Special thanks to NetGalley and Cranthorpe Millner Publishers for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

While the descriptions in this book were lush and informative, I wish more of that effort had been put into the actual plot. In addition, I wish there had been more substance to the characters, especially a deeper delve into their sexuality’s and identity.

A Rougher Task is less historical romance (or even adventure) and more of a diary-esque narration of the 1870s Royal Engineers' daily life.

While the main characters, Albert Bond and Jack Coleman, are interesting and their slow-blossoming relationship the highlight of the book, the author spends too much time with detailed descriptions of mundane scenes, randomly switching to secondary and tetriary characters, breaking the already slow pace.

If you want a snapshot of life in the army in the Vicrotian period, the book is great. For a romance and/or action plot, it's unfortunately dull.

Thank you NetGalley and Cranthorpe Millner Publishers for the ARC!

This was a strong start to the Babanango series, it had everything that I was looking for and enjoyed from other books like this. The characters were everything that I was looking for and enjoyed how well they felt in this universe. DJG Palmer has a great writing style and left me wanting more.

Reading this book is an exercise in finding the story in a morass of words. Even then, it wasn't something I found satisfying.

Too much time is spent describing things, people, places, not letting everything unfold as characters experienced them. This, and data dumping, distanced me from the writing and certainly made it hard to care about the two principal characters, Lt Albert Bond and Sapper Jack Coleman. In part, this book is billed as a queer romance. I'm all for queering history (this time the Boer War). Yet all that the author offers is a damp squib which is all the more frustrating because neither character is fleshed out. How are they queer? What have their experiences been? How does that feed into their current situation? We're given all sorts of detail about their lives so far (see the data dumping above) yet none of it really feeds into convincing, flesh and blood characters who we care about, follow the progress of and are the reason to continue reading.

Disappointing.