Review

Blythe’s aristocratic family has fallen on hard times, and she wants to help support them with her burgeoning bee business, selling honey at the markets and building apiaries on upper class estates. Her parents, however, want her to marry money, so they send her to spend the summer with her wealthy cousin, where there are fewer bees and more eligible gentlemen.

This move reacquaints her with her childhood nemesis, Briggs, who once played a very embarrassing prank on her, which she can never forgive or forget. He looks just as handsome, irresponsible and insufferably cocky as ever. But his family is also secretly in financial trouble: trouble so bad that they might lose their ancestral home.

They make a deal. Briggs will help her find wealthy investors for her business, if Blythe will help him land heiress Sabrina Dixon and her £50,000. But one of Briggs’s investors takes more of an interest in Blythe than her bees, and Briggs starts to wonder if he really wants to marry Miss Dixon after all. But what choice does he have? It’s marry rich or lose the estate.

*

An entertaining Regency YA rom-com, although, despite some good snark, ‘witty’ might be a bit of an oversell. It’s told from Blythe’s and Briggs’s first person perspectives, and there are plenty of fun side characters.

There’s definite scope for ‘spot the classic romance influence’ here: I’m seeing Pride and Prejudice, definite traces of Emma and — Victorian sidestep — Gaskell’s North and South. Not to mention the title’s nod to the 1986 John Hughes cult classic.

It’s also enjoyably full of the usual contemporary sensibilities in Regency dress. Blythe has a sassy gay friend and there is a minor gay romantic subplot. There’s a bit of implied neurodiversity and some (not much) racial diversity. The patriarchy & class structure are mildly questioned. Dialogue is mostly Regency-style, with a few deliberate anachronisms (e.g. “He’s a 10”).

Unfortunately, the pacing is a bit slow in the second quarter. I gave serious thought to DNF-ing it at about halfway. (Also, audiobook narrators, c’mon. More zip, less enunciation.) But I stuck with it, mainly due to mild curiosity about how the author was going to make the money problem go away, and the narrative pace thankfully picked up. The plot resolves in a relatively interesting way, and one character’s glitchy-seeming inconsistencies are satisfactorily explained. I’m also relieved to read a rom-com in which there are sound reasons why characters couldn’t’ve just sorted everything out with a good chat on page two.

Overall, if you like Regency romance, you should enjoy this. Just skim through that second quarter.

Age: 13+

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YA depictions of sexism and homophobia; a couple of very mild bad words and double entendres; kissing; a character puts his hand up another character’s dress, and there’s some brief thigh caressing; boxing scenes leading to mild boxing injuries; bee stings; a character is rescued from potential drowning; an agina attack — everything is okay; a character has a gambling addiction and an affair (backstory); horse racing; mildly injured horse — everything is okay; characters drink, mostly in a polite, Regency, glass-of-wine-with-dinner way, but occasionally to excess; very mildly implied sexual & alcohol-related debauchery (backstory).

*

George, E. (2024). Witty in pink (B. Crow & H. Martin, Narr.) [Audiobook]. Tantor Media.

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