Last month when I was reading What I Did for a Duke I kept waiting for a particular scene to happen, and it never did. That is because I had superimposed the bathtub scene from Do You Want to Start a Scandal onto that book, which was all the excuse I needed to read it as well. Like with What I Did for a Duke this one is a reread of a book I only read a couple years ago. It deliciously fits into what I expect from a Dare book, particularly one that marries her Castles Ever After series to her Spindle Cove books. When I read A Week to be Wicked back in 2018, I laid out 7 things that make a Dare novel and how well the books execute on them is often how I rank them, so for this reread I’m going to go point by point.
- Independent lady making her way in the world. Do You Want to Start a Scandal features Minerva Highwood’s younger sister Charlotte who is trying to survive her first season and find a way for her best friend Delia Pankhurst and herself to have a European tour to enhance/find refinements. She’d also like to thwart her mother’s scheming and tries to warn off Piers Brandon, Marquess of Granville.
- More Often Than Not a Marriage of Convenience plot. While trying to warn Piers to avoid her, they are trapped in the library (where he’s doing some spy snooping) while another couple tups (to quote Piers). They are caught exiting the library and an understanding is reached that they will end the two-week house party with their engagement, much to Charlotte’s distress and her mother’s joy.
- Smolder and steamy sexy times. Check and Check.
- Sincere emotion on display. Charlotte is full of wants. She wants a protective, older brother relationship with her brothers-in law, she wants to understand her mother, she wants to marry for love, and she wants to have refinements, or at very least a purpose. She works so hard on explaining to Piers that they both deserve love (while trying to find the erstwhile tuppers to free them from their understanding that she doesn’t realize until about 2/3rds of the way through the book that she has fallen in love, and that she thinks Piers has as well. For his part Piers has some big, dark clouds in the storm of his soul and really cannot see a world in which he loves anyone, let alone Charlotte – which she cracks when she points out how obvious it is (to her) that he loves his brother Rafe.
- Wounded Hero, either physically or emotionally, who is smitten with the heroine. Piers is definitively smitten, and entirely thrown off by how well Charlotte can read him. I continue to love how much emotional intelligence Dare placed in Charlotte, letting her deduce the world around her. Piers’ wounds run deep, and a content warning of parental suicide should be noted, although it is not dwelled on.
- Interesting, but not overtaking, side characters. This one had less of these, the Pankhursts are more periphery than side, and while Charlotte’s sisters and brothers-in-law do show up for the third act tension release (which happens quite late) they are not on the page overmuch either.
- Comedy/quirkiness/whimsy in some regard. Dare is not afraid of humor. There are lots of moments between Charlotte and Piers which lean into the comedy of the absurd, but nothing so much as Delia Pankhurst’s little brother Edmund (age 8) mistaking the sounds of an amorous couple for that of a woman being harmed and yelling “MUR-DER” at Piers whenever he comes across him.
When taken all together shows easily why this is a 4.5 for me.
Bingo Square: Scandal. It’s right there in the title, which is also a line uttered in the book, and a thing that Charlotte is trying to avoid at *almost* every turn.
