Review ~ Love on a Midsummer Night by Christy English

Sourcebooks Casablanca
6 August 2013

Anything is possible in the moonlight

Arabella, Duchess of Hawthorne is recently widowed, but when her dead husband’s duplicitous nephew makes his dishonourable intentions clear, Arabella realises that she has no choice but to flee London. In desperation, Arabella seeks help from her previous love, the dissolute roué Raymond, Earl of Pembroke, who still retains an echo of the man she once loved and lost. Both Raymond and Arabella have dark secrets which threaten their future happiness, and yet bubbling beneath the surface is a story of thwarted passion and unrelenting danger. 

The skilful storytelling of this delightful author brings to life this lovely Regency romance which is a continuation of the story she started in How to Tame a Willful Wife, loosely based on Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. In this second book of the series - Love on a Midsummer Night, the author brings to life A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There is always a danger when retelling a classic story that it can become a bit of a caricature of the original, but I found that I was completely beguiled by the ‘will they, won’t they’ love affair between Arabella and Raymond, and hoped that they would be able to reconcile their differences. 

It’s really not necessary to read the books in order as they confidently stand alone, however, because some of the characters overlap, it is perhaps more interesting to start with book one and enjoy the series from the beginning.

If you like historical romantic fiction then do give this author a try.

My thanks to NetGalley and Sourcebooks Casablanca for my ecopy of this book.

More about Christy English and her books can be found on her website.

Shakespeare in love #1