A review by katkinney
A Christmas Bride by Mary Balogh

3.0

In this regency romance, Helena and Edgar meet at a social function where Edgar is trying to find a bride before Christmas. Helena seduces him and they wind up spending the night together. The steamy scenes were super steamy! However, Helena is the queen of push and pull and as soon as the passion is through, she coldly dismisses Edgar.

I found myself really drawn into the writing, especially enamored with the secondary characters, and charmed by the Christmas setting. The only element of the story that I wasn’t so keen on came about very late in the story when certain aspects of character backstory came to light. Before that, this was on track to be a 5 star read for me.

Spoiler

It seems Helena had during the course of her first marriage tried to seduce her husband’s son when he was a very young teenager. The author tried to explain it away in the writing with their ages only being so many years apart (I still felt really uncomfortable reading it as written—this was clearly penned long before #MeToo), but the victim was traumatized by her actions, it gave an unsavory element to an otherwise nice Christmas story, and I rather wished this one aspect of the story would have been omitted.