Ravenel 3: Devil In Spring

Title: Ravenel 3: Devil In Spring

Author: Lisa Kleypas

Genre: Historical Romance, Series

Time: 4 hours

Rating: 10 out of 10

here's a short description of the book in goodreads.

Lisa Kleypas once again delivers.  And with any Lisa Kleypas historical romance, you already know the ending: they live happily ever after.  But Kleypas is so great of a writer that you want to want to read about how they got to the happy ever after.

I love that her heroines are not spineless, simpering twits like most romance novels.  But I especially love about the Ravenel series is that the women are not only NOT spineless, simpering twits but they actually have ambitions beyond landing a husband.  This particular book also revisits one of the Wallflower Girls (Evie).  It’s kind of a Wallflower and Ravenel crossover where it brought back characters from the Devil in Winter (my favorite Lisa Kleypas book, btw) with the title being a play at the original Wallflower book.  It made compare the women in that series with this one.  Sure the Wallflower Girls were not push-overs but their life goal of snagging a husband isn't exactly very admirable as compared to Pandora's wish to run her very own gaming empire or Dr. Garnett's ceiling breaking career of being a surgeon.  Maybe it's because of the time setting of this series that women were perhaps given more freedom as compared to the Wallflower Girls' time?  They are a generation apart.  The feminist in me is liking this very much.

What does kinda bother me about this book was the out-of-nowhere terrorism plot thrown in at the end.  It just seemed like it was forced into the storyline and just a few pages later, it was neatly resolved.  I am a bit forgiving of it, though, because I think the author might be using this to set up the next book.  Maybe it'll be about the mysterious Ransom who could be a long lost Ravenel offspring as implied by Gabriel.  He already made an appearance in the previous book.  I wonder who he'd be paired up with. Perhaps the feisty Dr. Garnett?  But then, we still have yet to read about Cassandra's own happy ending, so maybe it'll be the book after that?

How Does it End?

WARNING!! SPOILERS AHEAD!! READ THIS TO UNDERSTAND THIS PART OF THE POST.

This is Book 3 of the Ravenel Series and it focuses on the "wilder" twin Pandora.  It starts off with Evie’s & Sebastian’s son, Gabriel, unwittingly caught in a "compromising" position by the hapless Pandora.  However, Lord St. Vincent Jr. is a gentleman, unlike his rake father, so he offers to do the honorable thing by marrying her.  But Pandora has other plans.  She is about to launch her gaming empire with the help of bro-in-law Winterbourne and marriage would legally wrest ownership of said empire and transfer it to the hubby, or as she dramatically put it "I would lose everything."   Yup, it sucks to be a woman during those times.  But the Ravenels have her back and said she wouldn't have marry him if she didn't want to.  But Gabriel was already enamored with her and invited the whole clan to their place for a week while the scandal dies down a bit.  Of course, it is in this week that the fall deeply in love with each other.  Both sharing their "flaws" with each other—Pandora's being partially deaf in one ear causing her balance issues & not being able to waltz, she has some sort of ADHD going on and she does not want to get married.  While Gabriel’s is that he feels pressured to be a perfect person (I don't know, because of how he looks? Or was it something to do with the title?) and he alludes to a dark, sexual appetite that he thinks a lady of the peer cannot satisfy causing him to have a married mistress because only she can satisfy it.  And this burns his goat because getting it on with another man’s wife is against his “honor system”.  Turns out, he had some Christian Grey tendencies but hold your horses ladies, the book is no 50 Shades of Grey.  In the end, love wins and they get married.  They honeymooned for a week and went back to London so Pandora could launch her 1st game in time for Christmas.  She runs into trouble when her printer supplier happened to be involved in terrorism plots and so they tried to kill her.  Dr. Garnett saves the day and the mysterious Ransom helps them find out who the bad guys are.  The whole terrorism thing already infiltrated Home Security.  They were able to stop a bombing attempt and almost caught the bad guy but he preferred to be dead rather than be caught so he offed himself (very espionage-y).  Pandora is now safe and her 1st game is a success.  The end. Well, at least for this book.