Review: Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend by Emma R. Alban

Title: Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend

Series: Mischief & Matchmaking: Book One

Author: Emma R. Alban

Publisher: Avon

Length: 396 Pages

Category: Historical Romance

Rating: 4.5 Stars

At a Glance: Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend is a thoroughly charming historical romance with a decidedly modern flair, aiming for delightful and scoring a perfect tone.

Reviewed By: Lisa

Blurb: Gwen has a brilliant beyond brilliant idea.

It’s 1857, and anxious debutante Beth has just one season to snag a wealthy husband, or she and her mother will be out on the street. But playing the blushing ingenue makes Beth’s skin crawl and she’d rather be anywhere but here.

Gwen, on the other hand, is on her fourth season and counting, with absolutely no intention of finding a husband, possibly ever. She figures she has plenty of security as the only daughter of a rakish earl, from whom she’s gotten all her flair, fun, and less-than-proper party games.

“Let’s get them together,” she says.

It doesn’t take long for Gwen to hatch her latest scheme: rather than surrender Beth to courtship, they should set up Gwen’s father and Beth’s newly widowed mother. Let them get married instead.

“It’ll be easy” she says.

There’s just…one, teeny, tiny problem. Their parents kind of seem to hate each other.

But no worries. Beth and Gwen are more than up to the challenge of a little twenty-year-old heartbreak. How hard can parent-trapping widowed ex-lovers be?

Of course, just as their plan begins to unfold, a handsome, wealthy viscount starts/i calling on Beth, offering up the perfect, secure marriage.

Beth’s not mature enough for this…

Now Gwen must face the prospect of sharing Beth with someone else, forever. And Beth must reckon with the fact that she’s caught feelings, hard, and they’re definitely not for her potential fiancé.

That’s the trouble with matchmaking: sometimes you accidentally fall in love with your best friend in the process.

Review: Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend is a thoroughly charming historical romance with a decidedly modern flair, aiming for delightful and scoring a perfect tone. This book was an excellent choice for my first read of the new year. It’s not one inundated with high risks, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing at stake, either. Gwen and Beth are the young heroines of this tale, didn’t fall in love on purpose, but when it happened, they certainly fell with purpose.

Emma R. Alban sets up the matchmaking premise of the series with Gwen’s father and Beth’s mother as the focus of their daughters’ attentions. Or perhaps intentions is the more accurate description since they’re scheming to get their parents to fall in love with each other. Or fall back in love with each other. Or admit they love each other. Everything applies in their parents’ case. Gwen and Beth have an ulterior motive beyond bringing their father and mother together, though, and that’s where the tension lies. What’s a young woman to do when she’s expected to catch a young man’s eye and work toward a marriage proposal, but doesn’t want that expectation to fall on her shoulders? Furthermore, what’s a young woman to do when she does fall in love but then society dictates that love is wrong? It’s a thoroughly inconvenient nuisance.

Don’t Love You Like a Best Friend reads like a script that needs the Shondaland treatment (think Bridgerton). Alban’s writing translated to “watching” each scene play out in my imagination, envisioning the clothes, the teas, the balls, the manners and social conventions, and Gwen, her father, and the best of their extended family living life to the fullest give this book all the joy. It left me anxious to see what matchmaking mischief Gwen and Beth will be cooking up for a certain couple of someones in book two. It’s sure to be full of manners and miscues.