Review: A Bluestocking’s Guide to Decadence by Jess Everlee

Title: A Bluestocking’s Guide to Decadence

Series: Lucky Lovers of London: Book Three

Author: Jess Everlee

Length: 302 Pages

Category: Historical Romance

Rating: 4 Stars

At a Glance: Jess Everlee continues to deliver characters who charm their way into my affections. These books are not full of bluster; rather, they are quietly romantic and their characters offered the happiest of ever-afters for the time in which they exist.

Reviewed By: Lisa

Blurb: London, 1885

A lesbian in a lavender marriage, Jo Smith cuts a dashing figure in pin-striped trousers, working in her bookshop and keeping impolite company. But her hard-earned stability is about to be upended thanks to her husband’s pregnant paramour, who needs medical attention that no reputable doctor will provide.

Enter Dr. Emily Clarke, a tantalizing bluestocking working at a quaint village hospital outside the city. Emily has reservations about getting mixed up in Jo’s scandalous arrangement, but her flustered, heart-racing response to Jo has her agreeing to help despite herself.

There’s a world of difference between Jo’s community of underground clubs and sapphic societies and Emily’s respectable suburbs. Perhaps it’s a gap that even fervent desire can’t bridge.

But for those bold enough to take the risk, who knows what delicious adventures might be in store…

Review: Jo Smith and Dr. Emily Clarke couldn’t be more incompatible if they tried. “So different that they were nearly natural enemies,” as Jo puts it. Jo lives a hedonistic life, scandalous by every definition of the word for a woman of the late 19th century. Dr. Clarke, on the other hand, is an upright woman, pragmatic, a teetotaler, a bluestocking who also fights an uphill battle against the blatant misogyny aimed at her in the medical profession where she makes a mere pittance compared to her male peers. Emily stubbornly refuses to be relegated to delivering babies, the role that’s most expected of her. Until that’s exactly what she agrees to do.

Jo and Paul’s “lavender marriage” being caught off guard by a surprise delivers the dramatic thrust that not only brings Jo and Emily into each other’s lives but also propels the interior life of each character and deepens their relationship from a practical need to their fundamental want of each other. The question is not if they want to be together. The question to be answered through all the obstacles is how.

Jess Everlee continues to deliver characters who charm their way into my affections. These books are not full of bluster; rather, they are quietly romantic and their characters offered the happiest of ever-afters for the time in which they exist. This book, in particular, draws and builds its characters by how they have been, and continue to be, affected by the people around them, whether that’s family, friends, or colleagues.

Reading the first two books in the Lucky Lovers of London series (The Gentleman’s Book of Vices and A Rulebook for Restless Rogues) isn’t imperative to understanding or enjoying A Bluestocking’s Guide to Decadence, but it sure doesn’t hurt either. Seeing the crowd from The Curious Fox is a bonus, and knowing Noah and David and their relationships to both Jo and Emily offers a little something more to the family trials and tribulations—the ghosts Emily speaks of figuratively—that haunt them.