Elizabeth HoytReseñas

1st read: November 2021
2nd read: December 2023

Still cute.

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Original review:
Once Upon a Christmas Eve is the first book that I've read by Elizabeth Hoyt, and I'm really impressed. It's a really sweet novella about Adam, a 35 year old rake, and Sarah, who is 27 and hates rakes. They have met before and are thrown together for a few weeks during the Christmas season.

The Frog Princess is a short story that is interspersed throughout the novella. It's a cute and funny retelling of Grimm's The Frog Prince.Once Upon a Christmas Eve is the first book that I've read by Elizabeth Hoyt, and I'm really impressed. It's a really sweet novella about Adam, a 35 year old rake, and Sarah, who is 27 and hates rakes. They have met before and are thrown together for a few weeks during the Christmas season.

The Frog Princess is a short story that is interspersed throughout the novella. It's a cute and funny retelling of Grimm's The Frog Prince.

1st read: December 2022
2nd read: December 2023

This novella is sweet, but I liked the first half much better than the second. The second half was fine, but it was rushed and didn't quite connect with the rest of the story.

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Original review:
Hippolyta is escaping from the villain who kidnapped her, when she sees Matthew's carriage going down the road and talks him into giving her a ride. Hippolyta tells Matthew that her father is wealthy and will pay him a reward for helping her, but Matthew thinks that she is a con woman because of her appearance.

At first the characters couldn't stand each other, but over the course of their travels they get to know and begin to care for each other. It was actually pretty sweet.

Mary, an orphan turned nursemaid, was browsing in a bookstore when Henry, a nobleman, mistakes her for someone else. It turns out that Mary is a dead ringer for Johanna, a noblewoman whose twin sister was kidnapped as a baby and never found.

Henry was originally betrothed to the missing twin sister, but when she went missing the betrothal changed to Lady Johanna. He and Johanna have been friends since childhood and neither of them wants to marry the other. When he runs into Mary at a bookshop, he is very excited to get to know her.

The premise for this novella is really interesting, but it ended up falling flat. The main characters were nice, but their personalities and the romance didn't have much dimension.

Nice change of time period. Slow burn to the spice- puritanical hand-wringing a tad excessive. Interested in finding out what happens to secondaries in the next books.

Really enjoyed the MCs. Interesting to read about 18th c. England rather than the usual Regency period. Some behaviours, changes of attitude, are a bit hard to swallow but this IS a work of fiction.

Reforming a pirate is silly fun.

A bit less than stellar 3- the MMC is a selfish aristo.

Believable romance btwn MCs who have lost previously their beloved partners. Other characters excellently woven in to the story.

Really enjoyed the Minotaur excerpts that began each chapter. Who doesn’t love a Beast?

Enjoyed the MCs but the antagonistic energy in the beginning seemed off. Some anachronistic language is offensive. Also, prior MCs who feature as secondary characters now don’t have the same personalities.

Short and shallow. EH’s website has disappeared but you can read it via the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190915080439/http://www.elizabethhoyt.com/books/el...

Reverse age gap was nice. Also not having physical issues magically erased.

DNF
Repeated use of an outdated racially offensive term makes this book unreadable. It’s one thing to use it in dialogue in an effort to be “historically accurate” but do you REALLY have to use it so much? This’s a bodice-ripper; I’m not reading it for a history lesson from Kenneth Clark! Therefore, it’s entirely inappropriate to use it in the descriptive narrative.
Get a FUCKING clue and do some modern research as well!!!!

Val has been a thoroughly despicable character when he has popped up in prior books. In his story, you meet the mad creature that his torturous childhood created. Bridget’s evolution is fascinating as well.

Alf finally gets her story aaaaaand an HEA!

more like 3.5 stars? I liked this better than Duke of Sin (which I read first, as a chaos reader) but that isn't saying much.

I really dislike so much of what Hoyt chooses to do to some characters, namely the sex workers. I had to DNF her Raven Prince story because I do not trust her to tell those kinds of stories. God I hate how much romance hates sex workers and THAT is my villain story.

I don't know. This was uneven for me. I never really believed Silence wanted to be with Mickey or that Mickey would just abandon his pirating for a nice house and wife. Also, he had zero connection with his daughter - that was never rectified by the end. I don't see Silence, Mickey and the babe as a family unit so I just didn't buy their HEA. Also, every fucking sentence is, "his man voice/body/scent/presence/hair/nostril/wtf-ever" or "her womanly/feminine face/smell/tongue/glare/wtf-ever. Jaysus - in every instance, womanly/female or many/male could have been removed and the sentence would be fine bc it's all contextual anyway! This series is interesting - and has shining moments - but the writing fails under the weight of the themes the author is attempting to explore. I will continue the series, because I do think it is doing more for me in regard to English-type histroms than others have.

Kind of a mixed bag for me. I liked Val and I loved Bridget but I don't really see them together? For me, the romance never came through in their dynamic. I loved the intrigue and I am invested in reading the rest of the series - reading book 1 first may have been helpful lol. I was also surprised this was published in 2016, considering so many outdated and offensive terms used throughout the book. Ultimately, I feel like the writing crumbled under some of the weightier themes - colonialism, sexism, classism, vigilantism, etc. I feel as though Val’s outrageousness was used to mask underwhelming development. Like, for such a serious book it was all very surface-y?

Many CWs: child rape (off page and recounted), abduction, threat of rape, murder

Thoroughly enjoyed it!

Isabel comes across as pretty self-centered, and Winter.. well, he's almost too good for his own good.

What stood out for me was Winter's caring and non-judgmental nature.
It was refreshing to see him not dwelling on Isabel's past but rather focused on having her in his future.

The story unfolds with a perfect blend of steaminess and romance.

I want you all to pay special attention to the dress on the front cover--taking the bows away from the bodice that's what I want my wedding dress to look like....with the off the shoulder sleeves and a little less fluff in the sleeves at least. Its a gorgeous dress and a gorgeous cover.

Moving past the superficial beauty of the cover--though the hero of the book is meant to be scarred badly on his face (he lost an eye and the lid was sewn shut, horrible scars on that side of the face) and only have three fingers on his one hand, so ignore the cover image of the male and the inside image of the male because seriously they won't gel with the description (and unlike other times where I could forgive it, I can't forgive it when the imperfections were such a big issue in the book itself).

This is loosely based around Beauty and the Beast, if that's not entirely obvious, and follows some of that story's basic outline. Beautiful woman arrives at dark, dreary and unkempt castle, meets its 'beastly' occupant, wedges herself into his life so that she's indispensable to him, horrible family related event happens forcing her away, and then in the end true love wins out. In this case it felt a bit more like animal lust winning out--the sex scenes of the book are a little more...forceful then I am used to. Don't get me wrong--they are well written, but they seemed more of a driving force then mutual affection until the end when Alistair concocts a truly clever and ironic plan to thwart the Duke from taking the kids from Helen. For a celibate and reclusive bachelor (for seven years I believe) Alistair certainly knew how to please a woman!

I enjoyed Helen and Alistair's bantering more so then their romantic complications. He just couldn't win out (most of the time) which was probably for the best since he is possibly the world's biggest killjoy. He might have invented the term 'emo' actually. He could be so charming however, even with or without his eyepatch and his three fingered hand and scarred face that it was a crying shame that he felt so despised by people that he never left his home.

I also found it refreshing that Helen was not shrinking violet--she freely admitted to being a Duke's mistress for over a decade, that she had two illegitimate children by him and that she had entered the arrangement more or less of her own volition. Well she admitted all this once the cat was out of the bag. She couldn't tell Alistair this before for obvious reasons. There was some backpeddling involved in the story though, Helen was forced to take up the Duke's carte blanche when it became obvious her parents would not house her for instance. I admire her courage to leave everything she had known for the last thirteen or so years to escape a situation she felt was destructive.

This is part of a longer series, of four books (the fourth not yet out), but I didn't feel as if you had to have read the first two to understand the plot. Faces familiar to the other novels are mentioned, shown and explained quickly, the deeper plot of finding the spy that betrayed the soldiers way back when is also explained and dealt with and the basis for the next book is also laid out quite well. All in all its definitely one of the better examples of how to welcome readers to the middle of a series.

Interestingly at the beginning of each chapter is a short excerpt of a story that reads as a fairy tale. The book that its from is mentioned within the pages of the novel itself--a book of stories to tell children that a character from a previous novel is working on about Four Soldiers returning home, or so I came to understand. The excerpts mirror the novel's going-ons quite well without losing the 'fairy tale' like quality.

I'm interested in the first two novels now (To Taste Temptation and To Seduce a Sinner) and with book 4, To Desire a Devil, due out in November I have a bit of time to catch up!

TO DESIRE A DEVIL is the last in Hoyt's Legend of the Four Soldiers series of books. Having only read the one directly preceding this one (TO BEGUILE A BEAST), I still only had a tenuous grasp of exactly what the nature of the underlying plot elements for the books were. A traitor amongst the group, each book was modeled after a fairy tale in some way, and all four male heroes were wounded in some way (mentally, physically, emotionally...). We met Beatrice before, as well as learned of her infatuation with Reynaud's painting, which I was looking forward to. Beatrice seemed imminently likeable in TO BEGUILE A BEAST.

Unfortunately, TO DESIRE A DEVIL was a mash up of different plot threads that separately would have made interesting stories by themselves, but together didn't blend well. A lot of what happens to Reynaud in the years of captivity had me raising an eyebrow and wondering if I was thinking too deeply on the subject. The Beatrice I found so interesting before, seems to have lost some of her sense at seeing Reynaud in the flesh and acts like a mooncalf.

It's useless to deny that the passion between the two of them is anything but hot. The scenes are filled with steam aplenty and reveals several interesting things about our protagonists. It's outside of the sexy scenes that their relationship is difficult to reconcile. Beatrice almost immediately transfers her infatuation with the painting of Reynaud to the man himself, despite his savage, anti-social and often downright rude behavior towards her. Reynaud decides Beatrice is his, no two ways about it, but doesn't seem inclined to treat her any better because of it for much of the book. Their eventual admissions of mutual love came off as abrupt and insincere. Together they knew less about each other than we the reader knew about the eventual traitor!

This was a letdown for me for so many reasons. Ignoring the problems of Reynaud's past, his current behavior and off rationale, I just couldn't get behind Beatrice. Considering how mature she came off otherwise, it felt as if she decided that love was the one area she didn't need to think too hard on. In the end the book was a disappointment for me, I'm sorry to say.

When a rogue meets his match is the story of Gideon and Mesalina and it has that classic “we are in an arranged marriage but are developing real feelings for each other trope”. Actually, that is not totally accurate because from beginning of the book, it’s obvious Gideon has always had real feelings for her. The things I really enjoyed were Mesalina and Lucretia (her sister’s) relationship. They were so close and Lucretia was really hilarious, I am looking forward to reading her story. The main couple here were fine but lacking something. I don’t know if it was chemistry or if I was just dissatisfied with some of their character flaws, either way I was not emotionally invested in the couple.

I do look forward to reading more in the series especially Lucretia’s and Julian’s.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

Elizabeth Hoyt gets me to care about the characters every time. I even kind of like the Duke of Montgomery, which, how?

Not as good as her others. I didn't like the hero much.