Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend
Series: Mischief & Matchmaking
Genres: LGBTQ+, Romance
Release Date: January 9, 2024
Pages: 396
Get from: Library | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo
My Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆
Gwen has a brilliant beyond brilliant idea.
It’s 1857, and anxious debutante Beth has just one season to snag a wealthy husband, or she and her mother will be out on the street. But playing the blushing ingenue makes Beth’s skin crawl and she’d rather be anywhere but here.
Gwen, on the other hand, is on her fourth season and counting, with absolutely no intention of finding a husband, possibly ever. She figures she has plenty of security as the only daughter of a rakish earl, from whom she’s gotten all her flair, fun, and less-than-proper party games.
“Let’s get them together,” she says.
It doesn’t take long for Gwen to hatch her latest scheme: rather than surrender Beth to courtship, they should set up Gwen’s father and Beth’s newly widowed mother. Let them get married instead.
“It’ll be easy” she says.
There’s just…one, teeny, tiny problem. Their parents kind of seem to hate each other.
But no worries. Beth and Gwen are more than up to the challenge of a little twenty-year-old heartbreak. How hard can parent-trapping widowed ex-lovers be?
Of course, just as their plan begins to unfold, a handsome, wealthy viscount starts calling on Beth, offering up the perfect, secure marriage.
Beth’s not mature enough for this…
Now Gwen must face the prospect of sharing Beth with someone else, forever. And Beth must reckon with the fact that she’s caught feelings, hard, and they’re definitely not for her potential fiancé.
That’s the trouble with matchmaking: sometimes you accidentally fall in love with your best friend in the process.
Review
NOTE: This review is based on an eBook I borrowed from Amazon as part of the Kindle Unlimited program.
I wanted to like Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend, the premise had so much promise. However, within a few pages, I knew I had to read it with an “alternate universe” frame of mind. While ostensibly set in 1857, the mannerisms and language are modern to a point that I can’t call this “historical romance.”
I’ve done that before, though, plenty of times. And I was getting along OK, despite the slow pace, trying to ignore the odd items here and there that pulled me out of the story, like:
- gowns being one piece instead of the skirt and bodice that they were at the time.
- mentions of avoiding legs getting tangled in skirts when the character in question is wearing a hoop crinoline. I don’t think the author has ever worn one, as there is no way your legs are getting tangled in your skirts.
- the rich daughter of an earl taking dishes to the kitchen.
- using stays and corset interchangeably, despite them being two very different garments. It would be like using undershirt and bra interchangeably in the modern world. They kind of, sort of serve a similar purpose, but they are NOT the same thing.
However, at about the midway point, there is a dinner scene, where the main characters go out to dinner — which wasn’t a thing for nobility at this point in the Victorian era — at a seafood restaurant — also not a thing yet — to have oysters — a peasant food at the time — and they sat at a booth. Three women in hoop crinolines were supposed to fit at a booth table. They slurped down oysters, cracked crabs, and, supposedly, tried caviar for the first time. Almost every paragraph gave me a new thing to dislike and pulled me further out of the story.
I forced my way through the scene and kept reading for a while, but after the second? maybe third time Lady Gwen — who isn’t actually looking for a husband — gets upset that Beth — who needs a husband to save her and her mother from poverty — is being courted, I just couldn’t continue. I realized I was forcing myself to read this for no other reason than to finish it, and I promised myself I wouldn’t do that anymore.
I think this would have done much better as a contemporary romance with some manufactured reason why Beth needed to marry.
Notable Quotes
“Tonight is like an evening out of time, ethereal and fleeting. Magic seems to float on the air as they pile into the carriage…”
“Such a simple action, but Beth feels like it speaks volumes, their underthings there, together, atop each other.”
“… she allows herself to know that this matters, and they must make the most of this moment, not toss it away in fraught panic.”
About the Author
Raised in the Hudson Valley, Emma now lives in Los Angeles, enjoying the eternal sunshine, ocean, and mountains. When she isn’t writing books or screenplays, she can usually be found stress baking with the AC on full blast, skiing late into the spring, singing showtunes at the top of her lungs on the freeway, and reading anywhere there’s somewhere to lean.
Author links: Website | Goodreads | Instagram | Amazon Author Page
Have you read Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend? Let me know in the comments! I’d love to hear from you.
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