My Season for Scandal by Julie Anne Long

I sit here stunned. Yes, I have written this review twice. The first version was too overwrought because I was entirely overcome by this book. This is such a bracing, visceral story of deep thoughts and even deeper emotions that it left me wrung out.

Before I go any further, I need to beg you to absolutely delete this book’s cover from your mind. It is horribly misleading. Our hero is not a smug git. Our heroine does not spend her time in a dead faint.

Lord Dominic Kirke is a Whig MP and a well-known orator. His latest affair (i.e. consensual business arrangement) ended and in response his thwarted mistress tried to burn his house down, somewhat intentionally. So he seeks refuge at the Grand Palace on the Thames (the setting for all of the stories in this series), where he meets Catherine Keating. She is a country-bred lady in town for the season to catch a husband. Catherine is also a temporary resident of the Grand Palace on the Thames.

The impact they have on each other is immediate:

She stared, blinking, into the space he’d left, her ears ringing as if he’d been a cymbal clash, instead of a man.

In the opening chapters of the book, Catherine and Dominic have a few conversations in quiet corners of fancy houses during the balls they attend. These conversations are unlike any I’ve read in romance. Dominic is wry and biting and whip smart with a tremendous amount of passion for protecting the most vulnerable of society. Catherine has experienced great loss (her mom and it’s made her really appreciate the shortness of life and how precious it is, in a full-hearted way) so she faces the ton as both an innocent and as someone who struggles to find her place in this bright and shining London where things like the correct sleeves are apparently important. That innocence is matched with a biting wit of her own that she unleashes on Dominic often during their singular, secret conversations.

In Dominic’s eyes:

For such a soft-spoken person Keating’s wit had surprising angles and edges. There was almost nothing he loved more than angles and edges. They were the means by which puzzles were put together.

From the very start, he is confused and defensive and spellbound by this woman. Catherine is astonished by the ferocity of this, her first love – the ways in which it reshapes her, and makes her more herself. The backbone of this story is not a plot: it is two people falling in love through conversation, each one more delicious than the last. If pining is your thing, this book has it in spades. It sears the senses and the thwarted lust makes me blush. But if you need ACTION in your books, then this won’t be the one for you. The events are things like, ‘sitting quietly in a corner of a ballroom talking’ and ‘secretly sharing a cab’. There is rather delicious tension in how they have to secretly see each other and the central conflict between them is based on their need to let down their guard and trust that love is possible for each of them.

The one potential red(ish) flag? The age gap. Dominic is 35 and Catherine is 22. Their age gap is not shied away from; on the contrary, it is front and centre as they get the measure of each other. The story is honest about how one person in the couple has a lot more life experience than the other, but that knowledge doesn’t diminish the experiences Catherine has had. Because it is dealt with so forthrightly and in the open, it didn’t feel gross to me, though I don’t gravitate toward age gap romances so my experience there is limited.

Our hero and heroine are deep, philosophical thinkers, but that thought is matched by deep, honest emotions, so the philosophical questions about a state of being are never boring or pompous. These are questions that make up the stuff of life and they are asked with a clear-eyed sincerity about any number of topics.

For example, when faced with her first ball and her absent chaperone, this is how Catherine felt:

She felt undeniably a little melancholy, but it was also a bit dreamlike and delicious to be completely alone in a strange place. As if she was floating unmoored through space. As if anything could happen at any time.

If you need a heart-heaving historical in your life, I think this might be the one you’re looking for.