Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake (Love By Numbers, #1) in Around the World in 80 Books

Apr 16, 2010 Juliana Philippa rated it it was amazing

Shelves: romance, 4-half-to-5-romance-historicals, 0-to-reread-romance, romance-historical, 2010-apr-reads, 0-reviewed, 4-to-5-stars, set-in-england, 0-own-in-dead-tree-form, 0-own-in-dead-tree-form-mass-market

Yay!! Finally a good new release, a wonderful new author, and a fantastic shy-wallflower-heroine (4.5 stars)

Summary
"Plain" and spinsterish 28-year-old Lady Calpurnia "Callie" Hartwell is sick of being seen as an old spinster, on-the-shelf, passive, and uninteresting - and thus THE LIST is born. On this list of nine things are activities that normally-shy Callie would never have dared to even contemplate, let alone actually do (gamble at a gentleman's club, drink scotch, smoke a cheroot, attend a ...more

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Mar 21, 2012 Nadine in NY Jones rated it it was ok

Shelves: historical-romance, era-1820s

rec by Lauren Willig

This book was ... okay. I tried really hard to enjoy it, but I just didn't. The hero was a jerk. I have little patience with jerks being romanticized, the heroine mooning about thinking, "oh of course a man like that could never love a woman like me, what was I thinking?" Well, what WERE you thinking? He's a jerk! Move on! Find a man more worthy!

So, here we have the heroine, Callie, aka Lady Calpurnia, daughter and now sister of an earl, 10 years on the spinster shelf, fat an rec by Lauren Willig

This book was ... okay. I tried really hard to enjoy it, but I just didn't. The hero was a jerk. I have little patience with jerks being romanticized, the heroine mooning about thinking, "oh of course a man like that could never love a woman like me, what was I thinking?" Well, what WERE you thinking? He's a jerk! Move on! Find a man more worthy!

So, here we have the heroine, Callie, aka Lady Calpurnia, daughter and now sister of an earl, 10 years on the spinster shelf, fat and plain and missish. (Don't you just love it when the heroine is described as "fat," but really she just has really big boobs? yeah, men HATE it when a woman has big boobs ...), and we have the, uh, hero, Marquess Ralston, aka Gabriel. He's spent the past few decades schtupping as many women as possible because his mother left his father when he and his twin brother were young boys, and it broke their father's heart. Yeah, I didn't totally follow that logic either, but okay, it's a romance, I'm willing to move on from there. But what I couldn't get past was: he's a jerk. He was constantly (CONSTANTLY) telling Callie that he knows what's best and she should do what he says and blah blah blah only men can think properly blah blah.

Another odd thing: I found myself skimming past the sex scenes - I just didn't like them. And, I really hate it when one character sucks on another character's tongue - are there really people who find that a turn-on???? I find it a lot in these books, but I know I would hate it myself. Oh, and I also hate it when the man insists that the woman do something sexually that makes her uncomfortable - quite often these romances have the man insist that the woman twirl around naked or masturbate in front of him or tell him all her sexual fantasies or whatever (this book hit ALL those highlights). Maybe the power play is supposed to be romantic? I don't know. I hate it.

But for all that, I'm willing to give this author another try. I just, I really hated Ralston. ...more

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Dec 08, 2013 Sam rated it really liked it

Shelves: read-2013, 4-historical-romance, reviewed

More like 3.5 stars, but a solid read overall. It took me a bit to warm up to the characters, but after the first third, the story gelled better. As our heroine attempts to break free of society's rules, she manages to implicate the hero again and again in her antics to charming effect. ...more

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