BOOK REVIEW: At Your Request by Jen Turano

At Your Request (Apart From the Crowd) by Jen Turano
Series: Apart from the Crowd #0.5
Published by Baker Books on January 3, 2017
Genres: Fiction / Christian / Historical, Fiction / Christian / Romance / General, Fiction / Romance / Historical / General
Pages: 96
Amazon|Barnes&Noble|Goodreads

After her father lost the family's fortune, Wilhelmina was cast out of the fashionable set and banished to the wallflower section. Taking a position as a social secretary to help support her family, she's mostly come to terms with her new status. But when her old friend Edgar returns to New York society for the first time since she rejected his marriage proposal, she's newly ashamed at how far she's fallen--and how hastily she dismissed him years ago. Her strategy is to avoid a face-to-face encounter at all costs, but he seems to have other plans. Will Edgar take advantage of their now reversed positions and make her regret her refusal, or is there still hope for a friendship between them--or something more?

At Your Request is an e-only novella that gives an exciting introduction to Jen Turano's new Gilded Age historical romance series, Apart From the Crowd! Includes an extended excerpt of the first full-length novel in the series, Behind the Scenes.

I read the first two books in this series in the before time.  I don’t remember a lot about it, but I will be rereading, as I have decided to finish the series and there’s that third book I never got around to reading.  But here I am catching up with both the prequel and the final installment.  And the reality is that as soon as I start reading again, it will all come flooding back to my brain.  That’s what I have found with other rereads this summer.  Rereading has really been eye-opening for me as I realize how much I have changed as a human, which has changed the type of reader I am as well.  

As with any novella, I struggle, but this one was mostly well done.  Didn’t try to be too much, mostly.  The ending was a bit too tidy with Edgar tackling Wilhelmina’s lost family wealth, but honestly, outside of that I didn’t have too many novella vibes coming from this one.  It was a solid story of second chances set in the Gilded Age of high society that I absolutely cannot identify with but also felt very engaged with.

Here’s the clencher for me that really brings this story down a notch for me.  I do not like the narrator.  Which concerns me as I had planned to listen to the next two books but now . . . not so sure that’s the best bet.  Her voice was so affected that it literally took me out of the story.  Maybe she was trying to sound ‘Gilded Age ’?  I just know that for me it came across as insincere, as though the story is ‘putting on airs’.  I enjoyed the story, the interplay of characters with some seriously old-fashioned names, but the narrator really did not do it for me at all.  And that reflects in the end rating.  I do believe it would be a very different rating had I read it myself.

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Posted By: Fizzy Pop · In: Apart from the Crowd, At Your Request, book review, Jen Turano