Infamous by Minerva Spencer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The Most Infamous Mean Girl of the Ton is About to Become Your Favorite Heroine
Infamous has a Mean Girls premise which I absolutely loved. Ten years ago, the beautiful debutante Celia Pelham orchestrated a cruel trick by locking one of two male twins in a room with an unwanted wallflower, Phillida. Unfortunately, the wrong twin was locked in the room. It is Lucien Redvers, the handsome earl who Celia has had her eye on all season and is intending to wed who is trapped inadvertently and who proposes to Phillida out of a sense of duty and honor.
Fast forward ten years ahead to a Christmas house party celebrating the engagement of Richard and Lucien’s younger sister to the “meanest boy” in London, and it is quickly evident that the lives of many people have been changed forever by Celia’s terrible choice of pranks.
If you are not caught by that point in the story, you will soon be by the deep pain of the characters. The plot rests on a series of miscommunications, failure to communicate, and misunderstandings–which can sometimes be a very tedious plot device. In this case, Minerva Spencer is such an excellent writer that while the miscommunications are frustrating, they create great tension and the plot works as a whole very well.
This book made me cry. That is a rare occurrence for me. The characters in Infamous are breathtakingly well-developed and come alive very quickly. When the hero of this book turned out to be a twin, I did not realize that meant it would be a double love story–but indeed it is, and the second love story is one which drew me in even more than the first. And the first has an excellent premise.
At first, I was a little put off the hero in this book at first. There were a couple of reasons for that, but I think it was intentional on the author’s part. He is excessively nerdy and he also prefers to have older women as his lovers because they are more “needy” (yuck).
But the other three primary characters are so incredibly full of life and their arcs are so compelling that it didn’t matter (and Richard, the main hero, becomes very sympathetic in time).
There is steam and tension, but it is the mending of broken hearts and past pains that makes this story so special.
Six out of five stars.
Side Note: I have not read any of the other books in this series but very much enjoyed this one nonetheless.
Thank you to NetGalley for the early review copy!
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