An Affair with the Viscount

Necessary Arrangements, Book 5

By: Sadie Bosque

Narrated by: Sienna Frances, Timothy Campbell

Only a scandalous actress...

Josephine Claremont hides her real name—and all the struggles she's endured—behind a beautiful stage name and debonair lifestyle. As the premier actress in London, she is welcomed in all society homes even though she doesn't belong in the haute ton. She is the queen of the demimonde and is determined to maintain that position—even if a dashing viscount is oddly intent on winning her heart.

...can bring a jaded rake to his knees.

Richard Lewis, Viscount Gage, does not believe in love. His sisters may have succumbed to love and marriage, but he values cold logic and reason in affairs of the heart and the viscount is not above meddling in other people's lives if he believes he is right. When one night of passion with the fabulous actress leads him to reevaluate his beliefs, he is committed to winning her no matter what—only the headstrong vixen is determined to avoid him at every turn.

©2022 Sadie Bosque (P)2023 Podium Audio

Performance suffered

Tim Campbell should be performing all of the Viscount’s parts not just some. I didn’t like female attempting male voice. Story line was good.

Enjoyed the story

The story was very good. It does focus a lot on women’s disadvantages at that time. Some people may find it triggering if they are pro-life. The only thing I wish the Viscount’s character was more true to his previous personality. In previous books he was very morally strict and controlling. Here he is so enamored with Jo that it all goes out the window. No internal struggle.

Favorite from the series!

So far my favorite of the NA series. Sadie Bosque always brings a fresh take on classic tropes. Just the right amount of angst and believable character turn arounds. As always, narration was excellent. Another review stated book contains propaganda, I kindly disagree. All difficult topics included in book were handled sensitively and were very on par with the era this took place in.

yuck

storyline: weak and shallow
mfc: cannot empathize with her very shallow not enough character development
mmc: not likeable, shallow, not very interesting and also cannot empathize with anything here
wasted a credit on this one and couldn't get past 2 hours....it was just terrible.

Out of it’s time

I will admit I haven’t finished this book because it has the wrong mores for the period. Abortions existed, and they were dangerous, but throughout the book it was the attitudes that rang so false to me. In that society becoming pregnant and having abortion would have meant the inevitable sinking into prostitution. But Jo is still playing the innocent. Her affair with Richard seems like an affair of a young maiden, not someone who knows where she exists in society or the realities of her society. She has all the wrong expectations, when she seems to think, Richard should fall in love with her and marry her. Richard is not rebellious. He has not discarded all of societies beliefs, yet he easily abandons, after a brief few weeks of depression, the world he swims in and embraces a world that never existed until the 2020’s. There were two kinds of women, madonna’s and whores at this point in time; this story tries to put across an idea that a conservative responsible Viscount ignores his world entirely and follows his heart. Gives up all of his prejudices, and happily, I don’t know what he is actually going to do. Give up his place, perhaps abdicate his position? I could see this happening if the Viscount has been rebellious all of his life. If he hated the world he lived in and decided to become a pirate. In that time it was an either/or situation. There was no straddling. You were “good” and obeyed the rules and manners or you lived outside of them and were “bad”. The hero and heroine in this book are still playing at the role of fair young maid and dutiful Viscount. I think the author is heading toward a marriage where the wife has a career as a play write, and gets to become famous, and her husband gets to be viscount and respected, and the society accepts it all. It will ignore the Victorian era on the horizon. I guess some people will like the absurdity of the story and maybe view it as a new ground breaking way to write historical fiction, but it seemed too false for me to enjoy, and when I read it there is a protest inside of me feeling what is being written doesn’t fit the time and place, and the author is rewriting history to fit into a very modern attitude about morality that never existed at that time. I think that way of thinking about the past is prevalent now. Maybe it always has been, There is a movement in the country to judge the patriarchy of the past, and try to create what is believed to be good inclusive tolerant people of today and make them inhabit the past, but it just doesn’t work for me.