Never Wager with a Wallflower

RATING: 5 Stars (★★★★★)

SPICE LEVEL: 2 Spicy Peppers (🌶️🌶️)

⁠DISCLOSURE: I received a free e-arc from St.Martins Press in exchange for my honest review.

Author: Virginia Heath
Publisher: St.Martins Press
Is it on KU?: Nope

TW: Deaths of Family Members & Poverty/Homelessness

Tropes:⁠
↠ Found Family
↠ Rivals to Lovers

This book has what I like to call the Emma Effect. Inspired by Jane Austen’s 1815 novel, I think the term helpfully explains books where families, typically in-laws, connect the characters.

In Never Wager with a Wallflower, the protagonist Venus “Vee” Merriwell, falls in love with her sister’s husband’s cousin, i.e., her brother-in-law’s cousin. This loose family connection adds to the intrigue as the Found Family of in-laws gives the male protagonist, Galahad Sinclair, a family he’s never had after being abandoned by his father and the tragic loss of his grandfather and mother.

My favorite part of the book is Vee’s journal entries. They made me laugh out loud on more than one occasion. This book is a true Romantic Comedy.

You can read this as a standalone or as the trilogy's final book.

The third and final delightful installment in the Merriwell Sister's Regency rom-com series.

Miss Venus Merriwell has been waiting for her prince to come since the tender age of fourteen. She wants a man who is a selfless academic like her, and free from all the wretched vices her gambler father enjoyed far too much before he left the Merriwell sisters practically destitute. Unfortunately, after a slew of romantic disappointments, there is still no sign of that prince at twenty-three and the only one true love of her life is the bursting-at-the-seams orphanage in Covent Garden that she works tirelessly for. An orphanage that desperately needs to expand into the empty building next door.

For Galahad Sinclair, gambling isn’t just his life, it’s in his blood. He grew up and learned the trade at his grandfather’s knee in a tavern on the far away banks of the Hudson in New York. But when fate took all that away and dragged him across the sea to London, it made sense to set up shop here. He’s spent five years making a success out of his gaming hell in the sleazy docks of the East End. Enough that he can finally afford to buy the pleasure palace of his dreams―and where better than in the capital’s sinful heart, Covent Garden? The only fly in his ointment is the perfect building he’s just bought to put it in also happens to be right next door to the orphanage run by his cousin’s wife’s youngest sister. A pious, disapproving and unsettling siren he has avoided like the plague since she flattened him five years ago…

While Venus and Galahad lock horns over practically everything, and while her malevolent orphans do their darndest to sabotage his lifelong dream, can either of them take the ultimate gamble―and learn to love thy neighbor?

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