Access Instantly To Love And To Loathe (The Regency Vows, #2) Drafted By Martha Waters Provided As Paper Edition

loved this book. The setup sounds hilarious: Jeremy is a typical HistRom rake who recently got some notsostellar feedback on his performance.
To reassure himself that he's actually not all that bad in bed AND to take advantage of the persistent attraction between him and one of his longtime acquaintances, Diana, he proposes a friends with benefits situation.
Diana decides that the benefits do sound enticing, so she agrees that they can start their FWB sitch at Jeremy's annual house party.
Side note: don't house parties sound great It's like a vacation home with all your buddies except you're so rich you can pay for people to make your food and clean the rental.


What really sets this book apart, though, is the critical eye Martha Waters casts on male privilege and communication skills in relationships.
Of course we are reading this through a historical lens, but sometimes using that lens can allow us to see our own era more clearly.
Great emphasis is placed on the facades women assume to succeed in their one lifepath marriage, with a similar focus on the veneer of masculinity.
This is exactly what we want out of Historical Romance: a fun story, a real romantic connection between the main characters, with a nuanced exploration of social issues that can be applied to the "real world" as well.
We were entertained, impressed, and completely satisfied with the conclusion,

Word Summaries:

Laine: Jeremy was too poor for Diana in her first season, but she's widowed now.


Meg: After some notsostellar feedback on his “performance,” rake asks his crush/enemy for “advice.
”

This objective review is based on a complimentary advanced reader copy of the novel, sitelinkTo Love and to Loathe by sitelinkMartha Waters is bookof the Regency Vows series, and just like booksitelinkTo Have and to Hoax, I simply adored it! It is full of snark, humor, romance, and just enough steam to get you going.
I usually don't read historical romance, but this is a series I love coming back to, and I really liked the way Waters brought back characters we have already had the pleasure of meeting in the first book.
I am such a huge fan of the way this author writes, and even though I tend to read this series slower than I normally read, I still love every minute of it.
I snickered and laughed out loud more times than I can count, and I loved our lead characters, Diana and Jeremy.
The book is told from both of their perspectives and I wouldn't have had it any other way.


I do want to say a quick word about the audiobook since I decided to check that out for the last part of the book.
Anais Inara Chase amp Joel Froomkin narrate it and I thought it was so fantastically done, They were the perfect narrators for Diana and Jeremy and even though I always love when there is more than one narrator, I especially loved it for To Love and to Loathe.
I think the audio is a great option if you like listening to books, and I can tell you that you definitely won't be disappointed by Chase and Froomkin.
This is such a refreshing series and I always love the banter between all of the characters.
Diana is one of my favorites by far, and I was so happy to get her story through this book.
If you like romcoms in any form, I highly recommend both of the books in this series!

I received a complimentary copy of this book.
Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own, tw: death of a sibling

As someone who hasn't read a lot of historically, I'm not sure if this was meant to be more overthetop than most of them are but it definitely had that tongue in cheek feel to it.
This is a bantering almost rivals to lovers, including a fake but actually real tryst meant to help out the both of them.
While there is a lot of what feels like over the top behavior from some of the characters, it was overall enjoyable.
There is a side character who is a lesbian and it is used a bit as a twist but overall I think the character is handled fairly well for the time period the story is set in.
Cute but surface level for sure, To Love and to Loathe has a great setup and I thought I would really enjoy it, but it does some things I find irritating and it very poorly handles the existence of a queer side character, including the heroine privately outing them to people SHE finds trustworthy without the consent of the person in question.
Outing someone to your friends, especially in a time when things were incredibly dangerous for queer people is NOT okay and I'm not sure how this made it through the editing process.


The heroine is a widow who is determined to maintain her freedom and financial independence, but is interested in casual affairs though she's not sure how to show she's "open for business" so to speak.
The hero is her childhood friend and a notorious rake, but after ending things with his last mistress who gave him a bad review of his bedroom skills, he's seeking affirmation that he's as good as he thinks he is before moving on to a new mistress.
And so they decide to conduct a brief affair during a house party for both their sakes.
Not realizing they have actual feelings simmering beneath the surface,

The setup for this is fantastic and I thought I would love it, but I ended up finding the characters and their actual romance a bit lackluster, wasn't convinced the ending made sense given the personality and concerns of the heroine, and really disliked everything surrounding the treatment of this queer side character.
I think the author was trying to say something about how LGBT people found ways to exist during that time, but it was very poorly handled.
Others will likely enjoy this more than I did, but ultimately I just couldn't get on board with several elements of it.
I received an advance copy for review via NetGalley, All opinions are my own, Martha Waters rapidly has become a historical romcom queen, She continues to add just the perfect amount of comedy and romance to make a book so very enjoyable.
You will always get laughs and swoons in a Martha Waters novel, To Love and to Loathe was a highly anticipated romance for me because when I read her debut novel To Have and to Hoax, I was instantly captivated and intrigued by Jeremy and Diana, these two people who cannot be in front of each other without bickering.
And finally, reading their book definitely delivered,

I love sex pacts because almost always when they agree to have an unattached liaison, it never ends the way they expected it to end.
Because news flash, my naive little beautiful main characters! YOU WILL FALL IN LOVE!!!! It's wonderful to see it happens because you know it's gonna happen but it's always so nice to see it before your eyes and all the little details that sum up to the one big THING of confessing their love for each other.
Jeremy and Diana were A enemies to lovers who banter at every chance they get, everyone is so very tired of them just arguing, but hello they might be catching feelings while being on thisweek vacation at a beautiful country estate.


Another thing I highly enjoyed was the resemble Jeremy, Marquess of Wittingham, has to Pacey Witter, Dawson's Creek's best character.
It's THERE!!!! Funny, flirty, always letting everyone down because they expect stuff from him that he cannot give, but also really they all have put Jeremy in a box of never being serious enough and him letting them all believe he's just a careless rake.
That's our lovely Pacey. Him bickering with his childhood crush UHM YUP, Then they kiss behind closed doors You got it, This relationship reminded me so much of them that I am adding an extra star just because of that.
Because sadly, we do not get a lot of Pacey romance heroes out there,

But I'm taking off a star because Diana had no reason to share secrets that weren't hers.
If you have read it, you know,

I'm excited that Martha has announced Emily's book AND IT'S A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE, MY FAVORITE TROPE!!!! Martha keeps giving and we just receive really the best result, I'm expecting lots of sexual tension and fun situations, This was a bit of a letdown, unfortunately, Before going any further, let me say that I LOVED the first book, Like, it was my favorite romance book of last year loved it, My review of To Have and to Hoax is over on Booktube: sitelink be/fyemLZg And while some of the magic that I loved in the first book was in here, a lot of it was not.


The basic premise is that the young widow Diana and the charming rake Jeremy have been verbal sparring partners since their younger years Jeremy is good friends with Diana's older brother, so they've known each other a long time.
In their adult years, they started to feel an undeniable chemistry between them, but anything that could have been was put on hold because Diana married an older man out of necessity.


Fast forward five years, Diana is now a widow and Jeremy has slept with scores of women, curating himself quite the reputation.
On par with their normal gibes at one another, Diana betsthat she can get Jeremy married off in a year.
Confusingly, shortly after making this bet, the two of them also enter into a mutually beneficial friendswithbenefits arrangement for the duration of a twoweeklong hunting party at Jeremy's country estate.


So during this visit, Diana is simultaneously trying to fix Jeremy up with a woman who seems to be throwing herself at his feet, while lusting after him herself, and developing feelings for him as she starts to get to know him better.
And those feelings are hardly onesided,

It's a cute setup, but there's a lot going on, Too much, honestly. It's not even just that these two main characters are getting physically involved with one another while also being at odds because of this bet.
That's confusing enough already, but there's also a lot going on on the sidelines: Diana's artistic ambitions are revealed, the previous To Love and to Loathe's couple Violet and James makes many appearances, James's brother West is rekindling an old flame, Diana and Violet's friend Emily is sort of/kind of being courted at this party but has a whole complicated thing going on because of her father's gambling debts, the woman throwing herself at Jeremy might not be as enthusiastic about him as she's letting on, Jeremy's spitfire grandmother is getting involved in Jeremy and Diana's mess.
. . it's enough to make your head spin,

What I loved most about the first book was that the emotional aspect of the estrangement of Violet and James was played out over the whole book.
There's not just one emotional dumping session in which you find out why a character has been feeling the way they've been feeling by means of one huge monologue.
No, things are much more gradually revealed in a way that felt a lot more authentic, In this second book, there were so many other elements at play that I don't think we got enough time with the couple for the deep emotions to slowly creep out.
Instead, we got an infodumpy climax and an ending that didn't even acknowledge the vast majority of the side plots that were introduced.


I was honestly hoping that this book would span a year's time since the timeframe for the bet was a year.
I envisioned Diana hunting down suitors for Jeremy only for those suitors to get rejected over and over a ploy by Jeremy so he could get time alone with Diana.
The climax could have been when he finally likes one of the candidates, but then Diana starts to panic because she's gotten to know him so well over the previous months and now has feelings for him,

right as he starts to show an interest in someone else.
I personally would have found something like that a lot more effective than a close proximity setup and the side plot distraction galore.


All of that being said whew, the banter is almost as good as the first book and so many parts of this book are laughoutloud funny.
The author is a great writer, but as her acknowledgement section seems to hint, she didn't have the time to focus on this book that she had with the first one.
Sadly, it shows in the finished product, Not a bad book by any means, but an unsatisfying followup to a truly stellar first installment.
.