My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Sweet Enemy was a recommendation I picked up from my regular visits to SmartBitchesTrashyBooks.com, a book that falls into the general category of historical romances with bluestocking heroines. This book’s heroine, Liliana Claremont, is a brilliant chemist who chafes at the restrictions that society places upon her, keeping her from pursuing achievements in that science. But when she discovers that her father may well have been murdered, she’s determined to look for evidence at the house of Geoffrey Wentworth, the Earl of Stratford.
Geoffrey’s our obligatory broody hero, whose family is throwing the obligatory mess of young misses at him in an attempt to get him to marry. Liliana’s own family pressures her to go to his estate in the hopes of catching the Earl’s eye–but all Liliana’s interested in is finding out whether this man was responsible for her father’s murder.
Now, this is a setup guaranteed to catch my attention, and it did a decent job of it. Ms. Snow’s writing was solid, and I did very much like the shooting contest scene, in which Liliana actually gets to use her chemistry knowledge. Set off against this, though, were tropes that usually weary me in a romance novel and this time was no exception: i.e., the failure of characters to just talk to each other, insta-lust, and how the Big Misunderstanding that almost always causes the characters to fight almost always comes after they’ve finally had sex.
But that said? I did actually enjoy this book for the most part and I’d like to see how Ms. Snow’s writing in this series progresses. Three stars.
