Not my favorite by Ms. Bev, but certainly a good book! Adults acting like adults, a sweet secondary romance, and lots of very interesting Black history wrap around this unconventional story of a marriage of convenience.

I didn't like it quite as much as I've liked her latest novels because it felt like Jewel didn't have much agency. She went from being under her father's thumb to being under her husband's, more or less against her wishes. She tried to do Eli a solid by posing as his wife for one evening, but ended up having a shotgun wedding later that same evening to cover up the lie. She wanted to build a house on her land; the men in her life protested and she gave in. She wanted a chance to get to know her husband; he set about seducing her and she gave in. I much prefer a character like Regan in Tempest, who is unconventional and doesn't give a fig what anyone cares or does about it.

The muck-racking villainess was too evil to be true ("Satan's handmaiden" was the town's nickname for her) and had absolutely no redeeming features, which made her a little boring. It was so OTT that it was hard to believe Jewel would even allow her nasty insinuations to hurt her, but she does. Luckily the rift between husband and wife only lasts a day, but still. That felt like a particularly weak point.

It was also a bit sad to know that Grayson Grove was such a singular place in its progressiveness. Ms. Bev packs all of her stories full of history, and she was at pains to point out that universal education was definitely not the standard of the day in the 1800s, nor was women's suffrage or even that of Black people. The founders of Grayson Grove wrote so much of what we take for granted into their charter and it's striking, and saddening, and humbling.

There is a lot of politics, sex, and religion in this book, so if that's not your bag, you may want to skip it. Otherwise, it's definitely worth a read, for the history of newspapers alon ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1231221.html

Browsing through LibraryThing one day, I noted that Beverly Jenkins, of whom I had not heard, was one of the highest rated authors by the owners of her books - not many, but enough to reassure me that this was not astroturfing. Her particular subgenre - African-American historical romance - is not one that I had ever considered sampling, but I thought, what the heck, and BookMooched a couple of her books.

Jewel is actually a rather nice book. I particularly appreciated the historical setting, a Black community in the northern USA (specifically, Cass County, Michigan) in the 1880s. It's not an environment I had ever thought much about, and Jenkins has clearly done her homework: the book is perhaps intended partly as a didactic device to educate readers about that period of Black history, especially the increasingly important role of journalism, and I was happy to be educated.

I'm not a connoisseur of romance novels so feel less qualified to judge the plot. I found the setup a bit implausible (the eponymous heroine, a 24-year-old virgin, agrees to pose as a friend's wife and then finds inevitably that the fiction becomes reality). But the execution was entertaining, with lots of sexy newlywed moments. There were no really nasty characters in the book except for the husband's ex-girlfriend, and she is suitably dealt with. An uplifting and cheering read. ( )