Have you ever imagined what it would be like to be inside our heads as we read these silly romance books? Well, now you don't have to wonder! Join us as we attempt our first ever read-along review! We are going scuba diving into this book to read and review it chapter by chapter. This means we are going to release two new episodes a week instead of one. And you get to hear our perspectives live and unfiltered as we unravel the plot and characters of this book as we go. You're welcome.
For the next few weeks, we will be reading and reviewing the book How to Wake a Sleeping Lady by Bree Wolf. It is available through Amazon Kindle Unlimited so if you want to join in the fun and read along with us, we strongly encourage you to do so! Or if you prefer sit back and enjoy this serialized book review as we reveal one layer of the plot onion at a time. We wanted to make things even more interesting so we picked a book and author we have never read before. And to add an additional challenge we bypassed the synopsis and just dove right in in order to fully immerse ourselves in the story with no preconceived notions about where the book is going. It is a deep sea exploration at its best - no plan, no map and hopefully we survive it. As we read each chapter we will have a lot of thoughts and ideas regarding what we think is happening and what awaits our characters in the future. So join us for the ride as we find out how good we are at playing Regency Romance Mad Libs and challenging ourselves along the way to see how well we know historical romance tropes.
In our first installment of the book, we dived feet first into the Prologue and this is what we have learned so far:
- It is set in London in the early 1800s.
- Our hero, Lord Wentford, notices our heroine, Agnes Bottombrook, from across a crowded ballroom - and approaches her very slowly (like weirdly slow motion movie like)
- He digs her, but she just doesn't know how to handle the attention because:
A. She is a wallflower (typical)
B. She is old (29 is old back then apparently)
C. She is a bluestocking, which is another way of saying she is smart . . . and kind of a shrew?
D. She is older than our hero (color me intrigued)
Because of her age and intelligence (yikes) our heroine is convinced the hero's interest must stem from a cruel joke or churlish wager. Unaware of all the crazy self doubt rolling around in our heroine's head, our unsuspecting hero approaches to kindly ask her for a dance. She goes on the offensive for some inexplicable reason and starts attacking his motives without even as much as a "Hello, How do you do?". He is undeterred and won't take "No" for an answer. From this brief prologue we have established the following characteristics of our main characters: She is very aggressive and he is very obsessive. By the end of the chapter they are possibly engaged (it is not clear) and we take many minutes to speculate on the outcome of this meeting and what to expect in Chapter 1 and the novel as a whole.
Originally we were going to do live readings of the chapters on the podcast - then we Googled what copyright means and realized that is a big no-no. So we went back to the drawing board and decided to do mini reviews of each chapter. We hope you enjoy. As a bonus stay until after the end credits to hear Easter Egg snippets of Amy reading portions of the prologue aloud. All those drama classes definitely paid off. Don't quite your day job Amy!
