A review by anatomydetective
The Brass Queen by Elizabeth Chatsworth

4.0

I received this ARC from Netgalley in exchange for my fair and honest review. Opinions and thoughts expressed are completely my own.

I generally do not read much from the romance genre, but thought this might be a fun change of pace. Set in an alternate reality where Queen Victoria had set out to greatly expand the British Empire. Since the book only deals with aristocrats, all we see of this is the availability of various foodstuffs coming and going throughout the novel -- there is no discussion of the impact of war on the everyday man, nor of the fact that the heroine of the novel is an arms dealer.

The writing itself is quite good, and the plot is fun if you are willing to suspend your disbelief and allow yourself to be swept along. If you read romance for racy sexy bits, you will be disappointed. This is not that kind of book. Flirtation and flashes of petticoats is all you will find here.

Spoiler

My quibble with this book and the reason behind the reduction of one star is that it is left until the very end to reveal the true identities of both of the romantic leads to each other. Trusdale is masquerading as his brother, and Constance is hiding the fact that she is an arms dealer. They both find these things out about each other at the very last minute and it doesn't seem to affect the way they feel about each other. Those feelings barely seemed to make sense anyway; they seemed to be built more on attraction and convenience than anything else, so it seems a bit of a stretch to expect them to also survive fairly substantial lies/misinformation about identity with nothing more than a bat of an eye.