A LITTLE BIT WILD

Author: Victoria Dahl ISBN: 9781420104837 8/2010 HISTORICAL Publisher: Kensington
Time Period: England 1847

He Is Not What She Had In Mind. Jude Bertrand is not an excellent dancer. Nor does he wear the most fashionable coats. But when Marissa York’s brother approaches him, desperate to preserve Marissa’s tenuous reputation, Jude does prove heroic enough to offer to marry the girl. In fact, the union should more than make up for his lack of social graces—and his own scandalous past… But Minds Change… Marissa knows that betrothal to the son of a duke—even one as raw and masculine as Jude—will save her from ruin, but that doesn’t mean she’s happy about it. Soon, though, she finds that Jude has a surprisingly gentle touch—and plans to use it to persuade Marissa that their wedding day cannot come soon enough…

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

I’ll admit, I have nearly everything Victoria Dahl has written, but until I received A LITTLE BIT WILD I hadn’t actually read anything by her, and I didn’t know what to expect. While I liked the concept of A LITTLE BIT WILD, I didn’t enjoy it as much in the execution.

I thought Marissa was vapid and shallow. I realize those are synonyms of each other, but they both equally apply to Marissa and I found her a very frustrating heroine. While I liked certain things about her—she loses her virginity on the first page because she wanted to see what all the fuss was about—there were also times that I wanted to shake her. She can’t seem to get past the fact that Jude is not like the effeminate, pretty boys she usually favors, to see that Jude could actually be a worthy love interest. That being said, however, I didn’t see what Jude saw in Marissa. I get that he admired her from afar, and he saw her ruination as a way to finally get her to notice him. What I didn’t understand was what he saw in her. I wasn’t convinced that he loved her in the beginning of the book, and I wasn’t convinced by the end of the book.

Plot wise, A LITTLE BIT WILD was A Little Bit Light. While there is some intrigue in the middle about who is trying to blackmail Marissa, for the most part, this book is a character-driven romance. Most times, I enjoy character-driven romances because I think it’s easy to lose the romance in a conflict-driven story. However, here, I never connected with Marissa and Jude, and as such, by the time we figured out who the culprit was and there was still 50 or so pages left, I just couldn’t muster up any interest in how Marissa and Jude resolved their interpersonal issues.

Established fans of Dahl’s work may enjoy A LITTLE BIT WILD, but it was a miss for me.

Jilian Vallade