Mine Till Midnight

I'm not quite sure how to review this one - there were some elements I really liked, some that I didn't, and a pretty troublesome amount of racism/othering of the Roma hero. I guess let's start there; Cam, the hero, is Roma and there is a LOT of use of slurs to refer to him, details behind cut: mostly g*psy, but also at least a few instances of things like "half-breed," since his father was Irish. No slurs from the heroine, but the narration uses the g-term and also there's quite a bit of exoticizing of his “dark” coloring and eye color (I read in print so I don't have exact quotes, but it was pretty constant throughout the book). This was published in 2007, so it's 14 years old as I write this - not ancient, but old enough to have aged poorly in this regard, at least. I'm not sure if there's a good way to write a Roma main character without veering into this weird sort of fetishization, but even if there is, this isn't it.

Okay, other things I wasn't really here for. There's a lot of possessiveness/jealousy from the hero, particularly towards the end of the book, stuff like him getting upset because she was talking to another man (an architect! Doing some work on the Hathaway estate! What a shameless hussy, right), which I absolutely hated. Benefit of the doubt, maybe it was meant to be funny, but if so, it didn't land. It was also explained as being because he's Roma, and ... again with the racism, sadly. I also didn't really love the supernatural element here, honestly. I feel like it would have been more effective to have Leo just mourning Laura and that leading to his depression/substance abuse, instead of bringing in the Roma legend and having him be literally possessed/haunted/whatever it was.

All that said, I did like a lot of this book! I liked Amelia and her determination to keep her family together and provide for her younger sisters, and I liked all the sisters (Leo was kind of an ass throughout, but there were Reasons). I enjoyed the connection to the Wallflowers series, and I thought it made sense in this case instead of being shoehorned in like “hey look, here are these characters you liked!” Lisa Kleypas is still one of my favorite historical writers, and I'm still going to read the next book in this (and probably finish the series, honestly), but I don't think this one is one of her best. Start with the Wallflowers or Ravenels series instead.