Review posted: Happily Ever After - Reads
Blog rating: 3.5/5

An arranged marriage is set up by the King as his way of trying to prevent two powerful clans from going to war. The Armstrong’s and the Montgomery’s have been bitter enemies for years and as a way to help force peace between them, a marriage has been ordered between Laird Montgomery and the daughter of Laird Armstrong. Graeme Montgomery and his brothers are livid that he’s being forced into marriage with a woman who’s believed to be unable to give him any heirs and who is also believed to be daft. Eveline is anything but daft, she’s deaf but has been playing a role for three years, letting people believe what they will so she wouldn’t be forced into a previously arranged marriage with Ian McHugh, a man who delighted in terrorizing her. Eveline was thrown from a horse and suffered a head injury. She lost her hearing and doesn’t speak, even though she can, but it all helped her get away from Ian and the horror she’d face as his wife. Instead, her clan and those outside of it believe her to have suffered a far more serious head injury than she did, one that left her to be described as touched, off, or daft.

Clans don’t go against the King, so both the Montgomery’s and the Armstrong’s go through with the wedding. Eveline sees it as her chance to start new. She’s still not speaking but she can read lips so she knows pretty much what people around her are saying as long as she can see them. She’s nervous, scared, excited, all manner of different emotions about her marriage. She knows for certain she won’t be welcomed into the Montgomery keep with open arms. Their clans have been at war for so long, the very fact that Graeme is bringing a Montgomery to live with them brings huge hostility toward Eveline and makes the transition very hard for her.

Poor Eveline goes through so much, first dealing with her deafness. She’s learned to live with it, teaching herself to read lips and she figured out ways to communicate even when she wasn’t speaking. She’s determined to make this marriage work and she doesn’t want to keep the real reason she doesn’t speak a secret any longer. She befriends Graeme’s little sister Rorie, one of the only friends she makes at her new home. In fact everyone, save Rorie, Graeme and their two brothers Teague and Bowen, treat Eveline horribly. She’s nothing but nice to these people and they call her names, take every chance they can to humiliate her, but she stays strong until it just becomes too much. The one thing I had a hard time understanding was Eveline was adamant that she learn the proper way to run a keep and really make her presence known in a good way there, as someone willing to participate and pitch in. She goes to the other women asking for guidance and they have her doing all the hard maid work, scrubbing floors, fetching fire wood. It made no sense that Eveline would think this was the way a Mistress of the keep would act and in turn gain respect. She grew up watching her own mother run their clan’s keep and yet she continually got up to work her fingers to the bone, for what? I get that she wanted to earn respect, but I wish that she would have stood up for herself more against the women. Maybe I’m nitpicking over something very small, but it bugged me.

I enjoyed seeing the relationship between Graeme and Eveline evolve. I especially liked how Eveline trusted Graeme enough to tell him the truth fairly early on and their romance took off after that. The romance and sex scenes felt a bit tame, but the story wasn’t completely centered on their romance, so in that sense it worked. While a book’s romance is what normally draws me in, with this story, I was more involved in Eveline’s journey. Her journey with Graeme and their relationship, but also with her finding a place among the Montgomery clan, becoming a family and close with Rorie and Graeme’s brothers and being able to come clean to her family about what went on for the past three years. It’s still hard to buy into her not speaking to her family or anyone for three years, regardless of how scared she was about Ian.

For Graeme, he’s a nice hero, but I can’t say he blew my socks off, which is how I felt overall after finishing. There are some nice, touching scenes between Eveline and Graeme but nothing stood out and wow’d me about the story in general. I’ll certainly pick up the next book in the series to see where it goes, but I finished the book thinking it’s a good story with interesting characters from the leads to the supporting cast and fans of Banks’s previous books in this genre will enjoy it.

SERIOUSLY, THESE TITLES. WHICH HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THE BOOK.

⭐ - This is a hard no no for me. (spoiler alert)

First and last book I'll read of Maya Banks. Go read Mary Wine if you want historical accuracy.

The level of description of emotions and tears is sickening, which makes the whole story so absurd.

I'm a little over romances where the couple barely even glance at each other and they're suddenly incredibly in love and willing to do anything for the other, but it's such a good story and written so well that I'm perfectly fine forgiving and enjoying it.

It was exactly what I expected it to be.