September 1, 2014
Daniels’s tonally confused debut, the first in the Ever After series of Regency romances, is nominally a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, but the chapter epigraphs provide the only hint of folklore. Despite his wealth and title, Marcus Bradley has trouble finding a woman who will marry him, since he has been visibly scarred by his abusive father’s whip. Danielle Strafford, a bored and beautiful heiress, runs a service helping women in arranged engagements flee with their preferred partners. When Danni helps Marcus’s promised bride abscond, he insists that she help him find a new fiancée, and together they abduct a young woman. Of course, the logistics of the kidnapping don’t run smoothly, and Danni and Marcus are thrown together over the course of various complications. The narrative is too angst-ridden for comedy and too unrealistic for tragic drama. The characters are thoroughly unsympathetic, the plot strains without managing to fit the fairy-tale schema, and the setting is deplorably under-researched. The abundance of cliché in the otherwise competent prose doesn’t improve the reading experience. Agent: Rachael Dugas, Talcott Notch Literary.