How to Be a Wallflower - Eloisa James - 3.5 Stars

[Olivermagnus]

Cleopatra Lewis is planning to meet her grandfather for the first time. He's a viscount who was estranged from her mother for Cleo's entire life. He wants her to enter polite society and meet an eligible bachelor. Cleo's mother had run off with the blacksmith's son as a teenager. He later went on to found Lewis Commodes, making Cleo an heiress upon his death. But she's a hands-on manager who knows her way around the inner workings of water closets. She takes pride in her accomplishments and doesn’t need a husband to complicate matters, so she's determined to become a wallflower during the Season's parties.

Jacob Astor Addison is the American equivalent of nobility, hailing from ‘old money’. A member of the Astor family he changed his name when the Astors moved into the opium trade. He is in London on business and encounters Cleo in the costume shop he was planning to purchase. Cleo believes he's making an unscrupulous deal, so she decides to rescue the proprietress by making her own offer for the shop. Jake is determined to get the shop back, so they make a deal to compete for it.

Soon, he realizes what an incredible woman Cleo is and decides to win her love instead. Being a blunt and truthful American, Jake is upfront with Cleo about his intentions, both in business and pleasure. But Cleo is too, and insists she doesn't want a husband.

The book title is a bit of a fib. While Cleo is planning to become a wallflower, she never actually sits along the wall. She's always in the middle of every event. However, I enjoyed that the story had a lot of humor. I liked all of the secondary characters and hope they appear in the following books of the Would Be Wallflowers series.

This was a quick and enjoyable historical romance by one of my favorite authors in that genre.

[Robin P]

I enjoy Eloisa James, who generally has a lot of humor. It's interesting that she is the daughter of two well-known literary writers - Robert and Carol Bly. She is herself a tenured professor of English, specifically Shakespeare at Fordham University, under her boring name of Mary Bly.

Her Wikipedia article has some more info about her upbringing, her "outing" herself as a romance writer, and the fact that she is a spokesperson for ovarian cancer, which was the cause of her mother's death. That was what my daughter had, but I wasn't aware of this effort on the part of several Regency authors.