially weird because not only did the author use an identical plot set-up to a prior book, but all the same characters reappear. Complete lack of awareness, in my opinion. Also, just…why. Including Slightly Scandalous, I’ve read 5 Balogh novels total, and they’re all starting to blur together because she really loves the marriage of convenience, class differences, and fake engagement tropes. How about some variety, please?

(This coming from someone whose favorite historical tropes are marriage of convenience and class differences.)

So, I mean, the book itself was good. This author’s stories are always readable and I think she brings a memorable, and enjoyable, tone/mood to her Regencies. They’re not quite fluffy, but not quite serious. Goldilocks would probably say they’re just right, if Goldilocks didn’t mind repetitive plotlines, that is.

Okay, so the thing with Freyja is that she’s not likeable. I think the majority of this book’s negative reviews are negative because of this character. She’s snobby, she’s over-violent (seriously, what upper class woman in 1814 runs around punching people?), and kind of deluded as to what her romantic issues really are. Romance readers tend to be harsher on female protagonists than they are on the hero. They want her to be likeable and not too difficult. That’s a whole other subject for another time. I honestly didn’t care for Freyja either, for the record, but I mostly think this is because Balogh screwed up really badly in making her the villain of a previous novel. It’s hard to see a person treat the protagonist of one book like absolute shit, and then in a later book get inside her head and hear that she just acted like shit because she loved him.

Sure, Freyja. Sure.

The whole “I was mean to you because I loved you and didn’t know how to express it like an adult” cliché is something that needs to go die in a hole and never come back. Especially when we spend so much time inside Freyja’s angsty head before she comes to the realization that she never even loved Kit in the first place—she just loved the feeling of being in love. Uh huh, okay.

So first in A Summer to Remember, Freyja comes across as the nastiest bitch in the universe because some man dared to pick someone else. Then in Slightly Scandalous we learn this is because she really loved him and was heartbroken. But THEN we learn that Freyja didn’t even love him at all, and it she was just confused with her feelings. That is a lot of emotional yo-yoing for me, I’m sorry.

Also, I just find it absolutely ridiculous that in Romancelandia, it’s never okay for a person to have loved previously. There’s always some stunning realization that what a character had with their ex wasn’t true love (whatever that is). Invariably, the protagonist was confused or immature or mistaking what they felt for love. Why do authors do this? Because, obviously, it’s IMPERATIVE that there be no competition or comparison or other issues when the hero and heroine finally embark upon their happily ever after.

But the thing is that in Freyja’s case, this totally derails the plot. If she didn’t love Kit at all, in any way, then her whole vow to remain single forever because she’s already met her one true love is completely beside the point. She hasn’t met her one true love, so there’s no point for her to spend the rest of her days mourning what she lost. I mean, obviously I don’t support a person spending decades sulking about their ex, but c’mon. Balogh massively undercut the stakes and complications implicit in this novel when she removed all of Freyja’s turmoil in one very conveniently timed epiphany.

But I digress.

Slightly Scandalous is readable, but the storyline and character motivations are flimsy. At one point everyone has to go to Cornwall to confront Joshua’s aunt because she’s attempting to set him up for murdering his cousin (and thus paving the way for his own accession to the title). So, wow, here’s a real problem that has to be solved. Except it’s fixed entirely too quickly, because heaven forbid an actually difficult obstacle impede the course of true love.

Right.

There was a nice character, one of Joshua’s young cousins, who I believe has Down Syndrome, and I quite liked her presence in the story. Balogh handled that very well and that whole B-romance between Lady Prudence and the nice fisherman made me happy. It was also fun (though also annoying?) that Balogh trotted out all the other happily married couples we’ve encountered in this series thus far, even including Neville and Lily from One Night for Love. Nothing that a romance author loves more than showing off her previous protagonists and how blissful their HEAs are.

I still feel like Mary Balogh has my number when it comes to Regency romance. She writes exactly the stuff I love to read, and this book was no different. I was just disappointed by how deeply redundant this particular story was. It lacked depth and logical sense. The heroine is difficult for a variety of reasons, even if I didn’t mind her “unlikeableness.”

Overall, I very much liked this book, but Slightly Scandalous is not an outstanding example of what I enjoy so much about this author and her writing. It didn’t live up to the standard Balogh has established in previous novels.