1.5 Stars

I haven't read many historical romance books, but lately I've found a few that were super fun and very interesting to read, and when I saw this I thought I'd found another one: a female protagonist that refuses to follow society's conventions, an enemies-to-lovers relationship and witty banter? Sign me in!

Unfortunately, rather than engaging banter what we have for the first half of the book is open animosity between the protagonist couple, and then the relationship runs hot and cold and hot and cold again and I honestly lost interest. It didn't help that I wasn't particularly invested in any of the main characters either (but I did love Eva, and her ending was great!! I'm actually looking forward to reading her book). I did enjoy the writing, and although the story had too much drama for my liking, I believe this book will make fans of historical romance very happy.

Miss Drusilla Clare considers herself a reformer and doubts she’ll ever marry. That does not stop her attraction to her best friend’s brother and known rake, Gabriel Marlington. When Gabriel stops another man from accosting Drusilla, the two are caught in a compromising position and forced to marry.

The book blurb does not accurately depict the contents of this novel. This is the first book in the Rebels of the Ton series, however Gabriel is the son Lady Euphemia Marlington de Courtney from the previous book, Dangerous. In that story, Gabriel’s mother was kidnapped and sold into a harem. Gabriel lived the life of a sultan’s heir until his father died and Gabriel was smuggled out of the country in order to escape his tyrannical brother. This background helps to set up Gabriel’s behavior, conflicts, and his different view of relationships and sex.

Dru is hoping marriage will give her more independence, but Gabriel thinks a wife is his to command and becomes protective and possessive. There are a lot of misunderstandings because they make assumptions about the other’s motives instead of talking it through. When they do open up, the trust and relationship building improves. I give this book a 3.5 star rating.

* I received an ARC and this is my honest review. #Notorious #NetGalley

I liked the premise, but the male lead was unnecessarily cruel at multiple points and I honestly thought he didn't deserve Drusilla''s patience.

I have mixed feelings on this one. First, I didn't realize some of these characters are from one of her previous books until I went back and looked at the backcatalog blurbs. So even though this is the first book in a series and can be read alone, I did feel like there was a lot of family relationships that had backstory that was in play. I felt a little lost at first.

Another thing that was interesting, but I'm on the fence about if it added much to the love story was Gabriel being the ousted son of a sultan and there's both some political drama told as backstory and some prejudice he faces in English society, and some personal-ish grudges with a villian driving the story.

One thing that kept coming up was that Gabriel grew up expecting to have his own harem of wives, which his new wife keeps dwelling on. Plus he had/has a relationship with a pair mistresses (who are in love with each other). And oh yeah, there's his son via his former fiance. And his mom escaped the sultan and has a new family with a Marquess. And Duke grandfather in the mix somewhere. So yeah. There's A LOT going on here, which may make more sense if I had read the previous books.

And we haven't even gotten to the heroine Drucilla. She is a hot mess. A charity working, merchant daughter who is super rich but dowdy and sharp tongued and obviously hides behind her supposed feminist ideals because she has low self esteem and doesn't think she deserves marriage and a family with the uber-hot Gabriel, who she's been secretly in love with. She self-sabotages everything with him through most of the book. Then when he falls in love with her (because, sex?) she suddenly isn't this for hard feminist anymore. Gabriel has no pretense about the fact that his wife is his to command, etc. And Dru at first fights him on this, but then after the good sex, is like "that's cool." I just didn't like her but felt sorry for her because she just kept making things worse for herself.

I didn't even scratch the surface of this book. There's so much plot and external things happening, I didn't buy the love story at all. But it was certainly well written and the story, for all that was in there, seemed to move along. I would say that this is Gabriel's book. Dru's whole character seems in service of his story, and that's perhaps one reason this was only an ok read for me.

<I>*Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review *</i>

<b>3.75 stars</b>

Notorious, a piece of period romance, revolves around Drusilla - a sharp-tongued and strong-minded, but really somewhat insecure woman - and Gabriel, a witty and assured man who however struggles somewhat in London society due to his ethnically mixed background. Through a series of unfortunate circumstances, they end up having to marry each other in other to save their reputations, and not be ostracised from the <i>ton</i>.

This was very easy to read- I almost couldn't put it down! I quite enjoyed the banter between Gabriel and Dru, and the writing style was very engaging.

However, there were several points throughout the book where I really wished that Gabriel and Dru would just talk to each other about what they're thinking instead of retreating into their respective and flawed reasoning! And honestly I kind of felt that, while Dru was preaching all about female empowerment, in a lot of points she really didn't behave in a way that supported those ideas! I still really enjoyed this though!

An Strangely addictive page turner with a repetitively gullible, socially awkward, Weak, useless Heroine with a lying cheating husband and she needs someone to control her money and keep her out of trouble. No female power here.

I will not be reviewing Notorious on my blog. This was a do not finish for me. It was a dealbreaker for me that Gabriel had a child and kept it from Drusilla for so long, it was also a dealbreaker for me that he was in a poly relationship with two other women. Neither of these things are what I am looking for in a historical romance novel.

I tried to power through, but it just really irked me, and it made it really hard for me to find Gabriel likable. The only character I really cared for was Eva, so hopefully the next book in the series will be about Eva, and won't feature any of my dealbreakers!

Thank you Kensington for allowing me the chance to read an advanced copy of Notorious. And thank you for your understanding.