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Waking up with…who?

Waking up with … who?

*If you’re just tuning in, my best friend Kelsey, and I are in the process of reading the ‘Books That Blooded Us’ with Fated Mates podcast hosts Jen and Sarah. We’re just doing their historical picks, but you can find all the Old School deep reads in Season 2.

What’s the point of reading a book when you know how it’s going to end?

This is an annoyingly frequent question to which Romance readers reply: I am reading it precisely because I know how it’s going to end. The HEA (Happily Ever After), the cornerstone of the genre, can actually allow us to be more adventurous, more invested, more risky. The HEA can raise the stakes from the start. How, HOW, are these two mismatched and misguided souls going to sort things out? In some the best romance novels, this happy resolution seems like a depressingly impossible task.

Enter Lorraine Heath’s Waking Up With the Duke, lauded by the Fated Mates for doing ‘grown up work’. Due to some tragic miscommunication, Kelsey started this book before it’s schedule slot. And she had to put it down after a few pages! I only realised how much of a superhuman feat of strength this was when I cracked the virtual spine myself. ‘Your loyalty to BOOK CLUB will never be questioned!’ I texted Kelsey after recovering breath from that opening chapter.

And what a first chapter it is. The starting salvo has got to be one of the best of all time: ‘I’ll consider your debt paid in full if you get my wife with child.” Wait, what? Our hero is being hired out as a stud? Our heroine is married? And her husband isn’t all old and gross and uncaring, but the young and kind friend of the hero who’s been paralyzed by a carriage accident? And the heroine is 100% in love with her husband? How the hell will this work out?!?! See? Stakes.

Safe to say that our first reactions to this book were a bundle of excited bafflement:

K: Just finished chapter 1: OVERCOATS IN HELL!!

M: Right?!The terrain looks very familiar (Oh look it’s the rake our feisty heroine despises) but also feels super strange (husband! alive!)

K: I am concerned that the husband still has use of his upper body and yet has shown no apparent improvement in three years. He needs better PT.

M: Sigh. Yes, but you know it’s Victorian times so he just gets a sedative and a stiff upper lip as options.

K: I am dumbfounded that they haven’t so much as kissed since the accident. That makes no damn sense!

M: Our hero is all like, wait are your husband fingers paralyzed too? His tongue? Y’all could still have sex!

Finally, we settled into the rhythm of this wild ride and were whisked off to the country retreat where the impregnation bargain was to set to commence. We weren’t excited at all…

K: Late night conference, deal has been struck. “Just the basics please, no extras.”

M: Yep. Not to spoil it for you, but that’s all that’s going to happen. Mechanical fornication for procreative purposes only.

K: That’s what I figured.

M: Not once will they climax at exactly the same time and feel their very souls pouring into the other person.

K: Mechanical procreative cunnilingus.

M: Naturally.

This section of the book is what the Fated Mates team call a Russian Doll – a little novel set within the bigger one. It is perfect little miniature. Then, BAM! a truly audacious POV mic drop moment. I won’t gush about this sudden intrusion of a perspective that isn’t the hero’s or heroine’s because it signals a totally unanticipated second phase of the book. I’m usually pretty good at guessing what’s going to happen next. Not this time. Suffice to say, that, like Sarah and Jen, we were blown away with the high-stakes plotting, the beautiful writing, and the truly emotional payoff. Heath asks for our trust. A LOT of trust.  Cause the optics in the first half with the pitiful paralyzed husband don’t look so good in 2021. But she’s chosen to centre this book around heroine’s emotional truth rather than some objective reality. And it’s totally worth it.

So, what’s the point of this ending?

K: I love overall how the book accepts scandal as the price of happiness, that it’s worth bearing, rather than “fixing” it.

Me: Yes! And recognises that reaching that place is not easy.

K: Adulting

M: 101

K: 400!

Up next:

M: You know what’s next?

K: What’s next?!!

M: Stephanie 30-page-sex-scenes Laurens

K: YESSSSSSSSS!!!!!